DOGE更新+Ben Shapiro与Antonio Gracias回应“解放日”关税

Jason Calacanis

Welcome back to the number-one podcast in the world, with me again today Chamath Palihapitiya, our chairman dictator; David Friedberg, our sultan of science; and guests Ben Shapiro and Antonio Gracias, who is joining us from the White House to work on DOGE while still doing his day job.

Was it public prior to this week that you were doing this role?

I didn’t announce it. The New York Times had a story about me going to SSA, although it got Woodland, Maryland only 40% correct.

Jason Calacanis

Antonio, how does it work when you volunteer? Do you, Elon, and Steve just figure out, “Let’s put a senior person at every part of the administration where there’s a real opportunity”? Why did you end up at the Social Security Administration versus someplace else?

It’s great to see you guys. Thanks for having me on. I can use your laughter. You’re really making me laugh.

What happened was, I had actually volunteered to go to the VA because, as you guys know, that’s close to my heart. Elon said to me, “Great. You can do that next, but we’ll go to SSA first and see what’s going on there,” because it’s the biggest agency we have. He told me to see what I could find in fraud, waste, and abuse.

I ended up out in Woodland, Maryland, with the good people at the Social Security Administration. That’s where I started. That’s how all of this began for me.

Jason Calacanis

Do you go in there with a DOGE engineer as your sidekick, or do you go there solo? What happens on day one when you walk into the place?

I brought with me 2 great professionals, John and Peyton, from Valor. One of them is an engineer, and the other one is, I’d say, a finance ninja. Both of these guys are ninjas.

There was already a team there that was working with some great engineers and one senior person, Scott Custer, who had worked at Lone Pine, started his own fund, and then came here as a volunteer. They had already started doing some work, particularly on the enumeration part of the system.

Jason Calacanis

What is the mandate given to you as part of DOGE? Is it fraud, waste, and abuse?

Exactly what Bill Clinton talked about, what Barack Obama talked about, what all presidents have talked about, and maybe what President Biden talked about: Go figure out how to save some money.

The system is going bankrupt. It’s going to be bankrupt by 2037. The country overall, as you guys know and have talked about many times, is on its way toward bankruptcy. We wanted to do something, go figure out where we could save money, and find the fraud. That’s what we did.

Jason Calacanis

You spoke at a rally on Sunday, and you pulled up a chart. Could you explain to the American people what this chart shows?

Let me step back and tell you how I got it, because I think it’s important. You guys know how operational we are at Valor. I’ve worked with all of you at various times. What we do is map the entire system from beginning to end.

We mapped the system from enumeration—when you get your number—all the way to the end. We went to the offices and saw how the offices operate. In that process, one of our engineers, Peyton, found the data.

We were looking at all the data—how enumeration works, what’s going on, the typical things you would look at—and he found this data called “Enumeration Beyond Entry.” It had this giant ramp to it. You can see the baseline was around 300,000 to 400,000 people, all the way up to 2.1 million people. That jumped out at us. We said, “What’s that?” We dug into it, and that’s how this started.

Jason Calacanis

What that’s showing is Social Security numbers issued to non-American citizens, or noncitizens. Am I correct that those are the numbers we’re looking at?

These are noncitizens getting Social Security numbers.

For people who don’t know, it is not abnormal for us to give Social Security numbers to noncitizens. That is part of the process the government uses. The Social Security number was created in 1936 for citizens to track their earnings. In the 1990s, we started giving them to noncitizens who were authorized to work in the United States so that we could collect taxes from them.

If you’re not a citizen and you’re a green-card holder, which some people in this program have been, you have to have a Social Security number in order to work. You pay into Social Security and Medicare just like citizens do, and eventually, I think, you would qualify for those benefits over some period of time.

You can also get a Social Security number if you’re a legal immigrant into the United States on a visa. For example, when I first came to the United States 25 years ago on a TN visa, I was able to get a Social Security number because I had a valid visa to be in the United States.

Jason Calacanis

We have Social Security numbers being given to noncitizens. That is not controversial, but there’s something controversial about this chart. Antonio, tell us what that is.

If you look at the chart, you’ll see that it starts at around 300,000. This is during the COVID period, coming right out of COVID. If you go back a couple of years, to 2019, you’ll see that it was about 400,000.

What happened was, this program was designed for people like the ones you were talking about—people who got visas. This is “Enumeration Beyond Entry,” after you’re already in the country. There are some people in here who have H-1Bs, green cards, and so forth.

The way we thought about it was that the baseline number—the 300,000 to 400,000 a year you see—should happen. There are programs for Afghans, for example, the translators who came in after the war. The people who were brought here would be in these kinds of programs.

This particular program goes all the way back to 2017 and had legitimate uses for the kinds of people we’re talking about—people we want to let in. The baseline number is legitimate. What jumped out at us wasn’t that the program existed, because it has a legitimate use. It was the growth. Why did it grow this fast? What happened? That’s what we dug into.

Jason Calacanis

Have you figured that out yet? Is it because of a COVID overhang?

The criticism I saw of the chart was that people wanted to see the 10 or 20 years before this. What would we see if we looked backward? Do you have some theories? Is the COVID-overhang theory valid, or is this simply the result of Biden opening the border, especially in the third year of his term, in 2023?

The answer is categorically no. The program really started in 2017. They probably worked on it before that—it takes a few years to put these things into place—but it became active in 2017. You see a few numbers in 2018, and it starts to get a little bigger in 2019 and 2020. That is how we get this baseline number.

You can’t go back 20 years. That data doesn’t exist.

When we dug into it, we found that the vast majority of the growth was related to asylum programs, parole, and people who came in on NTAs—Notices to Appear—either at the border or at airports, mostly at the border.

We dug further and found that, of the roughly 5.4 million people total, about 1.2 million had a status marked “unknown,” and about 1.2 million were marked “general parole.” They should have markings showing which program they’re under.

If you claim asylum, you’re supposed to claim a real fear that you’re going to be tortured by your country or that something bad is going to happen to you, explaining why you can’t go home. What we found here was that a legitimate program was, to use the word I used, abused. The requirements were opened up so that more people could come through.

The example I’ll give you is the form. Going back in time, it used to be a 4-page form that the officer had to fill out in the field. The person claiming asylum had to actually prove that they had a credible fear of being murdered or tortured by their government.

It turned into a form that I can’t give you, but I’m going to show you here. If you zoom in on it, it has 4 questions. The questions are extremely leading. I’ll read one of the important ones: “Do you have any reason for concern about being returned to your home country or being removed from the United States?”

