Transcript of DOGE vs USAID, Crypto Framework, Google's $75B AI Spend, US Sovereign Wealth Fund, GLP-1s

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He's just talking about his investments.

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Let your winners ride.

Rainman David Sack. And it said, We open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you guys.

Nice. The queen of Kinn All right, everybody. Welcome back to the All In podcast, the number one, MAGA, finance, business, and personal optimization health. Yes, we are now larger in the health space than Huberman, Tim Farris, and Peter Atia combined. Yes, we've really started to grow the pod. If you want to, you can subscribe to the podcast on x. Com, YouTube, Spotify, and all those other places, especially if you want to have an incredibly positive, world-enlightening conversation with Ray Dalio. You can tune in to Friedberg and Ray Dalio on the channel. Great conversation It's gotten 300,000 or 400,000 views already on YouTube. How's the feedback been, Dave? Got so much great feedback on your Ray Dalio. Is it the end of the empire or are we coming back?

What's awesome is a lot of the recommendations he shared is becoming policy, it seems, for the Trump administration. Elon and Bessent and others in the administration have echoed trying to get government deficit below 3% of GDP. That seems to be the economic magical number. If you can do that, rates drop. I think that's resonated. It was great to have him publish that a couple of weeks ago. Talk with us about it. It's great.

Great bonus content from the team at All In. Today, we're super excited to have our friend Antonio Gracias joining the show. Antonio is the CEO of Valor Equity Partners, and he's made some solid investments. He was one of the first investors in Tesla, SpaceX, Athena, tons of great, or he's a second investor in Athena after me. Welcome to the program, Antonio. He put slightly more in.

Thank you, Jason. I was also on Uber with you, too, by the way.

Yes. I did the C. You did the Series A, I believe, or the B.

What did you do? Right behind you. We were in the B.

You were in the B. Right behind you, yeah. Okay. Yes. You were in the Shervin' round. Okay. Well, welcome to the program, Antonio Gracias. We've got a full docket today, and we might even have a special caller from the White House today. No promises, but you never know. We are 17 days into the Trump 2. 0 residency, and it seems like the main character, gentleman, is DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. They seem to have found a little known agency, USAID. Let's unpack it and talk about USAID and DOGE, maybe in three acts. The first one, let me just educate the audience on what USAID is and then get you all this general reaction to it. Most Americans probably haven't heard of USAID. It stands for the United States Agency for International Development. It's established by JFK by an executive order back in 1961. Wall Street Journal summed up its purpose as, quote, make friends and influence countries in the American interest. According to the US gov website, the purpose of USAID is to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster. You got a budget of about $45 billion a year under Biden, and that's about $150 per American per year.

They have at least 10,000 employees, or did. And as of 2023, they had programs in 130 countries. Obviously, there's 195 countries in the world. The budget doubled under Biden from '26 to '45. The budget was between 15 and 20 billion during Trump's first term. But the White House, and I guess Elon and the Doge team, found out about this USAID, went in there and found all kinds of interesting spend, two and a half million dollars to fund EV charging stations in Vietnam. 2 million for sex changes in LGBTQ activism in Guatemala. 1. 5 million to a Serbian LGBTQ group. 70k for a DEI musical, 47K for a transgender Opera in Columbia. The DEI musical, by the way, is in Ireland. So if you make it to Galway, you can see that DEI musical. This went on and on, and it has become quite a story. Antonio, you're our guest here this week. You and I and Sacks, and Elon spent a little time at Twitter during the takeover where I think a lot of these techniques were first put into action. Your thoughts on what's happening with Doge?

I mean, look, Jason, first, I want to thank you guys for having me. It's great to see everyone.

You can see the musical.

I like to see musical. No, I booked it. We're all going to see the musical. We're all going to see the musical.

What is it called?

Is there actually a name of this musical?

Di, The Musical. It's DEI, the musical.

Oh, man.

It's a heartwarming story.

I apologize.

Of getting a job that you're not qualified for. Sorry guys. Sorry.

I apologize.

I think the Doge story maybe starts with the Twitter takeover. Twitter was spewing the woke mind virus in the world, which is why Elon did it to begin with. When we got there, as you know, it was basically breaking even. There was going to be 12 and a half-ish billion dollars of debt of the company. So a billion and a half dollars in interest costs that there was no money to pay, which led to the turnaround, I think, which was the biggest turnaround of all time. It's literally the biggest turnaround, I think, ever in history. Second biggest tech deal ever done. Eighty % of the people gone. That doesn't include all the contractors that were there. And the company is now servicing its debt, and they just priced yesterday one of their bank deals at 97 cents. So this is a huge win. It means the company is doing extremely well. Other people bought the bank debt, and then the bank debt traded up to a little over 98, so 98. 5. 8. A giant business success, a rousing business success. Jason, you were there for part of it. You saw it. It was a disaster.

This place was tampons in the bathrooms and every woke thing you could possibly imagine, and no one in the office. It was so bad that the pens had gone dry in the conference rooms, which is incredible. I think that that's how the- So you mean the pens had gone dry because they were never been used or because they were being used so much? They were never been used.

We got there on the Halloween weekend and we started whiteboarding and no ink.

The rage didn't work. No ink. Next time, no ink. I mean, everything. It's incredible. But flowers were impeccable, food being made fresh every day for thousands of people and throwing They were thrown away three times a day, tossed in the garbage, we didn't give it to the homeless. It was shockingly bad, bureaucracy gone mad, bad incentives, people don't care. So it was both... I think this turned into two things. One was just stop the Wolfhind virus. The interesting thing is they do extra brand safety checks there now, and they have 99 % rating in brand safety now. So stock to my advice is going in the world, number one. Number two, fix the company. And both have happened. It's been a couple of years now, three years now, and both have happened. Not even three years, two and a half years, really. It both have happened. And I think you take that. That was the warm-up act for what's going on at Doge, which is the President of the United States, President Trump, wants to make it very great again. And that begins with making the government great. And you got to fix it. It's the turnaround.

This is the biggest turnaround of all time. And President Trump has the courage to do it. And he's got a great ally in Elon to make it happen in Doge. And so the numbers are pretty easy, right? We're spending six and a half trillion, we bring in four and a half trillion, we We got to find $2 trillion somewhere, interest costs $2 trillion a year. The bond markets were going up. The bond bond was going up a lot because people didn't believe that you couldn't stop spending, creating inflation. You see what's trading down now as Doge is starting to take effect. We'll see it's real, the stuff you're talking about. It's extraordinary what's happening. Elon said this is probably the right fraud, waste, and abuse. He means 10 % of the budget is probably fraud. I think it might be low, actually. So you're talking about 650 billion, a trillion in waste. I think that's probably about right. That alone fixes the problem. But it's really serious about it, Jason, for me and what scared me when we first started thinking about this, and I'm not there full-time. I'm in and out a little bit and trying to help where I can, but I'm not there full-time.

When this started, I thought we had a democracy that it turned to a bureaucracy. What I'm afraid of now is we have a bureaucracy that is about to turn into a kleptocracy. I mean, a Latin American style cleptocracy. The stuff you're talking about, that is pure fraud. You're making some jokes out of it, the DAI musical. But if you go into the data that's coming out of USAID, what you find is there's a lot of political contributions going on. There's Politico itself being funded by USAID. I mean, that is pure corruption. That's like a Latin American style autocracy. And we cannot let it go there. I mean, I think this happened just in the good time, and I'm super grateful to all the people there. There's 80 plus people there, all patriots gone full-time.

Okay, so Chamoth, you've been watching this. You hear from Antonio, what's your general take on what we saw in the first, I don't know, 20 days of Doge? Or no, 15 days. Sorry, it's 15 days of Doge.

Let me try to give you a little bit of historical context because I think that that's important. I think whenever I hear so many people breathlessly saying some version of WTF as if this is totally new, it's not new. I'll give you two examples, but one that I really want to double click The two examples I'll give you is that in 1941, the Truman Committee was formed because there was a fear that the spending by the Defense Department was completely out of whack. Over the next six or seven years, and this is really what gave Truman the credibility to then become Roosevelt's vice President, was they found incredible levels of waste fraud and abuse during the war, before the war effort, and then after, Pearl Harbor during the war process. Over seven years, that committee, and this is in 1941, they were tasked and budgeted with only $20,000 or $30,000. Over the next six years, they spent less than a million. Inflation adjusted to 2023, this is where I found the data, was about six and a half million they spent. You know how much they saved? It's estimated they saved somewhere between $10 to $15 billion in 1941.

That's a quarter of a trillion 2023. The second example is we did this under President Clinton, and that was called the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. The first thing that I think it's important to acknowledge is this is not new. We've done Doge twice before. Both have been successful The Harry Truman one was incredibly important because it really set guardrails for how this can be done. Everything in that committee, it was a Senate committee, was unanimous. It was Republicans and Democrats that found waste, fraud, and abuse everywhere. They saved an enormous amount of money. The second, which is interesting, is these last two versions of Doge were driven and led by Democrats, the same people today who are basically saying, Hey, hold on a second. We have congressional committees or we have inspector generals, and they lack the awareness to know that their own party was the driving force for this two times before. I think it's important to just acknowledge that those methods are not it anymore. Because I think what we're finding early days is the rot is super pervasive. There's no accountability. I think you need people to look at it with fresh eyes.