Could that be more leading? They opened the aperture on these programs dramatically. They allowed people who were illegally at the border to come in legally.

As we dug further into it, this took us all the way to the border. I’m a very methodical, lean business-process mapper, so we went literally to Brownsville and Laredo to ask what happened. We couldn’t find the data on what these unknown categories were.

It turns out that when the people at the border—we thought they were great, by the way—were giving people notices to appear, that allowed them to come into the country and then be scheduled for a court date that could be 6 years out.

Now you’re in the country with some quasi-legal status, waiting for your court date. While you’re waiting, you can fill out an asylum application. Without even an interview, just by filing a form, once the application is in, you can file another form, the I-765, to get work authorization. Once you get that, you get an I-766, which is the authorization, and we automatically send you a Social Security card in the mail.

There’s no interview at all. That is the majority of the growth you see in these numbers.

Jason Calacanis

Is there any identity verification along the way? Do we know that there aren’t duplications happening? How do we validate that one individual is getting one Social Security number at any point in this process?

It’s a great question. The answer is no. There’s no real verification.

One of the things we found when we looked at this was that some people showed IDs and some people didn’t.

Jason Calacanis

These would be IDs from their home country? A Venezuelan driver’s license or something?

It could be a passport or a driver’s license. But here’s what really tipped us off and disturbed us. When we looked at the birth-certificate data that was present at the border, the number-one birth date was January 1. It was 4 times more likely for someone to have been born on January 1 than on any other day of the year.

Jason Calacanis

They just hit Enter on that part?

They could also come with nothing.

Jason Calacanis

We take biometrics of people at the border, right? Do we take an iris scan, fingerprints, and all that stuff?

This is one of the issues. We do have photos of people. We found that 23% of the records we looked at did not have fingerprints.

The people at the border were overwhelmed, and we’re not sure why this happened. I’ll tell you this just so you understand: Both Border Patrol and Customs and Border Protection told me they had the highest suicide rates of all time during the surge. More than 70 of these agents committed suicide during this period.

It’s truly tragic. They knew what was going on.

Jason Calacanis

Given the fact that all this has happened, is the Trump administration going to try to reclaim or invalidate the Social Security numbers? What would be the proper action? Or is it too late? Are they already in the system, and now you can’t do anything about it?

That’s a great question. The first question was: Where are these people? Who are they? How are they?

We’ve gone through a whole process of mapping this. We mapped it through to the benefit programs. In the benefit programs, we found that every benefit we looked at was being accessed by these people.

About 1.3 million of them are on Medicaid right now. It’s just ramping up; it’s just starting.

Out of curiosity, I woke up at around 2:00 in the morning. I couldn’t sleep. My mind was racing about this. I sent Andre a note saying, “Hey, guys, let’s just look at the public voter rolls in some friendly states.”

We looked at the voter rolls and found that thousands of them had registered to vote in a handful of states. We went further with those friendly states and found that many of those people had actually voted.

It was shocking to us. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Now the question we’re asking ourselves is: What do we do? We’ve referred some people for prosecution, and that’s ongoing right now. We’re thinking through how to do it. The reality is that they have various kinds of status, so there’s a very detailed legal analysis happening right now about how to deal with it.

Jason Calacanis

Thousands of those people registered to vote in the election?

Yes.

Jason Calacanis

That’s a federal crime.

Yes.

Jason Calacanis

The interesting thing is that the Heritage Foundation has a very good project—it’s obviously right-leaning—where they’re studying all cases of fraud. I looked at it before we came here. There have only been 24 cases since 2003 of a noncitizen trying to vote. Those are people who were caught.

This would be incredibly dramatic if it was even 1,000 people.

Jason, it’s more than 1,000. I’ve seen the data myself. It’s more than 1,000 in just a couple of states. It is shockingly bad.

This is the tip of the iceberg, guys. It’s the tip of the iceberg. This doesn’t include the 7.8 million people ICE says came in illegally and are known to be here, or all the people who came illegally whom we don’t know are here.

This is not a political issue. I want to be really clear about that.

Jason Calacanis

Let’s take one step back, because I want you to repeat this. We may have run over it too quickly.

When you get a Social Security number, you’re saying there are important downstream consequences. One consequence is that you could show up and register to vote, which would be illegitimate and break federal law.

The second is that, without knowing who this person is, they can start absorbing resources that could otherwise have gone to an American. I guess that’s a fundamental part of this.

How do you quantify that? Can you explain all the different ways in which you think the United States ends up leaking services to these people? They could also be contributing. They could be paying taxes into the system. There are both possibilities, and both would leave fingerprints.

Good question. We need to figure this out. It’s massively complex. You can see the map I have on the whiteboard in our office. It’s huge, and we’re figuring it out right now.

Let me just tell you this: In every benefit program we looked at—and this was only a handful of states—we found people on all the benefit programs. We found them on unemployment. We found them on Medicaid.

To your point, the people on Medicaid and unemployment aren’t contributing. They’re taking out. They’re mooching off the system.

We sent this data list to the National Targeting Center. I don’t want to get too far into the data, but I can tell you they found hardcore criminals and people on terror watch lists in this group.

It’s a problem we have to figure out how to deal with. Of course, there are people who have jobs and are paying into the system. That’s also true. All of these things are true, and we’re trying to surf the data and figure out how to deal with it.

Jason Calacanis

One of the things about the data that you triggered is that a lot of people started trying to nitpick it and say, “Antonio, you’re cherry-picking,” or, “Antonio, this isn’t representative.”

You had some pretty big names—people who have credibility. Jim Chanos was probably one of the more prolific people, and he’s a very well-known hedge-fund manager.

You tried to articulate why their objections didn’t make sense. I think it’s important to give you a few moments to identify what they said and debunk it.

The chart they were using—you can see this in something I posted on X—was apples to oranges. They took a chart that included all enumerations, not the EBE program, the Enumeration Beyond Entry program, and compared it with our chart.

Jason Calacanis

To be clear, that would have included somebody like me coming in on a TN visa, or somebody on an EB-1 visa?

Yes. Those people would be in that data too, but they would be enumerated beyond entry. The data on the left, the big bars from 2020, includes people in the offices. It includes people who got Social Security numbers because they went to a consulate and applied ahead of time before they came in—people like you, probably.

Those kinds of people are included in the total enumeration data. We need a stacked bar chart.

Jason Calacanis

So there’s some funny business with the numbers. Can you flip back again? Your number for 2024 was how much?

2.1 million.

Jason Calacanis

What they did was take your data and add the total data from before that.