What is Doge at the end of the day? What they are, are read-only readers of the truth. The press secretary in the White House made this very clear. It's incredible the power that read-only access gives you. All it allows you to do is just take the data and present the data. They can't manipulate it. What they're able to do is publish all of this stuff in real-time. That's why this is so important, because if it went into a congressional committee, to be honest with you, it would sit there and stew for 6, 7, 8, 9 months. You would Maybe you get small little tidbits of it, but now instead, you're just getting the full thrust of it. What is the biggest thing that I find concerning? I think it's what Antonio said, which is that the media who are supposed to be this intermediary layer that's totally objective between the government and the people, were not independent at all, but had all kinds of hidden incentives, $8 million to Politico, $0. 2 million to the BBC. I think it's important to ask what's going on. By the way, that also has historical context. This is exactly what happened in the '60s and '70s, where it turned out that record companies were paying DJs to pay songs.

There was a huge set of lawsuits and trial cases, and the result was a change in the law. We call that paola now, which is you cannot take this money without disclosing it. Had this money been absorbed by these entities and actually disclosed, maybe we'd be okay. But nick, I sent you a link. Maybe you can throw it on the screen for these guys. This is a very simple manifestation of this cycle. We talked about this, guys, and we didn't realize how connected it all was. But we were asking ourselves during the election cycle last year, why are all these articles buried? Why aren't we really getting the truth? It turns out that the people who were responsible for telling the truth, somewhere along the chain, were cajoled or just told not to tell the truth, influenced by all of this back channel money that was going back and forth from the government to these folks.

Okay. Yeah. Let me just give some numbers to what you were referencing there. The USAID Organization has been giving money, as have other agencies, to journals, databases, and subscriptions. There's probably some amount of that that makes sense. However, when we look at this, during Trump, one, spend on political was averaging around 1. 3 million a year, but it suddenly ballooned up to 8 million a year under Biden. And you can see the quarterly payments here on this chart. So there's some normal amount to spend on publications or for a library at an organization. And so what we're looking here is all federal agencies. And suddenly, during Biden, there is a very suspicious ramp up in spend to Politico. All of this is breaking. A lot of this hasn't been verified yet, so we'll put that caveat on it. And Then there is a number of 34 million that's been floating around. That's all years back to 2008, not just 2024, less people have that number juxtaposed or misattributed. When Political was acquired back in 2021, they were doing about 200 million in revenue, so this would be about 4% of their revenue. It's pretty significant.

The BBC also received 2. 7 million in funding from USAID in 2023. That was 8% of their annual income. That's a little suspicious. Thompson Reuters, which is the consulting arm of Reuters, they've received $120 million from the federal government since 2011. That's got to be looked at and double-clicked on. Half of that came during the Biden administration. New York Times hasn't actually received all that much, 370K from the federal government last year. Under Biden, it went from 100K a year to $300,000. The New York Times data has been cleaned up a little bit. All of this is to say there's spending going on with the press that certainly doesn't look good and should be verified and challenged, obviously. We are in a breaking news environment, so we'll see how that information shakes out over time, which is one of the great things, I think, about Doge, is they're getting this information out there, and citizen journalists are looking at public databases, Friedberg. We're having a conversation about this, a conversation two years ago, Friedberg, when you kept harping on every episode about our debt and about the interest payments two or three years ago, you were way ahead of the curve.

Now, here we are. We didn't think anybody would ever take this cause up, and now it is the cause of the moment. What are your thoughts on the first two weeks of Doge Friedberg?

Magnificent. Okay. Magnificent. I mean, what else is there to say?

Eggplant Emoji.

Yeah, this is the eggplant Emoji. It's what we needed. If you zoom out on what Doge is doing, I think the best way to describe it is zero-based budgeting. In organizations that go through zero-based budgeting, you do a cycle, typically annually, where you take all of your OpEx, all of your expenses, and running a company or running an organization down to the studs. You take it down to zero, and you rebuild it up, and you say, What are we trying to achieve this year from first principles Based on that set of objectives, those goals, what do we need to do? What's the minimal expense we need to run? You don't start with last year's numbers and say, what else do we need to do? And start to add on top of that. You really do a hard level, high degree of scrutiny on every dollar moving out. That's what Doge is effectively doing. They're doing a zero-based budgeting on the federal government. They're looking at every line item and they're asking the fundamental question, which I don't think we talk about in the public discourse enough, which is what is the essential role of government?

There is a great debate to be had around that point. Should government be providing humanitarian aid in international markets? That's a good debate to be had. Should the government be providing security to nations that can't provide security for themselves? Does the US government have a role in that? Should the Should the government be providing loans for people to go to universities? Should the government be providing loans for people to buy homes that are overpriced? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. As we start to ask the questions of how we're spending money, I think it ends up leading to the most important questions which is what is the essential role of government, which I think is the debate that needs to be had in order for the democracy to last. I'm very happy to see the effort of Doge, and I think that it's the beginning of what I hope will be a long term process of asking the fundamental questions about essential government.

Antonio, zero-based budgeting was the first thing you introduced when the Twitter takeover happened. Just what do we need in terms of design? What does the sales team need to hit these sales numbers? How many servers do we need? My lord, the waste, fraud, and abuse at that company was shocking. They had buildings that were $100 a square foot, if I remember correctly, that were used for storage of the furniture from the previous building that had been were storing them in Class A office space. You reference the commissary. 20 people were having lunch a day, but they had never ratcheted down the amount of food they were making. Each meal was about 800 on average when you did the math for those 20 meals just in the San Francisco office. Maybe you could talk a little bit about how the shock and awe campaign of just freezing spending and then seeing, hey, what actually is necessary to accomplish this task, worked out at Twitter, and then how you see that being executed inside of our government.

Yeah, thanks, Jason. It was pretty extraordinary, actually. The Twitter experience, the first thing you do in a turn like that is try and get the checkbook and just turn payments off and then see what happens because there are lots of people that shouldn't be getting paid. Sometimes they complain, and sometimes you find the people that complain the loudest are the ones who are coming in the worst fraud. They're the worst fraudsters in the whole game. They're the worst crifters are the ones who are saying they're crying the most amount of foul. The problem, at least in Twitter, there were financial statements. Actually, there was an audit financial statement, and they were basically... They were in some It's always correct. I would say there were some issues with the user growth, DAOs, et cetera, and the incentive plans, but the actual cash flow numbers were pretty much correct. Here, the problem is much, much deeper, and it makes this zero-based budgeting question much harder, which is the way the government works, a Department just basically ask for money from Treasury, and they send it out. We all run businesses. There's a reconciliation process. You have a contract, you issue a PO against it, something comes in, you check that it came in, service is rendered, and then you issue a payable, and then a month later, you pay it, right?

That doesn't happen at the US government. That process is broken. It used to happen. It's broken now. And so literally, money is flowing out. I used to ask myself this question, why Where are the numbers always revised? Where are they always wrong? How can the government know how much money it spends? Just hit the button on the computer and figure it out. Problem is, that button doesn't exist. We spent time early on. I was at Marlago, the Internet, trying to track through, how does the money actually flow? No one could tell us how it actually flows. Where is it going out. People didn't know. It's totally crazy.

It's the reason he has- It all goes through Treasury, Antonio? Can you just explain that to us?

I will try to explain it to you. I'm not sure I have full command of it. I'm not sure anyone does quite yet. It goes to Treasury, ultimately, but it was supposed to flow through the way it was supposed to work. It was changed in the '70s, in 1973. The Nixon administration, in '71, let me go back. They came off the gold standard, which allowed deficits. In '73, at the nadir of the Nixon presidency, Congress took away from the presidency the executive power, this thing called the portionments, which was the power the executive to stop spending. So Nixon was abusing it by stopping it if he didn't want, and so Congress took away from him. What that means today is the executive, as he reaches in, it's very hard to just stop payments. So what's happening is the government is put in a process where they would just have an authorized executive stamp a bill that got paid. That broke, and I don't know when it broke, but it broke sometime. So The money flow now, Department gets a budget authorized to it by Congress. It goes to OMB, OMB allocates the budget. That Department then just sends a money request to Treasury to pay.

It is not reconciled against what happened. This is one of the reasons.

And that's it. There's no controller. There's no controller function like there is in a normal company.

100 %. There is no controller. There's no reconciliation. The reason they can't pass audits, the reason this happens is because you can't audit something you haven't reconciled. The only audit that I've seen is actually from the Social Security Administration. When you read it, I've got one of the partners who have read the thing, it's just riddled with material weaknesses.

Do you think there are individuals that have made millions or billions of dollars from mispayments overseas? Is this what's gone on in the missing money in Ukraine, do you think? It's found its way to the wrong places?

I don't know what happened in Ukraine. I don't. It's such a crazy story. It is shocking about Ukraine. I will say that I have business experience trying to work in businesses that had Medicaid, Medicare's payments. I wanted to make that better. We used to make the world better. We just stopped because we found so much fraud. I'm I'm certain. We literally have a rule here, government pay or in those areas, if it's more than a third of the business, we don't do it in the services space. This is why we found continuous fraud in the companies we're looking at investing in.

Just threading these things together. The really interesting thing with the Twitter pausing of payments was, at some point we were in a meeting at 1: 00 AM on a Saturday, and it was like, Hey, let's turn the credit cards off to see what bounced What happens? And what happens? And then, of course, we start getting calls. People started routing, obviously, because they knew Sacks was there, you were there, I would say, Hey, a company who I shared an investor with or an Another company said, Hey, we're not getting paid for this. It was like some SaaS software that nobody was using, et cetera. You start figuring out, to your point, Okay, is this software even being used? There was so much software and services that had been paid that nobody had ever logged in to set up. It was just being paid as pure graph. Now, you said, Antonio, correctly, the people who come first, they're probably the ones who are in on the biggest grift because, hey, I figured out how to grift this money. How USAID got to the top of the DOGE list, I think, is one of the most interesting aspects of this story.

If you remember, on January 21st, Trump decided he would do a bunch of executive orders, right? And one of them was to pause foreign aid for 90 days. Okay, this seems reasonable. We got to take care of our country. That was part of his mandate for becoming the 47th President of the United States. A couple of days later, the White House said, Hey, this USAID leadership is trying to to prevent the executive order. In other words, they're just going to keep paying people even though the executive order came out. That alerted the DOGE team. So Elon confirmed this on X. He said, quote, All DOGE did was check to see which federal organizations were violating the President's executive orders the most, turned out to be USAID, so that became our focus. And according to NBC, security officials at USAID tried to prevent Doge from even getting into the building or accessing the systems. To your point, Antonio, the person probably who's got the most to hide is the one who's going to fight the most. Over the weekend, Doge gained access to USAID, and then people started tweeting out all of this crazy spend and things that any American who looks at it and says, Wait a second, if we haven't fixed the goddamn water in Flint, Michigan, why are we sending money to Galway or in Ireland to do a DEI musical?

This makes no sense. And that's, I think, the key piece of this, Antonio, is, can you win the hearts and minds of Americans? Because some of this stuff, I don't know if it's legal or it's not legal or it's against protocol or it is protocol. We're going to find out. There's been tons of legal cases and lawsuits that have been filed. But to your point, this is how Elon found out about USAID.

J. Cal, let me ask you a question. Sure. Where does that place you in your political philosophy around the importance of human rights abroad?

Great, great question. I've always felt that the West should act in unison, and if the United States is the greatest economy or the strongest, we should lead. There is something called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United States, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote this at the UN, and everybody tries to hit those notes. I think it's great that we try to reduce suffering in the world, but I think we should be doing it not unilaterally and not to try to manipulate governments. And that's the piece of this that USAID is obviously a grift where people are trying to steal money for their pet projects. And I don't think they're acting in unison and above board to look and say, Okay, where's the most suffering in the world? How can we help that? That, to me, seems like a noble thing to do. If the United States has the budget to help fight AIDS in Africa or poverty, that's fine.

Do you think there's a chance that some of these human rights issues were embellished to try to get more money?

Well, I do think... I did this tweet recently, so yes is the answer. If you look at Amnesty International. Amnesty International, where I worked, was one of my first jobs. They were working on people who were imprisoned, tortured, raped, murdered, systematic murder of dissidents for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, religion, etc. Then somewhere along the line, Amnesty International was tweeting about trans rights, and that's the big focus. This is a very small amount of people on the planet, and I don't think that those human rights violations in any way relate to the tragedy we're seeing of people being murdered, tortured, raped, and caned, and beheaded in certain places in the world. There is a way to look at suffering and say, We should handle this first. Yes, somebody who feels they got misgendered, maybe that's way down the priority list compared to systematic rape of women in these war zones. Those will be the high order bits. And so this thing has gotten... The other fascinating thing, I think, about USAID, which I like to get your thoughts on, too, Chamath, is at what point did this switch from being the left saying, We should not intervene.

The left's position always in the '80s, '90s when we were growing up was, We shouldn't be doing these operatives in other countries. We should let democracy flow. Let these countries figure it out for themselves. We shouldn't be doing empire building. We shouldn't be doing imperialism. And then all of a sudden, now it's just such a grift that I think everybody's got their hands in the pie. Lindsay Graham's on some nonprofit that gets money from this. I don't know if that's above board or not. Everybody, a lot people who are formerly in government seem to be part of this NGO train. So the whole thing just turned out to be a grift, and it's a bipartisan grift, obviously.

It's infuriating. I think the biggest thing that we will have to confront is that many of the things that we thought were issues or problems may have actually been somewhat embellished because of this money cycle.

Sure.

And I think that that's going to cause a lot of people to feel really... They'll probably feel really foolish about some of the decisions they made, all the attempts at cancelation are going to look really dumb in hindsight.

Yeah. All right.

I might just regret to our friend David Sacks here who's coming online. Okay, here he is. David, are you good? The one thing I want to point out, this goes way back, I think maybe more than a decade ago, David tried to explain to me that neocons had taken over American foreign policy, and they your question about why did Democrats change? Why did Republicans change, et cetera? The neocons took over reform policy in both sides, Democrats and Republicans, and populated out this very activist muster stance, which is bad for America. I think, Jason, that answers your question as to why the Democrats shifted.

All right, with us is David Sacks. How are you doing, brother? Are you literally in the White House?

I'm in the EEOB. There's a podcast studio actually in the EEOB.

Oh, fantastic. And you're wearing a suit every Yeah, no, you're right.

I have to wear a suit and tie every day. I was just listening on your conversation about Doge. Jacob, I'm surprised that you never figured out a way to get involved in this USA. I mean, everybody's on the take except you. What's going on?

If I had known, I would have started in NGO.

Where's my NGO? You had everything except the money laundering. You had the grip, you had the virtue signaling. You had it all except the actual money.

Let me up level this for a second. Okay, so we knew the US government runs a $2 trillion deficit every year. We're in debt, almost $40 trillion. And we also knew that any time anyone tries to cut anything in Washington, the whole city screams bloody murder. Okay, so the question is just why? Well, now we know the money is all going to them. It's like round tripping to them. New York Times, Getting Paid. Politico, Getting Paid. Bill Kristol, Perennial Wormonger, Getting Paid. Ukraine, Getting Paid. Like 11 out of 12 publications, Ukraine, Getting Paid. Incredible. Victor Orban, who's the Prime Minister of Hungary, was saying that he's very popular in Hungary. His political opposition, funded by USAID. In Poland, the left-wing political opposition, funded by USAID, and on and on and on it goes.

Bbc. You wonder why everyone in the UK- I couldn't believe that BBC is getting paid.

Every left wing organization in the world seems to be getting paid by this slush fund USAID, which disperses about 50 billion a year. That's a billion a week. That's actually a lot of money. And so it makes you wonder, the left in general tries to portray itself as a movement of the people, that it's grassroots. This is the exact opposite. This is astroterf. This is basically money coming from the top down out of Washington to fund all these groups, maybe not even in the United States, all over the world. So it makes you wonder, what is the real level of local support for these left wing policies all over the world?

Yeah, crazy. So you did a big announcement this week on crypto and creating a framework, finally. I caught some of it. Maybe you could just tell us from the bottom up, what is the mandate from the President and what is your advice to him on how to make crypto move out of the shadows, offshore ICOs, craziness to legitimacy? What's the plan here to legitimize and regulate crypto?

Well, the plan was really spelled out by President Trump his week one EO on crypto, and it's all spelled out in there. The principles, the administration on crypto. The President said he wants to support the responsible use and growth of digital assets and blockchains across every sector of the economy. So the The principals are all there. And yesterday, I was invited up to Capitol Hill to meet with the chairman of the important committees that will be that basically govern crypto. And so we had a press conference there to announce the legislation Plan. You can see there, there's Chairman Tim Scott, who's the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee. To my left and then to my right is French Hill, who's the Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. And then to his right is John Bozman, who's the Chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. And then to the left of Tim Scott is GT Thompson, who's the Chair of the House Agriculture Committee. He's out of frame right now. But those are the four committees that govern crypto. And you may ask, why is the Agriculture Committee involved in crypto? And the reason is because the Ad Committee supervises the CFTC, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, because commodities all came out of agriculture.

So it's interesting. You need four committees across the House and Senate to get legislation done on crypto. It's not just House and Senate. It's actually two committees in each of the House and Senate. And so this is the first time where we've had four chairman of the four key committees committees all come together and say that they're ready to support crypto legislation. There are a lot of people on X who felt like this wasn't a mind-blowing announcement. They wanted something that they could trade on right away. That's not what this was. This was basically a statement of commitment from the chairs, the four committees, that we're going to get legislation done this year, maybe in the next six months. I mean, that's really the goal, and we've never had that before. So that is pretty monumental.

I used to work in this because when I first launched Climate Court back in the day, we actually were selling commodity contracts online. We set ourselves up as an exempt commodity trading platform. I remember all this old legislation. There was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, if I remember, when they deregulated the energy markets. But one of the features of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was that they created this concept of an exempt commodity contract, which was where you're not delivering a physical good. That's basically what weather-derivative derivatives were and energy derivatives and other indices were created that didn't have a tangible physical supply, and it was still shoveled in the commodities world. That's why the legacy of all this stuff sitting with agriculture. Is that the way this is likely going to move forward? Is it going to look like a new extension of exempt commodities and treated like that versus being securities?