Right. This is just a subsection. This is EBE only—Enumeration Beyond Entry—which is a program that started in 2017 and ramped up in 2019.

They took our data and then added the total data from before that. That’s apples to oranges. That’s why it doesn’t work.

I went through a whole analysis of this on X. The person who first posted the chart deleted it and sent me a post saying, “I’m deleting it because I get it. You’re right.” He apologized and asked me some questions.

I don’t want to get into fighting with people. You guys know me—I don’t post a lot on X. It’s not worth it. The data speaks for itself.

Jason Calacanis

It basically became a Rorschach test. People who didn’t want to believe the points you were making latched on to the chart that was shown, even though it had been disproven. That became the narrative for a good chunk of the internet and a good chunk of the media.

This isn’t political. I want to be really clear about that.

Jason Calacanis

Tell us about your political background. We haven’t talked about this on the show, but it’s worth letting everyone hear where you’re coming from.

I was a Democrat for 20 years. I knocked on doors for Bill Clinton in Iowa. I’m from Illinois.

I’ve got lots of good friends who are Democrats. When I explain this data to them, they’re as shocked as I am. They say, “I don’t believe this.”

Jason Calacanis

To say you were a Democrat is an understatement. You were a major donor and were heavily involved with the Democratic Party.

Ben, you tend to call balls and strikes on the program. What are your thoughts on immigration generally, how it should work in the United States, and how we can resolve this?

Antonio, I want your answer to that question as well. Maybe there can be some reconciliation here between the moderates, MAGA, the original or classic GOP, Democrats, and the woke lunatics.

Is there any way out of this? Perhaps what we’re seeing here with somebody like Antonio—a lifelong Democrat who is now helping the government—is that maybe we can get through this with data and logic.

I think what Antonio is doing here is so important specifically for that reason. It seems to me that there’s actually been a fairly wide consensus among the American population for a very long time about what to do about immigration, particularly at the southern border.

Number one is to stop illegal immigration at the southern border. After Biden blew that out, a lot of Democrats turned to President Trump specifically because of that issue. That has been the signal success of the Trump administration among all of its other successes. The numbers at the border have plummeted to almost zero—the lowest numbers in recorded history. That is an unmitigated success.

Then I think everybody knows that we have to figure out who gets to stay and who gets to go among the people who are already in the country. What Antonio is doing—being able to discern who is here and is a net draw on the resources of the American people versus who is a net taxpayer, who is actually contributing, and who is a criminal—is enormously important.

There has always been this bizarre supposition in the political realm that there’s no way, on a one-to-one level, to figure out who is who. You have to treat everybody as a class: either everybody stays or everybody goes.

The reality is that we should be treating immigrants and illegal immigrants who are in the country the same way we would treat people trying to get into the country. Are you going to benefit the United States, or are you not going to benefit the United States?

The counterargument was always, “How exactly are you going to determine who is who?” The answer I always gave was, “The IRS does it with our tax returns literally every single year.” Why should we not be able to do the same thing?

The kind of work Antonio is doing shows that you actually can do this by tracking the Social Security numbers of people who came in illegally. The truth is that the number of unknown gotaways is actually small compared to this. Most of the people who came across the border, at least during the Biden term—I went down to the border last year and visited a Native American reservation along the border where the Border Patrol basically was not present—were arriving at the border and doing exactly what Antonio was talking about.

They would literally say, “I fear going back to my home country.” They would be processed and led into the country with a future date to come back. That was all happening within 72 hours.

Being able to track those people and find out who should be in and who shouldn’t be in—that’s huge. I think that’s the consensus.

Jason Calacanis

Should we deport everybody? Are you in the Stephen Miller camp that says we should deport 20 million people, or are you in the camp of getting rid of the criminals and doing what needs to be done?

I don’t think it’s just the criminals. I think you also need to go after the people who are here to take advantage of welfare benefits, who are simply drawing on the system.

I don’t think the number is 20 million. I don’t think President Trump actually thinks the number is 20 million. I don’t think anybody realistically thinks the number is 20 million.

Jason Calacanis

They said it over and over again: All 20 million are going.

Right, but they say a lot of things. It’s a political campaign, and people say that kind of thing all the time.

Jason Calacanis

Antonio, let’s talk about reconciliation. You spent your life as a Democrat, and now you’ve spent about 6 months as a Republican here, helping this administration. How do we get the country back together and reconcile on this issue?

It seems unnecessary. To Ben’s point, I think 80% of people believe that the border should be shut, full stop, and that everything should be legal. I don’t know what the other 20% believe—I’ve never met anybody who said there should be an open border at the southern border.

Given your inside knowledge, and given that I would describe you as a Clinton Democrat—fiscally conservative and socially liberal, correct me if I’m wrong—what are your thoughts on reconciliation?

You really care about this. Your parents were both immigrants. My parents were immigrants. Three of the 4 people who host this program are immigrants. This is an immigrant country, built by immigrants and for immigrants. How do we reconcile this issue and put it behind us?

I’ve asked myself this question. I think we have to follow the truth. That’s the point: follow the truth.

The truth is in the data. As Ben said, the numbers don’t lie. People who are productive—we have to find a way to allow them to be productive and stay. People who are taking from the system should not be allowed to stay.

I don’t want to get into the policy at all, because it’s above my pay grade. My remit, as Ben said, is criminals, terrorists, and people mooching off the system. Then there’s a political question about what happens to the rest of those people. I don’t know. That isn’t my remit.

I will say this: All my friends who are still Democrats, when I explain this data to them, say the same thing you guys are saying: “This is a problem. We have to figure this out.”

Let me tell you why. The biggest problem here is not just people taking from the system. You have to realize that we gave $13 billion to $15 billion a year to human traffickers. That’s what this system did.

The money magnet that attracted these people here wasn’t necessarily some environmental crisis. The money magnet attracted them, and many of them died on the way up. Think about what that is like. Think about the human suffering. This is a human-rights tragedy.

People are being sold into slavery and abused at the border. At a minimum, every American should be against that. Every American is. This turned my stomach when I went to the border and heard the stories.

We are America. We protect people like this. We don’t give incentives to people to pay traffickers. If you pay $20,000—or I heard amounts ranging from $500 to $20,000—just to cross the border, where does someone coming from Central America or Africa get $20,000 to pay the traffickers who are walking them across the border?

It isn’t free to walk up through Mexico. It’s controlled by the cartels. What happens? They have to pay that money back. How do they pay it back? They’re basically indentured servants.