The question you're describing is called market structure. What are the definitions going to be? Because digital assets can be many things. You Some digital assets are cryptocurrencies. They're actually currencies. Then there's things that are crypto securities. Then there's things that are commodities. Bitcoin actually is regulated as a commodity right now. And then you've got things that aren't securities or commodities or collectibles, like NFTs, things like that. So there's all these different categories. And one of the things that the market needs is just clarity around the definition so that founders know what the rules of the road are and they can actually just comply with them. So giving them those definitions and describing how a crypto project could start, for example, as a security, and eventually the protocol could become decentralized enough or maybe it becomes a commodity. That whole idea, that's called market structure. And there was a bill in the last Congress by French Hill, who is the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee now, that passed the House with 71 Democratic votes. So it was fairly bipartisan. But then it It meant nowhere in the Senate, because frankly, the Banking Committee at that time was run by Sherrod Brown, who is anti-crypto.

So it got stopped in the Senate right away. Now we have Republican control of the Senate, and Tim Scott is the new Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, and he's expressed support. So I think now we could get a bill on market structure like FIT-21, again, which was French Hill's bill last Congress. I think we could do a revised and updated version this Congress. And that was one of the things the chairman expressed support for. So I think this is a It's a good chance we could get this done in the next six months.

What's the opposition, Sacks? I guess it feels to me like with the market structure question being addressed and answered, you would have also more protection for consumers because now businesses know the rules of the road. They follow them, the structure that protects consumers, et cetera, et cetera. Why would people be opposed to moving this forward, moving the legislation forward, getting this all behind us?

Well, I think this is an area where there's a really good chance of having bipartisan support. We did in the last Congress, I mentioned that the House Bill got over 70 Democratic votes. I think in the Senate, we're going to need seven votes, seven Democrat votes to get to 60, which is the number you need if you don't go through the reconciliation process. And I think there's a good chance this passes with significant Democratic support as well as Republican. It's not going to be unanimous or anything like that because there are still forces that are hostile to crypto in Washington.

You think it's going to be a discrete bill I mean, it seems like you're going to have to get a border security and energy and budget bill passed. So it seems like everything's looking towards reconciliation, in which case-We Would this be an adjunct, like an add-on?

The question is what you can get through reconciliation. So in order for a bill to go through the reconciliation process where you only need basically 50 votes, it has to have a budgetary impact or predominantly a budgetary impact. I think it's called the Bird Rule. And that rule was definitely pushed pretty hard in the last administration. You remember that the Biden administration got the Inflation Reduction Act passed through reconciliation and all those subsidies for clean energy or whatever. So they've opened the window pretty wide on what can go through reconciliation. But that's the question. There's one other bill that I think is going to move pretty quickly here, too. So I just mentioned the market structure bill. The other area is stablecoin. Coins. And Senator Hagerty, he's on the banking committee. He just released a stablecoin bill. There's counterparts in the house. And what the four chairman indicated is actually they're going to take up stablecoins first, and then market structure will follow very quickly. So I think we could see a stablecoin bill pass Congress in the next several months.

Sacks, I guess the question is the SEC was, and Gary Gensler were the blocker previously with crypto, and they just said, Hey, listen, there's an existing set of rules here. Just follow those rules. Obviously, those rules don't exactly apply to the innovation happening in crypto. The question, I think after stablecoins, which feels like a layup and a great place to start, that'll be a great early win, and it just It just makes people... I guess that would just reinforce the dollar supremacy, right? If it's tied to the dollar, so that's good for America. But maybe you could talk to protecting consumers, because we all saw in the first couple of generations of crypto, all kinds and GRIFs and ICOs and things that were never delivered. So how do you balance those two things? Protecting consumers who may get really enthusiastic about this versus people who might try to prey upon them.

Well, the first thing you want to do, if you're going to protect consumers, is you want to bring the activity onshore. Because obviously, when all the activity gets driven offshore, then it's hard for regulators to supervise it. And moreover, it's hard for the market to know who's a good actor, who's a bad actor, what's a good project, what's a bad project. So the first thing you want to do is have the innovation happen onshore in the United States. By the way, it's probably not a coincidence that the biggest fraud in the history of crypto, which was FTX, was based in the Bahamas.

A little bit of A little bit of a tell. A little bit of a tell.

And it'll be an even stronger tell when the good projects feel like they can come back into the United States, and then you've got the shady ones in the Bahamas or in other countries. They're going to stick out like a sore thumb. Everyone's going to be able to understand that, oh, those guys are too shady to operate in the United States. So the number one thing we need to do is just bring the innovation onshore. In terms of the framework, I think the market structure bill is going to define. Here's a security, here's a commodity, here's what you have to do, here are the disclosure requirements around creating a crypto project. So all of that will be in the bill. And then in the meantime, the SEC has created a new task force under Hester Perce, who's a SEC Commissioner, and she is already starting to do work in that regard to to find a better regime at the SEC for crypto projects. You mentioned that Gensler said that the SEC's doors were open to crypto companies, and they should come in and talk to us and work with us. That was very disingenuous. Crypto companies would tell me they would go see the SEC.

The SEC would tell them nothing about what the rules were, but they would have enforcement people in those meetings just writing down everything they would say, and the next day, they would get sent a Wells notice. So the truth is the SEC was not cooperating. They were not providing any clarity. They were just honeypotting founders basically to come in, and then they would immediately investigate them. I mean, it was really terrible. Look, we expect founders to play by the rules and abide by the law and be compliant. But when you won't tell them what the rules are and then you prosecute them, there's no fair way for them to comply. So the most important thing is to give them a framework. I think the SEC now is doing that. They're starting to do that already. And then legislatively, we're going to have a bill that does that moving through Congress over the next few months.

This is absolutely awesome. We're super encouraged that you're doing this, and we really appreciate you coming on the pod. I wish you could participate in the other three or four crazy discussions we're about to have, but we understand you've got to stay focused on the mission. Anything on the AI front that we can look forward to in the coming weeks that you're working on? I know that's the other part of your mission.

Well, the big thing is, like I talked about last time, the President rescinded the Biden EO, which was this 100-page monstrosity of Burns some regulation on our AI companies. I think that decision has been proven even more right in the wake of Deep Seek, because we know that China has basically caught up or they're very close to catching up. It felt like that Biden EO was written in a vacuum in which the US was the only player in AI, and that if we imposed a bunch of burdensome rules on our companies, that somehow that wouldn't allow China to catch up. And I think it's pretty clear that China is very competitive. If we hobble our AI companies, it's going to run down to China his benefit. So I think that was a very good decision. And what the President said in his EO is that we should devise a new AI action plan to replace that Biden EO, and we're working on that right now.

All right, David, we really appreciate. Sacks, any fun anecdotes from Doge you want to share?

I'll give you one anecdote, which is I've been working late here a number of nights at the EEOB, and I won't tell you where the Doge guys are based, but I know where their office is. So I just went by there to say hi. The whole room was full of young coders, I think they were engineers, but they're wearing suits and ties, so that's a little different. But they were all working really late. They're working there late up Friday night, and the facilities people don't know what to do because they've never had people asked to stay late on Friday before. So they've had to create new facilities, access for these guys.

They're like, You're coming to the office and doing work? We don't have a protocol for that. How does that work? We're going to need to get you a key or a badge to come to the building. Well, It's absolutely awesome to see the progress you're making in the first two weeks and continued success. We're so proud of the effort.

All right. Thanks, guys.

All right.

Do you guys think the Democrats are going to lose people over their opposition to Doge? Is Doge really viewed as oppositional to Democrat Party interests for the average person?

It's a Rorschack task. I think the thing is that there was a coalition that the Democrats had and there was a coalition that the Republicans had. The Republicans did a better job of reforming that coalition. Now, I think what you're going to see is a shrinking. I actually got this totally wrong. I don't know if you remember a couple of years ago, but my thought at the time was if the Republicans don't figure out how to fix themselves, they were going to go and lose for the next 10 or 15 years. The reason I said that was they would walk into every midterm and they would just get their ass handed to them. But I think they figured it out, that this is this thing that I've been thinking about a lot is there's a fight in Western societies, and it's a pendulum between labor and capital. It used to be the thought, the conventional wisdom was that the Republicans were pro-capital and Democrats were pro-labor. The brilliance of Trump is he took over the Republican Party and made it totally populist, which is to say pro-labor. The crazy The thing about the Democrats is that they are the most sophisticated liars.

Because if you look at what happened under Biden, you had record high stock markets. It was purely in favor of asset owners. Record high deficits, record high illegal immigration, record high wage suppression. All of these things are massively pro-capital, but they tried to present themselves as pro-labor. That entire ruse is now being undone. And all of this data, what that does is it'll consolidate the Democrats to a shell of their former self. It'll take a year or 18 months. But I think unless they figure out how to totally hard reset, they're going to be in a really difficult struggle to find a cohort of people beyond 15 or 20 % of the population for a long time.