This is terrible. This isn’t what we do in this country. This country is about freedom, and we are here to protect it. We protect it around the world, and we protect it at home.

I don’t think any American I know—Democrats, Republicans, anyone—thinks this is good. It isn’t good. It’s bad for America, and it’s evil behavior. We shouldn’t give people a reason to do it. We should find legal ways for people to come into the country.

Jason Calacanis

Do you believe there was a Democratic Party motive to increase the voter base for Democrats behind all of this, as some people have proclaimed?

As I go through the data, I see the data. In just a handful of states—4 states—we looked at the voter rolls. We found thousands of these people on the voter rolls, and many of those people had voted. In one state in particular, well over 1,000 had voted.

Jason Calacanis

I think this was a move to import voters. But I want to make sure I understand something.

When I talk to politicians from the Democratic Party about this, they say that aspects of human rights and doing the right thing for people in need motivated some of this behavior. Is that a lie? Do they actually have a different motive? Or do some people in the party think that way, while there’s a small group of highly influential people at the top who recognize that this will grow the voter base and are motivating it?

What do you think? Is this a conspiracy, or is it widely understood?

I’ll tell you what I’ve seen. I’ll tell you the actual information.

Under the Biden administration, they set all the defaults to maximum openness, with no identity requirements. You could get a Social Security number by walking into an office, answering questions, and presenting a medical record and a school ID with your name and date of birth. That’s it.

They opened up the defaults on Social Security. They opened up the defaults on paying people out, and they set the collection defaults basically to zero. That’s how the system looks. I’m reporting the facts.

Do I think that the average Democrat in Illinois, or the people I knew in Chicago, knew this? They didn’t know this.

Were there people at the top of the system who did this? People created these policies. The former administrators of these agencies created these policies. I’ve seen them. I’ve read them myself. I’ve gone to the data myself.

This isn’t everybody. If you’re the average Democrat out there and you see what I’ve seen, I believe you’ll conclude what I concluded: These policies are wrong. They’re evil.

We gave people an incentive to get trafficked. That’s terrible. I don’t think people know.

The reason I’m willing to do this—you guys know me, I’m pretty private—is not political. It’s because this is a human-rights issue, and that human-rights issue is being confused.

We were incentivizing people to pay traffickers to come to America. We were doing this. We have to find better ways to do it. I don’t believe any American in the 80% Jason is talking about—anyone who would say, “Close the border”—thinks this is good. This is an issue that can bring people together. We have to take care of people.

Jason Calacanis

Can you talk about the next big push from you and your team? Is there another chart or something you can demonstrate that will be equivalently powerful and help us start moving toward doing the logical and right thing?

The right thing is to figure out who’s who. Who are the criminals? Who are the terrorists? Who is mooching off the system?

Then there are the people who are working, as Jason said. What do we do with them? That’s the right answer.

I would add a fourth category, because I think there’s probably no more electric issue than voting impropriety. It has become so brazenly partisan that everybody has suspended logic.

If it turned out that there had been a manipulated effort in 2020, and there were even a thread of legitimacy to Trump’s claims, you would never be able to see the light of day because so many Americans would simply turn off. That’s because of the rhetoric they’ve been fed.

If it is true that these people illegally voted, I think it would be a thunderclap. It would open the aperture on voting illegality and voting reform. Irrespective of who you are, you should want to make sure that people who are not allowed to vote are not voting. To put it simply, that’s all.

Jason Calacanis

It’s amazing. I can’t get on an airplane in America without ID, but I can vote in some states without ID. I think that’s crazy.

Ben Shapiro, the number is 15 states that don’t have voter-ID laws, right?

Yes.

Jason Calacanis

This is becoming a very obvious issue and a loophole for us to close.

I think the best next thing for you to do is publish this list of people who voted, get it to the Heritage Foundation, and put sunlight on it. The truth shall make you free, and sunlight is the best disinfectant.

I think the whole issue is absurd, because if you look at the votes in the swing states, it would take 100,000 votes—tens of thousands of votes—to swing a state. It’s illegal, obviously. I’ve spoken to the person at the Heritage Foundation who does this. They’ve found around 2,400 cases over 40 or 50 years.

The number of people voting illegally is minuscule. To swing even one state, you would need a coordinated effort.

Hold on. Let me finish. I’m giving you data. I’m not being partisan.

There would need to be tens of thousands of votes manipulated in each of these markets. It’s impossible.

Here’s the key. Your results are only as good as your prompts. Your results are only as good as your prompts.

Jason Calacanis

Say it in plain English. What do you mean?

I suspect that if you put 3 or 4 of the smartest data scientists in the world on this, they might get to a very different answer than the one that has been reached. I don’t know whether that will validate or invalidate the claim, but the quality of the people who are able to interrogate the data is directly correlated to the output that’s created.

Jason Calacanis

We all want the data cleaned.

Jason Calacanis

Ben, do you think there’s any chance that a swing state could be swung by this strategy? In addition, Trump is a populist. His biggest gains in the last election were with people from South America, Mexicans, and other non-college-educated voters.

If you were going to plot this incredible strategy, the Democratic strategy of importing a bunch of voters would be the stupidest possible strategy, because the Republican Party has won those people.

I don’t think it would be a great short-term strategy because of the voting gaps, even in close swing states. Although you have outlier cases, like Florida in 2000, where the entire state was decided by hundreds of votes. In that situation, you actually could see a state shift on that basis. It’s a rarity, but it does happen, and in some cases it decides a presidential election.

When you’re talking about the long-term play, the question is whether you’re importing a bunch of people who are more dependent than average on the American government, or who are not interested in assimilating to free-market values or free-speech values.

Many of these people are going to get married. Many are going to have children. They’re going to marry American citizens, have American children, and then stay. Now you’re talking about generating a change in the voting population.

That isn’t a right-wing point. It was made by Ruy Teixeira all the way back in 2004, when he was a Democrat. He argued that there was a demographic wave that was going to shift the electorate in the United States permanently in the direction of Democrats.

The point you’re making is that even as a long-term strategy, that might be a bad play, because these populations may shift over time. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t the intent at the moment. It could mean they got it wrong or made a very bad strategic decision.

Jason Calacanis

Antonio, we have to drop you off here. Do you have any closing comments?

I want to thank you. I know you have other things you could be doing in your life. On behalf of the American people, whom I speak for here on the program, we want to thank you for your service to this country.

I know you’re calling balls and strikes, and you’re going to let the data speak.

I’ll close with this: Go look at California.

Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan came from California. Ronald Reagan signed amnesty, and some 40 years later, California is now a solidly blue state. I think some of us on this program—I know you, Jason—are refugees from California because of some of those policies.

I want you to be careful about this, because this is the tip of the iceberg. We have a very small sample of data in a couple of states. It’s the tip of the iceberg. I don’t know what the unintended consequences will be long term, but I can tell you what already happened in America, where an amnesty program turned a very large state from one party to another.

I want to leave you with this thought: This is not political. There’s no political motivation in my mind. This is about America. It’s about securing American democracy.

We will shine a light on the data when we can. We’ve referred these people for prosecution, and we’re going to keep looking. We’ll keep going. The data will lead us, and the truth will lead us. Eventually, it will come out in the sunlight.

We’re going to follow the truth. That’s our primary motive and our operating parameter.

Jason Calacanis

Thank you, Antonio Gracias. Continued success. I’d love to talk to you in 30 days when you have your next findings.

You’re a refugee from California too, aren’t you?

Yes. We took off in 2020, during COVID. My company took off, and we all got the hell out.

I was born in California, so I spent 36 years there before I moved. They certainly did a good job of wrecking that state.

Jason Calacanis

Where did you go?

I’m in Florida. My company is in Tennessee.

Jason Calacanis

You can’t raise kids in California. When you think about the crime and taxes, and what you’re getting for your dollar, it doesn’t make any sense.

Ben, what do you think about what you just saw? I’ll let you go first as our guest.

I wish the entire Trump administration were rolled out as well as Antonio just rolled that out. That is what I would say.

That was high-level competence and expertise, and a meticulous message that is data-first and difficult for anybody to deny.

I think the successes of the Trump administration have come from taking the 80% side of 80/20 issues. The success of President Trump in 2024 was that he oddly became the normal candidate. He was the guy who returned normalcy to candidacy in the face of Biden and the bizarreness of Harris.

As we see many of Trump’s policies rolled out, the ones that are rolled out the way Antonio rolled this out are incredibly well received by the American population. People are seeing serious people doing serious work that needs to be done.

The ones that are not rolled out that way are going to be less popular with the American people. I want President Trump to succeed on a lot of these agenda items. I don’t want his good agenda items to get railroaded and run over by the bad rollout of other agenda items.

Jason Calacanis

Thoughtful, well-constructed, and well-communicated—that’s good. When you talk about this being done wrong, what do you think could be communicated better?

Not to jump into the pile of rakes that is the tariff plan, but I think the way the tariff plan was rolled out was about as bad a rollout as you could do.

I say that not just because of my disagreements with the actual policy. I’ll either be right or wrong on that. It’s because of the way it was rolled out, with an essentially surprise announcement.

I don’t mind a surprise announcement if what is rolled out is not replete with contradictory justifications, statistics labeled as one thing that really aren’t that thing, and so on. It opens itself up to critiques from every possible side.

If you want to make the argument, make the full, well-thought-out argument. Then we can argue over whether it’s true or not.

There are 4 or 5 different claims being simultaneously made about the tariffs. One is that they’re going to raise revenue. Two is that they’re going to reshore manufacturing. Three is that they’re somehow going to retrigger the world trading system.

Some of these claims are mutually exclusive. If you’re going to reshore manufacturing, you’re not going to raise as much revenue, for example. Those 2 things are mutually exclusive, and yet they’re being trotted out at the same time.

If you’re going to put out a giant chart that the president holds up, showing tariff rates plus an unspecified variable, I’d like to know what the actual tariff rate is. The calculation appeared to be the trade deficit with a country divided by the imports from that country. That has nothing to do with the tariff rate. Technically speaking, it has literally nothing to do with the tariff rate.

Now you’re boxed in logically. If President Trump wants to do a reciprocal tariff reduction, how do you do that? He has used a statistic for tariffs that has nothing to do with the tariff rate and is actually just the trade deficit.

The only way to reconcile that statistic is to have Madagascar buy a bunch of American products in order to get its supposed tariff rate down. That kind of thing seems badly calibrated, even if you like the policy.

Jason Calacanis

Unless, from a poker point of view, they spent many months declaring they were going to do tariffs, everybody thought they were bluffing, and nobody believed them.

Maybe they had to do it in order to get the negotiating leverage they need to negotiate trade deals. They have to look a little crazy.

Jason Calacanis

That’s your position, Friedberg? You’re trying to rationalize one reason why smart people would put that board up, where they said these were the tariffs being levied upon our country, when it was actually the math of imports minus exports divided by imports.

That was the number. It was maxed out at either that number or 10%. That’s what they did.

In my opinion, they’re using this to anchor negotiations going forward. They’re making the case that they are declaratively, crazily, off the freaking ship and willing to do whatever they want in this administration.

Now everyone takes them seriously. Everyone shows up at the negotiating table, and they can announce a series of wins: “We got this set of countries to capitulate today. This is the deal we worked out.” It’s a unique deal with every country.

Maybe they’re getting all the trade representatives to the table by making the case that they’re willing to go all the way to the wall.

Ben, that’s what it feels like to me. For months, they’ve been very declarative. We are going to do tariffs. Scott Bessent said it to us in our interview. Howard Lutnick said it to us in our interview. No one took them seriously.

I did. I took them totally seriously. I called my financial adviser after the State of the Union address and told him to change my stock-and-bond ratio because I figured something like this was going to happen.

David Friedberg

You went heavy Treasuries?

I went light on stocks. The reason is that, with President Trump, he may not be serious about every single thing he says, but when he says something over and over, there’s no hidden motivation.

That is what I always have trouble with in the 4D-chess readings of President Trump. There’s almost never a hidden motivation. He says the thing he thinks.

It’s one of the things that makes him so popular and authentic. There isn’t a 4D-chess game being played. If he says he wants something to happen, it’s because he actually wants it to happen.

The thing about President Trump is that he’s also a realist. If bad headlines hit him, he may change his mind and decide to drive a truck directly through the center of the tariffs because prices are going up too much on semiconductors, for example.

One of the big exemptions from these tariffs is semiconductors. Again, you see a couple of different justifications fighting each other. One is that we need to reshore semiconductor production because it’s a national-security asset. The other is that we need to raise revenue on semiconductors. He exempted them, which blows up the logic.

I think the most likely result of these tariffs is that, within the next few weeks, the headlines will not be good. President Trump will start driving trucks through the center of the tariffs, and then he’ll start getting wins from various parties that allow him to find an off-ramp.