Well, and it's so dumb to come out against waste, fraud, and abuse. So the best argument the Democrats had, it seems, was that, oh, Oh, my God, people's social security numbers or people's privacy was being violated because they went in and looked at the data and how the money was wasted. This is the height of not getting the point and not reading room. 100% of Americans don't want their tax payments stolen. They don't care if you looked at their social security number. This isn't a privacy issue that Doge is looking at some database. And that's what AOC and Schumer were doing. Oh, my God, these people are looking at your social security number. They have access to your records. Who cares? What matters is how much money is being stolen from the American public, and anyone at any point in time could have picked up this issue. This has been going on, I I think you pointed out the last time somebody really addressed this in earnest was Clinton. So this has been going on. Obama, Trump 1. 0, Biden. Everybody has been raising the debt. All of this drift has been going on. It's only this time around that somebody picked up the free money and said, Here's an issue.

Now we see what happens when somebody picks up the issue of stop wasting money. It is a popular issue. This is only going to make Trump more popular.

Jason, I'm going to add what you and Chamath said. I think you're both right. I'm going to give you a very concrete example. Ram Emmanuel is now back from Japan. He was chief of staff in both the Democratic Whitehouses, post-Rosevolt, Clinton and Obama. He wrote an op-ed said this weekend, this past weekend that basically said the Democrats have lost their way because they have forgotten what he calls kitchen table issues, the things regular people care about. And Chamath, you're right. The reality is they forgot about inflation They forgot that inflation is terrible for the average person. It's terrible for middle class America. It's okay for people that own productive assets because they just go up in value. But it's terrible for people that are wage earners and that have any savings. Terrible for older people that are living off savings. Terrible. Ron makes this point that if the Democrats are going to reconform in some way, reform in some way, they're going to have to reca these kitchen table issues. If they don't, they'll just be about these fringe social issues, DEI, transgender, whatever, and that will never work. They'll never come back into power.

Well, the crazy thing is the democratic policies are meant to favor capital holders, but capital holders, by and large, deeply dislike the Democrats because of all of these other issues. So they have no home. There There is no base from which to build from right now unless they go through a great recent. And part of it is that they have to understand that they are actually not pro-labor. They have been pro-capital. But that requires such a schism from the deepest believers of the Democratic Party who thought, eat the rich, you wear it on your dress, it's so important to you. In fact, actually, you were feeding the rich. And the fact that you didn't even know that is just pathetic.

Yeah, What's funny is that Margaret Thatcher, famously said that the problem is socialism. You eventually run out other people's money and you run deficits, right? And you destroy the country. This happened in Venezuela. It's always the end of socialism. It's how it finishes, it's how the movie ends. We've seen it around the world. Just look into South America. We were heading that direction. That's when I said earlier, I'm afraid we might become a cleptocracy if this doesn't stop. And I'm so grateful to all the great patriots at Doge and the government, the President for making it happen because we were heading that direction.

So the Democratic Party is lost. They'll continue to be lost. Interesting thing came up this week. On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order laying out a plan to establish the first sovereign wealth fund for the United States. For those of you who don't know, a sovereign wealth fund is essentially an investment fund for a country. It's almost universally based on natural resources. Norway, Saudi, UAE, they all have Australia sovereign wealth funds based upon minerals or typically oil. The United States is not known for having the oil reserves of the Saud or UAE or Norway. This public investment fund would be, apparently, anchored by potentially the TikTok shares that Trump said he wanted to get half of by giving a license. A lot of that is unclear what this license would be. It's never existed. But this is the concept. The Treasury Secretary and Commerce Secretary have been tasked with developing a plan over the next 90 days. The plan should include, recommendations for funding mechanisms, investment strategies, fund structure and a governance model. Chamath, you were tweeting about this. What is the point of having a sovereign wealth fund in the United States if we're $36 trillion in debt?

Should we just pay down?

I think it's not- Where is this money going to come from? Well, it's not an either or thing. I think the point is that if there are assets that are minted effectively overnight, which I think the 50% share of TikTok would be, so call it $100, $150 billion, The question is, what should you do with it and who should govern it? I think this idea that if you had a group of five elder statesmen, so I'm just going to throw some names out there, David Tepper, Stan Druckenmiller, Ken Griffin, John Dore or Mike Moritz, Bill Gross or some other bond guy. My point is, what you get are five people that are very sophisticated across all market categories. One of them could be the rotating CEO for some number of years. People should rotate in and rotate out. These are unpaid jobs because everybody that has these slots should be mega-billionaires, so they shouldn't be doing it for their own personal advancement, and they should deploy that capital. So as you sell down the TikTok shares, maybe as you sell federal lands and you generate more oil revenue, take it all and invest it on behalf of America into American companies.

I think that's a great, incredible idea.

Antonio, you think the government should be in this business?

I think it should, but And I agree with Shamath that the governance is very, very important. I think he's got a good idea there. I think it, for a different reason is that we don't have an industrial policy in America. Many of our industry competitors around the world, in particular China, have a long long term industrial policy, and they put enormous amounts of capital behind the industrial policy. A sovereign wealth fund, I think, would be a stealthy way to create industrial policy in America.

What does it mean, industrial policy in this context? So-example.

In China, they want to build chip fabs, and they want to catch up to TSMC. So what do they do? They take the dollars of trade surplus they get from us every year, and they pour it back into making that stuff inside their country. And for decades, part Part of the problem we've had with China is that capital is free because the banking system just pushes money out to manufacturers, and they move the manufacturing because the WTO from the US to China. That's industrial policy. People say the Chinese have a long term hundred year vision. The way it manifestsests is this industrial policy. We don't have that here at all. And we try to do it. We do like the Chips Act, and it goes through commerce. We have government bureaucrats deciding how to spend $200 billion to modernize Intel, which needs to happen. I'd much rather have Ken Griffin, Bill Gross, any of the guys Timoth mentioned, deciding, Okay, we have five industries in America we want to invest in. Let's make great investments. Let's make great investments for America. They got to be economic. They got to make money for us, but they got to be good for the country.

I think that's what most of you sovereign wealth funds do. Some of them make portfolio investments, but many of them, like the sovereign wealth in Saudi Arabia, the PIF, they're making enormous investments domestically to remake the economy toward tourism example. And I think this is a great idea.

They're literally building cities in Niom. They've got a dozen cities being constructed and trying to take an oil economy and shift it to a tourism economy, a technology economy, a private equity economy.

Antonio is totally right. Like Scott Besson, part of his congressional testimony, you guys probably saw this, was he laid out this thing that he has that's called the 333 plan. In the 333 plan says we want to see GDP growth of 3%, we want to see deficits that are no greater than 3%, and we want to have 3 million bears of oil produced domestically in the United States. But if you double click on that, if you look at the total energy reserves in the United States, they're three times greater than the total energy reserves of Saudi Arabia. Three times across all forms. So not just oil. If you oil in that gas plus coal. If we actually go, as Antonio said, towards an industrial policy that's pro-energy, where the incremental cost of energy is effectively zero, where we want just a gross abundance of electrons flowing in America for all the great ideas that could pop up, it is, by definition, going to generate an enormous amount of revenue for the federal government. And so I think having the Sovereign Welf fund be the rainy day fund, if you will, that can bank a percentage of all of that, I think starts to do a lot of really good for the long term strategic guidance of the US.

Friedberg, what do you think here? Is this something where we're making the government too big, and now we've got the government competing with BlackRock and Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, and they're going to be on the board of technology companies and energy companies and investing in it. And then what happens when Obama, Biden, Trump, Bush, you get different people running these things, and then they want to do their pet projects? It seems to me like this could get awfully conflicted, awfully quick. What do you think? Should this be a business our government's in?

I think one of the things the government sucks at is capitalism. So I wouldn't make capitalism the mandate of a sovereign wealth fund. Certainly not when we have 40 trillion of federal debt, it doesn't make economic sense. Our cost of capital is 5%. That's how much the interest is on this 10 to 30 year debt right now. It's very hard to actually make real risk adjusted returns when our cost of capital is so high. I don't think the mandate should be, Hey, let's put a bunch of capital in a pool, go and invest it, and try and make money for the United States. That seems silly. But my point about the government being really bad at capitalism is that the United States government owns and has have access to and will acquire through other means significant assets and resources that should be monetized in a smarter way. I would think about the Sovereign Wealth Fund as being more of a strategic vehicle for monetization of high value government assets. For example, if Trump does actually negotiate a 50% equity position in TikTok US, that needs to sit somewhere. It should not sit in the Department of Whatever.

It should sit with a capitalist manager that then ultimately makes the decision on and how to monetize that asset, return that cash to the treasury, and pay down the debt. Similarly, the US has large amounts of land, has access to other large assets that get transferred in seizures, etc. I don't know if you guys remember all this, but there was like Bitcoin seizures that have happened over the years, is the government has cracked down on criminal enterprises. Then the government owns this Bitcoin. Do you think the smartest people are making the decisions on where and how to sell down that Bitcoin? I guarantee you not. I would much rather have a capitalist making decision. I would view the Sovereign Wealth Fund being less about raise capital from other means in the government, which effectively means borrowing money through treasuries because of the debt level we have and trying to invest it, and much more being about, okay, what strategic assets can the US government monetize and use this as the mechanism for doing that? Then ultimately, I think the objective should be to return that capital. I do think there's also an opportunity for managing Social Security in a smarter way.

Social Security is functionally going to be bankrupt in eight years. The way the trust is set up, the cash that's there, the assets that are there, and the demand on Social Security, given the aging population and the rising payouts every year. One of the other Another place to think about this is what are the long term debt obligations, which is ultimately the point of these sovereign wealth funds, and can they be invested in a smarter way? Why is the Social Security entity is ultimately owning 3% yielding bonds when they could be owning interest in equities? I would think about that strategic pool of capital being managed by this as well, and less about the mandate of go be a capitalist investor for the United States, raise money and make money. I think leave that to the markets. But when it comes to strategic assets, I think this could be a good vehicle for-When the Silk Road got shut down, yeah, we seized 144,000 Bitcoin, and that's sitting somewhere in some Department of Justice account.

It got sold off.

Yeah, I think they sold that off. They sold it?

No, I think we still have it. I think that was the idea, was that was going to become the Bitcoin Street Reserve. You could also come up with new taxes to fund this.

The DOJ sells these. Who do you think of the DOJ is making the Bitcoin market decisions? And is that the right person to be monetizing these assets?

I mean, David I'm just going to point out Social Security. I just want to follow up on, which is when you think about Social Security, it's 6 trillion dollars of our 36 trillion debt, and it's actually a fake treasury bill. One of the things we figured out in early days before the inauguration, that's $6 trillion dollars sits on the ledger. It's just a paper ledger over. Actually, if it gets paid out, it's also be very inflationary. It's just a fake treasury got ledgered over that pays a very low rate. Here at Valer, my partner John Shulkin has been reading to try to help. The only thing we find in this audit in the government, the Social Security Administration actually has an audit. It has an audit. When you go through the audit, it's crazy the material weaknesses going back to Doge that you find. Yeah, it'd be way better to have that invest in a way that was economic for people with real money.

By the way, guys, as we were speaking- They were pressing for this. Guys, as we were speaking, the federal judge just put a temporary restraining order on Doge and has barred Elon and his team from accessing US Treasury Payments data.

All right. So now we're going to have a real grudge match between the public- Which judge was it? Federal Judge?

Federal judge, yeah. Would you know why? Jamal, did you say why?

No, but Elizabeth Warren is doing a victory lap, so I'm sure that she's part of it.

So the government agency set up by the President can't look at the database of the Treasury?

So Just to double click here, DOGE is not a new agency. It's the renaming of existing agency. I can't remember the name of it. I'll have to find it. Elon tweeted about this some weeks ago. That was set up under Obama, actually, to do this, to create an audit function to the government. What's crazy about this ruling to me is, Congress, basically, the Constitution delegates to the executive the ability to spend the money, and they go through Congress, it gets actually appropriating Congress, and the executive spends it. How can you spend money if you don't know where it went? How can you be responsible? You have the authority to spend it, but not the... And how can you responsibly spend it if you actually can't go look and see where it goes?

Guys, this is flying fast and furious. President Trump just unveiled his framework for his tax plan. No tax on tips, no tax on senior social security, no tax on overtime pay, renew the middle class tax cuts, adjust the salt cap. So again, very, as I said, Prolabor, Pro populist. Eliminate all special tax breaks for billionaire sports team owners. I'm no longer. I already sold the team. I already sold my fees.

Sorry, Javan.

I already sold my fees. Close the carried Thanks, Biden. Close the carried interest tax deduction loophole, which allowed you to claim carried interest as- Sorry, Antonio.

Long term captives. No, please.

I better run. Oh, no. I'll be back in a few hours. I'll get to sell some things. Isn't that incredible?

I mean, he is really going for the jug. Wow. Amazing. I support this 100 %.

The salt deductions coming back, is that right?

Yeah, marginally, though. I don't think he's going to give it the way that it was before, but isn't this I mean, who's going to stand up and lay on the railroad tracks for being able to amortize a multibillion dollar sports team purchase, or that when you make a fund investment, you should get long term cap gain stream? Who is going to be that person? Nobody's going to stand up for these things.

I think we should just stop doing venture and just start NGOs. We just start a whole ratsness of NGOs to ship money around.

You could have an incubator.

Yeah, absolutely.

Ngeo, you can get it.

Ngeo, you can get it. If you've got a great idea for an NGO, why didn't you launch launch in every single random developing country in the world?

I mean, if I had known that- You would have had 8 billion of AUM because of USAID.

Just launch one in Vietnam and we could have... Yeah.

Ngo launch. Go launch. I love it.

We could have had a launch accelerator in Vietnam for transgender...

The Jason Calcanis Launch Fund of Equatorial Guinea.

It is so crazy, though, to come out and watching the Democrats, just the self-own of coming out and being like, We have to stop people from stopping wasteful spend. They just don't seem to understand how unpopular- These are kitchen table issues like Ram said.

I mean, everyone cares about that. If you don't care about that, if you care about these fringe issues and not the things people care about on the kitchen table.

Well, and if If you think about the transgender sports issue, biological males playing in female sports league, that issue that Trump just did an EO yesterday for was such an obvious issue of fairness and has nothing to do with transgender. It just has to do with biology. If a biological male plays basketball on a biological female team, somebody's going to get hurt, and that person is going to score 100 points. It's just obvious. And the fact that the Democrats couldn't see that issue being 100% or 95% makes no sense. It's just such an obvious litmus test of logic.

I mean, look, man, the Constitution is a document about fairness. The people that found this country, the patriots found this country, they did it because they were treated unfairly at home. All of us here are one generation away or two generations away from immigration. And the reality is that's why people come here, man. It's un-American. It's un-American.

Zero degrees. We got two people here who are immigrants.

I'm reading the TRO, and it looks like this TRO means temporary restraining order. It actually narrows who from Doge can get read access down to two people, Tom Kraus and Marco Elez.

Oh, okay. They don't want to have the whole team be able to see what's at Treasury. They just have to have a process and some sign off. Okay, that sounds not unreasonable.

I just want to point out two people to look at how good they are. I'm sure they're working 24/7. Look at all the payments in the US government is not a lot.

Yeah, it does seem like it needs to be more than two, but it doesn't seem like they're saying you can't look at it. They just want to have some controls in place.

I mean, it feels seem like that's an administrative block. That's like the narrowest thing you could do. Okay, yeah, you can come in, but you can just send two people, and just these two people. So if they get sick or something happens, no one else comes in. That seems to me to be truly leads the Ministry block to slow it down.

Yeah. While we're interpreting this in real-time, the facts will come out over time. Let's wrap up on Google. Google dropped 7% after reporting earnings on Tuesday, Chamatha. Revenue up 12% year a year to 96. 5 billion. Wow. Cloud revenue is up 30% year over year, 12 billion. Youtube ads surging 14% to 10. 5 billion. Net profit was around 26. 5 billion, up 28% year over year. So they are really focusing on profitability, obviously. Full year numbers, this is just extraordinary. Total revenue, 350 billion with 100 billion in net profit. Cloud and YouTube finished 2024 with a combined run rate of $110 billion. Youtube is basically Netflix inside of Google, and their Google Cloud is essentially AWS inside of Google. The thing that made investors get concerned, Chamath, is Google said it would invest 75 billion in CapEx in 2025, 42% jump over 2024, 29% more than analysts expect. Obviously, this has to do with data center servers and the AI build out. What do you think about that number 75 billion, obviously, in relation to what we saw with Deep Seq doing it with maybe a little bit less, maybe they're lying? Is this just an absolute Is it a waste of money or a gargantuan number, or is it something they can easily, with that amount of profitability and cash they have, absorb and use in the future?

I think I should stipulate that Google's models are probably the best of all the models across a broad base of capabilities if you test for them. Let's start there, which is whatever they're doing is working. The thing that they need to do is be able to translate those models now into better products. I think that That will happen slowly. For example, if you look at deep research, most of the people online that are evaluating deep research would now say that OpenAI is both faster and just better on the margins. All of these things can be improved. I don't think that's a comment on the base model. I think it's a comment on post-training and how they're attempting to productize these things. The other thing that Google has is a money machine that directly benefits from these AI-driven optimization on ad targeting. The only other company that has anywhere close to the same credibility is Meta. I think what both of these two companies need to do is do a better job of explaining how that 75 billion gets segregated, how much of that goes to these AI-enabled models that actually do better ads optimization. There's a really interesting discussion by a former meta machine learning engineer on X about how they did it.

It's pretty amazing. It's staggering. But if they could say half the money goes to that and the other half goes to more speculative pre-training and post-training, I think the market would have eaten it up. It's probably more of a disclosure issue for Google because I would say right now their model quality is the best.

You have thoughts on this Buildout, Antonio, obviously, I think you've been involved with XAI, and obviously you're involved with Twitter and X previously, and Colossus's colossal build-out. That was extraordinary to watch in such a short period of time. Do you have concerns that, like some people do, that this build out is too expensive and there would be too hard to monetize all that expense, or is it maybe a little bit of hand wringing and the opportunity in AI is so obviously huge that you just got to take the leap of faith and if you build it, the revenue will come.