A company in Belgium might say it’s going to build a factory in the United States. He’ll bring them to the White House, hold a big ceremony, and say, “As a result of this, we’re lowering the tariffs.” He did something similar with Colombia, when he said he would hit the country with tariffs unless it accepted illegal immigrants.

That might very well be the off-ramp. I don’t think that’s what’s going on right now. I think what’s going on right now is the strategy that Lutnick has repeatedly expressed: They actually like the tariffs. They think this is good economic policy, and they think the period between 1880 and 1910 was an amazing time in American history.

Jason Calacanis

Do you agree?

I think that’s a bad read on economic history, because there are a lot of confounding factors being ignored.

Among those factors was the Industrial Revolution and extraordinarily high levels of immigration during that period. You had an incredibly cheap labor base coming into the United States, a massive expansion of the American population, no income tax, and a newly discovered continent.

There was also less international trade generally, so tariffs didn’t have the same impact on global supply chains as they would today, when every product you buy has gone through 10 different countries in 10 different ways.

I don’t think that’s a fair comparison. That doesn’t mean Lutnick doesn’t think it is a comparison.

When it comes to the rollout, I understand the crazy-man theory. I hope that’s what President Trump is doing. But there was an off-ramp he could have taken if that was the strategy.

Yesterday, in anticipation of this, Israel—which had very low tariffs on United States goods—announced that it had removed all tariffs on American goods.

David Friedberg

They did that as an example of being a great partner.

Exactly. That afternoon, the administration listed Israel’s tariff rate at 33% and then hit it with a 17% tariff.

David Friedberg

Didn’t Canada do the same thing? Canada said it was willing to go to zero. The anchors on CNBC correctly asked, “Why haven’t you done that already?”

Israel did do that. I think your theory is correct. If you make the analogy to overturning Roe v. Wade, it’s the same exact thing.

He told us over and over again, “I’m going to put 2, maybe 3, people on the Supreme Court. I’m going to overturn it.” Then afterward, he wiped his hands of it and said, “It’s up to you guys. I had nothing to do with it.”

He will tell you what he’s going to do. He told you he was going to do these tariffs, and he’s done them.

I think there’s something embedded in what you said, Ben. He likes everybody to come to Mar-a-Lago or the White House. He loves doing deals. He wrote The Art of the Deal. He loves people coming to him, hanging out, and negotiating.

Jason Calacanis

He’s addicted to it.

Ben, what do you think is going on here? Is this a crazy man? Is it a negotiating tactic? Lutnick believes it, as he said very clearly, that he’s going to add $1 trillion in taxes here.

When I went through all the top people on the internet and our group of friends who are deeply involved in finance, I couldn’t find anybody in finance who isn’t in the administration who thinks this was well executed or a good idea. What’s your thought?

David Friedberg

Let me start by saying a couple of things. To use Donald Rumsfeld’s quote, I agree with Ben that this was a known known.

We mentioned this last episode. Donald Trump has been speaking about tariffs for 40-plus years. This is not a new thing. He tried it in Trump 1, but it didn’t go well because he didn’t have the team around him who had his back. It was inevitable that he would try it in Trump 2. He said he would, and he’s been able to do it.

If you weren’t planning for it, whoever was vested in this outcome needed to focus on it. It was a known known, so there was some dereliction of duty if you were caught off guard.

The second point is that we’ve said all year, since January 1, on this podcast—and even with the Polymarket bet I made—that the Trump administration does not care about the stock market.

That trade closed out, so congratulations to all the people who won $650,000 on it. Let me explain: Polymarket is a betting market that Chamath suggested. They’re partners of ours.

The bet was that the Magnificent 7 would shrink below 30% of the S&P 500 in 2025. This was free money. It was like the stock market giving out free money.

Why did this happen? It happened because it was clear to me early on that the rhetoric had shifted. They care about MAGA and people who have working-class and middle-class jobs. None of those people are deeply invested in the asset economy the way some of us are.

It was directionally clear. Scott Bessent had a cold quote yesterday: “The equity-market sell-off is a MAG 7 problem, not a MAGA problem.” That puts all of this into the realm of a known known.

Trump has had a 40-year view on tariffs. They’re going to see it through. I don’t think you’re going to see a grand capitulation.

Two, they’re okay with volatility in the equity markets.

Three—and this is the other thing we’ve talked about a lot—is where does this move our practical financing cost? We’ve talked about this. We have $1 trillion that we need to finance in the next 9 months.

The singular goal of the White House, in my opinion, has been to move the 10-year yield as aggressively and quickly as possible. Look at what they’ve done. As of yesterday, what happened to the 10-year was unbelievable.

We were approaching 4%, and we talked about this. If it had gone in the other direction by 30 or 40 basis points and touched 5%, you’d be talking about hundreds of billions of dollars in extra money that would not have been found and would have had to be printed.

Now we’re saving hundreds of billions of dollars.

David Friedberg

If the Fed cuts rates, does that make all of this irrelevant?

No. The Fed doesn’t control the back end of the curve. The Treasury market does. The government sells Treasuries, and the Treasury auctions 10-year notes. Those auctions will clear at around 4%.

As Americans, we should all have a moment where we exhale. The long end of the curve is giving us a respite in a storm, and we should be incredibly thankful.

Jason, I’m referring to what you said yesterday: “Jerome Powell, you’re on the clock.”

Jason Calacanis

That’s a different part of the curve. I understand that it’s different, but I’m trying to put these two things together.

David Friedberg

The two things being that this action enables the Treasury to finance the debt more cheaply, while the Fed needs to cut rates at the front end?

Exactly. Let’s play the ball where it lies.

The Wall Street smart money thought this was a $250 billion event. They were wrong. That’s part of why the stock market reacted so violently. This is a $750 billion to $1 trillion event. It’s a big moment in the market.

What does that create? It creates the risk of a recession. How do you minimize that risk? It’s about how easy it is for the average person to borrow money. That is more dictated by the Fed and how it prices the front end of the curve.

What we need now is for Scott Bessent to finance the $6 trillion due on the back end, while Jerome Powell cuts the front end. If he does that aggressively enough, he can introduce liquidity at a moment when small and midsize businesses need to get financing to weather the storm.

David Friedberg

I want to add to your point. There’s roughly $12 trillion to $16 trillion of private corporate debt in America. This is debt held by small businesses, midsize businesses, and partnerships, with an average operating margin of around 15%.

They’re going to be under pressure if there’s a recessionary risk, so they need access to capital. If you remember the interview Bessent gave us a couple of weeks ago, he was clear that one of his mandates is to enable the deleveraging of the financial system.

He wants to give banks the ability to issue more debt, introduce more capital, and introduce more liquidity into the markets by taking away some of the regulatory restrictions that have made it more difficult for banks to issue credit to business owners and individuals.

If they’re successful in their deregulatory efforts, they will introduce more liquidity into the market, coupled with the deregulatory work they’re doing elsewhere in the administration.

Their intention, as they’ve declared it—not mine—is to make sure capital flows into building businesses, building new businesses, underwriting new jobs, and creating more employment.

That’s the theory they’re trying to execute. It’s part of a 3-legged stool. If it doesn’t all work, the stool falls over.

Jason Calacanis

Give us an example, Chamath. I’m trying to get you to paint the entire picture, because the tariff cudgel isn’t making sense. It’s not all good news.

I’ll give you a specific example. A friend of ours runs a 100-plus-year-old company. I’ll say it in generic terms so that I don’t betray his confidence.

This is a business that has been built over 100 years, owned by an incredible American family. They make products that we all know and love.

What did this action do? They’re in a very difficult position because, as David said, they have a tight operating margin. They have to compete ferociously against China, and they’ve done everything possible to maintain their capabilities in America and hire American workers in the heartland while still competing with China.

It’s tough. This action swings them from profitability to a potential yearly loss of hundreds of millions of dollars.

That’s the other side of the tariff coin. We have to find a way to identify those examples and exclude them somehow or give them reprieve, because that wasn’t the intention of what Trump was trying to do yesterday.

That’s a company that should be winning and should continue to win the good fight against China. It should continue employing thousands of Americans. But because it had some capacity in other countries—not China, by the way—the tariff blows the whole thing up.

Now you have to fix those things.

Jason Calacanis

Ben, I’m going to play you a clip from Rand Paul. I want your feedback on executive power and on tariffs themselves. Is this a good idea or a bad idea?

Rand Paul

We should not live under emergency rule. The Constitution says taxes are raised by Congress. Most specifically, taxes originate in the House and go to the Senate, so I’m against emergency rule.

We are richer because of trade with Canada, and so is Canada. Whenever you trade with somebody, when an individual buys somebody else’s product, it’s mutually beneficial, or you wouldn’t buy it. If the trade is voluntary, it’s always beneficial.

There is no Canada versus the United States. The consumer wins when the price is the lowest price. Tariffs raise prices, and they’re a bad idea for the economy.

Jason Calacanis

Ben, your thoughts on the 2 issues. Is trade good for consumers? That’s what’s on everybody’s mind. Trump won in large part because of inflation and Biden economics, and because he said he was going to reduce inflation. A lot of people believe inflation is about to come roaring back.

On a macroeconomic level, I agree with Senator Paul when it comes to the powers of the presidency. It’s extraordinary that we should be able to use the trade deficit as a national emergency sufficient to impose what effectively amounts to a $700 billion tax increase on the American people if they’re the ones paying the price of the tariffs.

Congress is up for reelection in a year and a half. If Republicans lose Congress, whatever tricks President Trump is trying to pull in terms of rejiggering the rate at which we pay back our national debt will go by the wayside. If Democrats win Congress, pretty much everything comes to a crashing halt.

There are a lot of Republicans in swing districts, or in districts that are R+5 or R+10, who are suddenly going to feel vulnerable. A recession takes everybody with it. It takes Secretary Bessent, the president, J.D. Vance—everybody.

Recessions tend to crush the president in power, regardless of their long-term plan. When they say “short-term pain for long-term gain,” I think there are a few factors that need to be played out.

If there’s an inflationary effect from the tariffs, does that mean Jerome Powell will inject additional liquidity into the markets by decreasing interest rates? It’s hard to see how. He’s holding interest rates steady without decreasing them, despite President Trump publicly criticizing him since before Trump was formally president.

It’s hard for me to see how all this squares into a well-calibrated policy.

In the long term, tricks involving the interest rate we pay on our national debt will not be sufficient to pay it back unless we have robust economic growth. A lot is being bet on robust economic growth out-earning the levels of debt we’re currently racking up.

I love what DOGE is doing, but the systemic drivers of our national debt aren’t actually being touched by DOGE at this point. The systemic, long-term drivers are the means-tested welfare programs.

David Friedberg

Military spending would be number two.

Military spending as a percentage of GDP, or as a percentage of the budget, has been relatively stable and, in some cases, decreasing since the end of the Iraq War.

But the means-tested welfare programs continue to grow as a percentage of the budget and are increasingly unfunded as our population ages and grows.

Jason Calacanis

Putting aside executive power and the midterms, which would change everything, what are your thoughts on inflation and tariffs? What’s the chance that this comes back and explodes in the administration’s lap?

David Friedberg

I think there are 3 consequences, not necessarily related to inflation, that are worth spending time on. One of them doesn’t get talked about enough.

The first is the challenge of tariffs in general. I shared a clip with you guys in the group chat yesterday of Ronald Reagan talking about this.

Ronald Reagan

Today, many economic analysts and historians argue that the high-tariff legislation passed during that period, called the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, greatly deepened the Depression and prevented economic recovery.

At first, when someone says, “Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,” it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. Sometimes, for a short while, it works. But only for a short time.

What eventually occurs is that homegrown industries start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs. They stop competing and stop making the innovative management and technological changes they need to succeed in world markets.

While all this is going on, something even worse occurs: People stop buying. Then the worst happens. Markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs.

The memory of all this occurring in the 1930s made me determined, when I came to Washington, to spare the American people the protectionist legislation that destroys prosperity.

David Friedberg

Let me say 3 things that I think are going to be important consequences.

The first is the decline in competitiveness that arises when you use protectionist tactics like import tariffs. In order to be competitive in the market, you need a free market to test how good you are relative to your competitors.

If you use tariffs, taxes, or other government interventions to distort the natural forces of markets—where there’s a buyer and a seller, or multiple sellers, and ultimately the buyer chooses the best seller—you create a disincentive for American enterprise to become more competitive.

We lost manufacturing because we weren’t competitive in manufacturing. Putting a tariff on other manufacturing countries doesn’t make Americans more competitive. It gives American businesses a crutch.

Jason Calacanis

Let’s talk about manufacturing. If I’m using a traditional assembly line with low-efficiency systems, I’m going to be more expensive than a Chinese factory built with a lot of automation and high-efficiency systems.

If I say, “To buy the Chinese product, you have to pay twice as much because there’s a tariff,” the American company no longer has an incentive to invest in automation or build better technology to make itself competitive in the marketplace.