Yeah, I think Chumoth has the right framework here, which is return of invested capital. And what he's saying by if Google had said, Hey, half the money is for ads and half the money is for a budget of post-training, the market would seen that half the money has a higher return capital. And Google's return capital has actually been going up after the implementation of AI models into their company. And I think that abstracts the entire market, which is people are waking up that return of invested capital and data center will matter that the models are basic commodities and super competitive. In the best case, it's a land where in Asia, it's a Mele. In the worst case, it's just total commodities. What does matter is the return on capital data center, which is influenced by how good the data centers So you mentioned the XAI data center, it's 100,000 GPU cluster. It's the most dense coherent cluster in the world, and it will just train faster and better than other clusters. It's also built for the most cheaply and the fastest. So XAI will have the highest running capital, and I also think it's the best train data, and therefore, win.

I think Google will also win because they have their Tensor Flow chips. They make some of their own chips. They do focus on ROYC, and they have a great monopoly to fund it all. So I don't think it's overdone and blown. I think this is going to be, as you guys said before in the podcast, bigger than Industrial Revolution. But it's also true that you need to have a good ROIC. If you don't, you're not transparent about it, you can see what happens.

I would argue Google's probably probably been the most frugal, thoughtful, and well-managed computing infrastructure investor of all time. The '98 to 2005 era at Google, it was all about just cheap throwaway racks. That was the big advantage they had as they weren't using the of Oracle servers. They had a 2-3 year depreciation timeline on those, but they were super cheap, and so the ROIC was quite good. Then they got into energy efficiency, which they realized was a big driving cost. They started to build systems that were more energy efficient. As a result, they lasted longer. Then their depreciation schedule moved up to three to four years, meaning they could write down the value of the servers over three to four years. Then from 2010 to 2015 era, their hardware system for cloud allowed them to extend through repurposing the utilization, and they increased their depreciation to four to five years. Then in 2021, I don't know if you guys remember this, they made this big change to their depreciation schedule on data center infrastructure to six years. When they invest CapEx in a data center, they would write down the servers over a six-year cycle because of AI optimization on maintenance.

They started using AI just for internal management of the infrastructure. I would view the $75 billion CapEx actually as a very positive signal for the company. I think that it means that they have a really strong line of sight on how they're going to have full utilization and great return on this. If you do the math, ROIC math on this, $75 billion, assume a 20% ROIC, you've got to be generating, call it roughly an incremental, $15 billion of profit a year, plus the amortization of the $75 billion. Take the $75 billion, divide it by six, that's $12 billion plus $15 billion. Basically, they would need to make an incremental 27 billion of operating profit a year on the $75 billion for this to meet their OIC performance. That doesn't seem crazy because that's just under 20% of their annual operating profit. This is a very, I think, important point, which is Google doesn't just do this to build out AI in the future. They have a really strong line of sight on how this can increment, and you don't have a huge hurdle for them for this to pay back. I don't know. I would, to Antonio's point, I view this as a positive.

I think if you use their historical ability to manage infrastructure and make predictions on investments as an indicator of the future, this is a strong and positive indicator. I do think that for all the naysayers out there that think that search is going to evolve to chat, you could look at this as being a really important proof point that Google has the confidence that they're going to be able to move from search to chat. As Chamath points out, they've got great performative models. I would view this more of as a positive than a negative. If they were under investing, I would be worried that they didn't know where to invest. But to see them make this degree of investment highlights the confidence in the strategy.

Tony, I don't know if you've been watching the agent space or deep research that came out from Google and then closed AI, I mean, OpenAI launched their copycat version of this product. Sorry, my feelings on it. I'm curious your thoughts on job displacement. We're looking at self-driving. Obviously, Waymo has got cars on the road. Obviously, Tesla, which you were previously on the board of. And I know you were the first institutional investor in Tesla. Self driving is pretty good. I only get one or two disengagements per hour, and they tend to be the ones where I just want to take the turn a little sharper That thing. So that's getting pretty close. Byd is very close. You got a lot of job displacement that occur. Millions and millions of drivers in 10 years could lose their jobs. Researchers working at Gartner Group, whatever, Boston Consulting Group. It feels like there could be massive job displacement. Do you have concerns about that in the American economy and globally?

There's a lot of handling about this, and it's real. In prior moments of large disruption, there have been job displacements because there's no generous people to get retrained for something else to keep retrained. So I think there were studies, Monfreem, of the steel industry in Pittsburgh in the '70s, that the cost of each steel worker job loss was about a million the economy because these people couldn't be retrained. And that might happen here. But I have a more benign outlook, personally. What I think is going to happen is that you will have job loss, but the amount of productivity that will be released in the US economy is going to be extraordinary. So GDP growth is a function of the number of people working times productivity. It's very simple. Economists want to make it more complex than that, but it's the number of people working times productivity. If productivity goes up to 5, 6, 7, 8%, you get a massive boost in GDP growth. And then what happens? Well, people can get retrained. They can get different jobs, different services happen. People start companies. The application layer of LLMs is just starting. The barrier to start a company is quite low.

Things like launch probably explode because there's all these people who don't have jobs anymore. They're accountants and want to start something. It's hard to know what happens. I believe in American agility. I believe in this country. I believe that we will figure out a way to make this all work. And if there's enough productivity and money in the economy that's flowing, people will find new jobs. They will find new business to start. They will find new things to do. We have to get out of the way, take regulation down, and let Americans be creative, and unleash the American productivity machine. Let's make that happen.

Yeah, that's, I think, really strong thoughts. That's the game we're seeing on the field. How many companies are we seeing hit a million dollars in revenue with five employees, where that used to take 25? So the efficiency is there. Chamath, your outlook on this This issue, since it seems to be coming up again, specifically with truck drivers and Uber drivers and all kinds of other research jobs that seem to be doing pretty well or can be done pretty well by AI. Where do you stand on this issue today?

I think it's a process. Buffett wrote about this in an annual letter, and what he described was the changing nature of jobs during the agrarian revolution. What you saw was a large cohort of people who supported themselves through farming. Then the total quantum of those jobs shrank by 90% when you had industrialized farming and tractors and whatnot. But the economy, to Antonio's point, grew around that business and added other kinds of businesses that didn't make sense in that moment. I think what you see is that when economies get more and more evolved, you see the growth of services, businesses that are these things that only happen when you have excess. The person that you pay for closet organizing would not have had a job in the turn of the agrarian revolution or the industrial revolution. But they can exist in 2020 something, and frankly, they can make a good job. The life coach There are all these jobs that just come out of nowhere.

Podcaster, influencer.

All of that.

Venture capitalist.

Capital allocator. Absolutely. Mutant strawberry creator.

So I think that you're... Cut that. Waiting for this next turn of creativity. The big problem that we all have, maybe I'll take the more glass half empty version of what Antonio said is, we really haven't been unlocking people's creativity over the last 15 years. We've been trundling around, except safe of a few companies, which we all know, and we can just repeat them endlessly, but we know which ones they are that are truly innovating and at the edge. Everybody else is diddling around naval gazing. So the real problem is that we have not had a lot of reps in being creative. I'll give you just a very simple example, nick. Can you find this? Even extremely state industries. Did you see the BYD clip of the car?

Yes.

And I thought to myself- Parallel park, yes, with a little swipe.

It's incredible.

How tragic is it that when you look at this and you're blown away? Yeah. And you're blown away for two reasons. One is, A, I didn't think that that was possible. And B, why doesn't it exist in America? But the reality underneath the hood is extremely benign how this is implemented. And so I think that the problem is we spent so much time losing the script I think Antonio is right. When you unshackle people to not focus on the mental load of getting the pronouns right or the this or the that, you won't be so overwhelmed by things like this because you will have already been We're breaking the boundaries of human creativity. We need to get back to that. We need to let these creative people cook. I hope that that happens. I think that that will happen. Friedberg, can you do a science corner on the FDA approval for the non-opioid painkiller?

Not today.

No, I know. But could you do it in a couple of weeks?

Yeah. The one I wanted to do is that new macro study on GLP-1s, which I think is super interesting.

Tell us.

You guys remember, I talked a while ago about how they were able to mine VA data. The VA, they take care of veterans and they have all the medical records. On an anonymized basis, they can make that data available to researchers. If you guys remember this, this is how they identified that the Epstein-Barr virus or the virus that causes mono as being statistically certain to be the trigger for multiple sclerosis. In the cohort of hundreds of thousands of patients that were in this data set, no one got MS that didn't get Epstein-Barr virus. If you did not get Epstein-Barr virus, you did not get MS. I don't know if you guys remember, I did the science corner a while ago. Anyway, so the data set that you can mine at the VA is incredible. They pulled all the data from everyone that's been on the GLP-1 agonists, and they identified all of the health effects across multiple indications, the statistical difference between the cohorts. This research team out of St. Louis pulled all the data from the VA database. Basically, they looked at 1. 2 million people with diabetes that didn't take anything, compared to 215,000 that took the GLP-1 receptor agonists, and another 600,000 people that took other drugs for diabetes.

Basically, this cohort segmentation allows them to isolate the effect of the GLP-1 drugs. That's incredible. As you can see here, this shows across hundreds of thousands of patients, the effect of the GLP-1 on a hazard ratio, which means It's like, how likely are you to have the following health condition versus the population that's not taking the GLP ones? Then on the right, if you scroll to the right, nick, are the increase in risk, and on the left are the things that go down. The increase The only thing that increased is 8% or 10% increase in nausea and vomiting. Yeah, can't confirm. Musculoskeletal complications, GRD, which is gastric reflux from- Sleep services. Obviously, indigestion And sleep disturbance is probably related to indigestion. It's all abdominal stuff. Now, if you go over here to the benefit side. The benefit side is what conditions did you see a decrease in? You have a decrease in shock, a decrease in hepatic failure, so liver failure, respiratory failure, cardiac arrest. In fact, on cardiac arrest, you see a 30% decrease in the probability of having cardiac arrest from the cohort that's on the GLP-1s versus the alternatives. Schizophrenia?

Yeah.

Wow. Schizophrenia It's everything. This goes to the point, if you guys remember the interview I did a couple of months ago with the CEO of Eli Lilly, that they have all these clinical trials going on right now for different indications for the GLP-1 receptor agonists, that they're seeing that there's health benefits beyond just the weight loss in reducing things like kidney disease, obviously liver problems, mental problems, and so on.

Do we know why? If we don't know why, do you think it's because this is suppressing the food the lack of food or the change in the food consumption that's creating this? Do you know what I'm asking? Do you think the drug is actually- I do.

You should watch the interview I did with Rix. In fact, this is a good moment to call it out if you haven't seen it. I have. It's actually- I think he highlights that this class of drugs, genes get turned on and off. There's what's called a gene expression cascade that occurs with certain compounds. We know that the GLP-1 receptor agonist means that it binds to these GLP sites, and there's a cascading effect of genes that then get expressed. What that seems to do is turn off things like inflammatory markers. It turns on things like CERQ-2 genes, which can actually increase cellular repair. There seem to be other benefits from these drugs beyond just the appetite control. It's not the appetite control itself, but there seems to be other effects-Let me ask you a question. From these receptors being activated.

Would you put your kids on this?

No.

Okay. Would you put your wife on on this?

I would consider it, and I would consider it for myself, too, just for the anti-inflammatory effects.

How will you make that decision?

Well, for me, personally, and the thing that I weigh against is the muscle loss and the bone density loss. I think that if you look at the biggest effect on the downside basis is you should increase your protein in your diet, you have to do weight lifting. There's things that you would do. Frankly, if you do those things anyway, if you increase protein in your diet and do more weight lifting, you're You're really going to see very good health benefits from just doing those things that may actually outweigh the benefits you get from seeing on the GLP-1.

I have a question you did, and this is the question is, when you look at that data and you talk to the COs, how much do you think really long term, when the long term sites are out, is going to be that it was the drug or just that being obese is very bad for you. When you take your body fat down dramatically, all these other gene expressions happen anyway, right? Totally. Which one will it be?

This is what they're starting to isolate. That's a great question. I will say, Antonio, they are starting see that there are other expressions that are not related to the obesity and people that don't have obesity that are using these drugs. They're seeing that cohort data now. Clinical studies, phase 2 were published, and I think we're going to see phase 3 in some of these indications soon. But it is looking very positive that it's not just the loss of obesity. Now, to your point, being obese, not exercising, eating poorly destroys your health. You stop that. Everything gets better. If you lift weights, free Can you tell us when you decide to do this? I will, yeah. If I do do a GLP-1 receptor agonist, I will let you guys know right now. I actually feel like I want to go through a process of increasing my weight lifting routine more. I've been trying to create a more rigorous schedule. My schedule just sucks, so that's been the hardest thing for me. But I actually want to go through that first before making that decision.

Why? You're going to call David. I'm sorry.

No, I was just curious. Why that order? I don't understand.

I want to measure the effects because I do think that if you actually get into a regular weight lifting routine and you increase protein in your diet, which is another thing I've been making a concerted measured effort to do, which is hard as a vegetarian, by the way, you see pretty significant health effects. I'm trying to get through the process of increasing muscle composition before I make the decision on whether or not to add GLP-1. I don't want to confound the two factors.

You know what I did that made it super easy for me is I got egg YTS in a carton And I have this incredible crunchy, spicy garlic thing that everybody in Moma Fuku and everybody makes and everybody's crazy about. Just in the mornings, I'll eat whatever it is, 10 ounces, 12 ounces of egg YTS with that spicy stuff. It's delicious. It's awesome. And I just try to get that whatever 30, 40 grams of protein first thing in the morning. And then doing the rucking. Well, this is easy. You just wear a 35 pound weight vest for and you walk a mile or two and you will get...

My problem, Jason, with all of this is that every time I see something... I saw Gary Breca on the Sean Ryan podcast recently. Sean Ryan asks him, what are a handful of things that you recommend for everybody. He recommends mineral salt, and then he recommends a methylated vitamin, he recommends amino acids, whatever. There's a protocol. Then if you happen to catch a clip on X of Andrew Huberman, he'll have a protocol. Then Brian Johnson has a protocol. The problem is all these protocols are slightly the same, but they're just different enough where it creates a huge cognitive load in a normal person like myself, to your point, Friedberg, who's busy, who's got a job, who's got kids. How do you side. I would really love something to be like, I don't want to say gold standard because you can't say that, but that is like, what's the real bang for your buck? What Antonio said, are you just better off just losing the 50 And then this is why these products are successful and I think will continue to grow pretty dramatically, Antonio, is because it is pop a pill and it solves all those problems.

It doesn't require the cognitive load.

And it will be in a pill format soon, right? I mean, the pills are almost here.

I love you. Very cool, actually, David, if you do this, to Jemal's point about people being confused. If you did the every person's story around this journey and you documented it. Totally. You did like, this is my weight. I did weight lifting first, then I did the GOP one. You actually did a weekly thing where you checked in, and even it was 10 minutes up on X or something, where you just gave people the journey in a way that wasn't so complicated. Because I think people are confused. Jamal is right. I have very good doctors. You guys are good doctors, but if you don't, you don't know what to do.

By the way, the problem for me, just to give you a sense of it, I had a doctor in LA, I had a doctor in San Francisco. I would have them do their own versions of things. Then I would have somebody else help me compare. It cost me way too much money, and all that complexity did was make the quality of my health care actually go down. Instead, what I really wanted was just a very simple protocol that said, take the metformin because it's good for you, take the vitamin D, take the omega-3 fatty acids, otherwise, just eat this meal plan. It would help me a lot more than I've had to cobble it together myself. Because by the way, when you see something like Gary Breca is very articulate, very smart. But when I see him on the Sean Ryan podcast, asked. The first thing I do is I go and populate an Amazon cart with all the things that he said because my instinct is, well, I should do the right thing for myself. This is a couple of hundred bucks. It's worth the investment. But then the day after, somebody else says something else.

So I'll be really interested.

You have a little OCD, though, Chamal. I've known you for a long time. You get very obsessive with these things.

Well, my father died because of poor health, my best friend died of poor health. I feel like you should at least do the things that are preventable.

Have you guys seen that post Chamat did with you? He was like half naked in the mirror. He looks great. What are you talking about? He looks great. If you could look like that, you'd do it, too.

No, I'm talking about when you had the glucose monitor. I'm sitting with him at the poker table. He's got the glucose monitor, and he's He's making a sip of wine, he's checking the glucose. He's having a piece of bijou, then he's checking the glucose monitor. It's just like, literally, he becomes obsessive. Then we had a.

There he is, RIP Chhabat. Come on. If this AI stuff, this generative AI.

You know it's so funny about this picture? All these clowns on the internet are like, they don't understand that when you're 6'2, these are big legs when you're 6'2.

Those are not big.

.

When you're I mean, you're a king.

I'm the captain now. When you're like 5, 7, 5, 8. I did lose my chopstick. I lost my chopstick.

When you're 5, 7, 5, 8, I get it why you guys- Because you guys are all stubborn and short. I don't get it.

This is the problem with generative AI. You can tell it's a fake photo. You can tell that that was generative AI because nobody has legs that day. How could you have biceps and then legs that day? It doesn't make sense.

Look at this.

It's unbelievable.

What a thirst trap. Now you guys are going to find photos of Antonio and I. We're going to throw him on. I I have four pieces of advice for people.

Number one, get good sleep. Number two, exercise. Number three, diet. Number four, meditation. If you want to do that, it's very simple. You get the calm meditation app. You get the eight sleep You get the fit pod for fitness. Then you get NutriSense for your diet. Those are the four things you focus on, my people. Make sure you have a Zetaphina You get a good Athena assistant. All of this is brought to you by my NGO, which is All-in NGO. Usaid gave us 18 million last year. Guys, I forgot to tell you about it, but don't worry, it's in an offshore account for all of us. When we get back to Ethiopia, Vietnam, we have an All-in castle built there. Okay? We built with our NGO. So good. We'll see everybody next week.

Love you, boys.

We love you. Good seeing you guys, man. Thank you.

Great job, Antonio. Bye-bye. Thank you.

Bye. Bye. We'll let your winner's ride.

Rain Man, David Sacks.

And it said, We open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you Westies.

The Queen of Kinwa.

I'm going all in.

What your winner's ride? I'm going all in.

Besties are gone.

That's my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

Oh, man.

My architecture will meet me as what is going to be.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

What? You're the bee. What?

You're the bee. We need to get merches.

All in.

I'm doing all in.