David Friedberg

That’s the long-term challenge with tariffs. They distort the economic consequences that arise in a traditional free-market system.

The second consequence is that, in the near term, some of these tariffs will cause a loss of revenue for a significant number of American businesses.

People may not remember this because it wasn’t that big of a thing, but between 2016 and 2020, during the last Trump administration, there was a continued escalation of tariffs and trade tensions between Trump and China.

During that time, China stopped buying American exports. China is the biggest buyer of American agricultural products. As a result, the Trump administration had to issue 2 support payments to farmers totaling $28 billion in 2018 and 2019 because China stepped out of the market.

American farmers represent a large portion of the Republican voting bloc. The second consequence is that there will need to be financial support—meaning increased government spending—if we intend to keep the tariffs in place and the global market stops buying American exports.

The third consequence is the one I worry about most. China had a State Council meeting a couple of days ago. At that meeting, it announced a series of measures it would be willing to take regarding intellectual-property infringement in the case of retaliatory tariff escalation and a trade war.

China may say, “We’re disregarding all intellectual-property rights held by rights holders around the world.” It could steal intellectual property more openly and more brazenly.

Because China has a lower cost of manufacturing, a larger manufacturing base, and lower-cost power, it could take the only thing that much of American enterprise relies on—our intellectual-property rights—and say, “We’re going to well…”

Jason Calacanis

People might say, “They already do that.”

David Friedberg

They already do it to an extent, but imagine if China made copies of Microsoft Word and started selling them around the world for $5.

Jason Calacanis

They did that internally for a period of time, and then they started respecting intellectual property internally. But they’ve never done it globally.

David Friedberg

They also shipped Disney films overseas.

Jason Calacanis

That’s right.

David Friedberg

Imagine if they started taking American manufacturing drawings, blueprints, and designs. They have all this manufacturing capacity. They could sell everything at 10 cents on the dollar to all the global markets that the United States is cutting trade ties with because of the tariff escalation.

China could say, “We don’t care about your intellectual-property rights anymore. The rest of the world needs someone who will sell to them.”

I’ll also add something about China that isn’t talked about enough. It seems to have developed 3-nanometer semiconductor-manufacturing technology, which will go into production in the third quarter of 2025 and reach full production in 2026.

That could move the base from Taiwan potentially into China. China is developing lithography systems and advanced semiconductor-manufacturing systems. It will effectively have everything from energy to minerals to manufacturing capacity to support and service all of technology, including the software.

We’re in a really disadvantaged position if China chooses, in this moment, to disregard the intellectual-property rights of American businesses.

I’ll take the other side of all of this. I’ll start by saying that there’s no point prognosticating when they’re telling you what they intend to do.

Jason, do you want to play the clip?

Scott Bessent

I could see, in the next few years, that we’re going to have to have some kind of grand, global economic reordering, something equivalent to a new Bretton Woods, or, if you want to go back, something like the steel agreements or the Treaty of Versailles.

Jason Calacanis

What does that mean? As a refresher, what are we talking about?

Scott Bessent

We’re talking about commercial relations between, at the time, 44 countries.

That’s a big statement. I don’t think those kinds of things are said casually at a Manhattan Institute cocktail hour.

If you’re steeped in the history, you understand how important those statements are. I take this similarly to how I take Trump’s rhetoric on tariffs. I’m spending time trying to understand the scenarios that could play out.

David is right if you assume the status quo. But what they’re saying is, “We’re going to question this. We’re actually going to go here and totally rewrite that.”

If that happens as part of this, all bets are off. I don’t think any of us know with certainty what a new economic framework would look like.

If Scott Bessent is preparing himself to say, “Put me in, Coach. I’m ready,” I would take that seriously.

Jason Calacanis

Ben, let’s talk about onshoring and bringing these jobs and factories back to America. It seems crazy that we’re going to make fast fashion, people’s Coachella wear, and their USB-C cables here.

Pharmaceuticals, sure—we need those for strategic purposes. We obviously need military equipment and chips. But outside of that, is there some rationale when we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime and everybody wants to come here and immigrate to this country?

Why are we using tariffs to try to create jobs here that we don’t necessarily need? We have too much employment right now and not enough bodies to fill all the open job vacancies.

One of the fascinating things is the difference in messaging between Treasury Secretary Bessent, Commerce Secretary Lutnick, and the president. They’re all messaging different things.

I think Secretary Bessent is making the strongest case for what is being done and what long-term reordering looks like. Even there, I’m still lacking clarity on what a reordered world-trade relationship actually looks like. What is the end of the rainbow?

Lutnick seems to actually like tariffs. President Trump seems to have a picture in his head about factories and revitalizing steel mills, doing the kinds of jobs we did back in the 1950s.

There’s a nostalgia that President Trump has about these jobs that nobody in modern life wants to do. If you worked at a Ford factory in 1953, in a non-air-conditioned factory, riveting for a living, you would be unhappy. You should be happy that machines do that now.

You hear this kind of talk not just about offshoring, but also about technology and machines. I talked with Tucker Carlson on my program in 2018, and he literally said he would outlaw self-driving cars because they would eliminate truck-driving jobs in Ohio and Michigan.

When I said that sounded crazy, he said the Luddites had a point. He then suggested that, on safety grounds, he would ban self-driving cars.

I asked, “But those self-driving cars will presumably be safer than humans driving.” He said, “You asked me on what grounds I would ban them, not whether that was true.”

I think this is the danger that technology faces when we talk about these issues. We tend to believe that the animus toward trade relationships around the world, or the anticompetitive nature of many of these activities, is relegated solely to the foreign sphere.

You could easily see that turn toward so-called job loss caused by AI or technological gains. The truth is that most job loss in the American manufacturing sector is not due to offshoring. It’s due to technological advancements. Manufacturing productivity in the United States has risen dramatically since the 1980s.

Jason Calacanis

Let’s play conspiracy theorist for a second. You’re right, Ben. We want that clarity. But if this moment is a catalyst that forces everybody into the room, and Trump leads a grand bargain across the 50 or 60 most important trading partners in the world, what does that look like?

It’s almost like reestablishing something akin to what the United Nations was meant to be after World War II, except that institution has failed. This new thing would exist purely on economic lines and cooperation.

I struggle to imagine the outcomes, but there are unbelievable possibilities if they could get the top 50 commercial and mercantile countries together in a room and say, “Let’s hammer something out.”

I agree with that. One of my questions is about some of the examples Scott is using when he talks about the Bretton Woods agreement.

If you’re talking about what Nixon did in debasing the dollar, Versailles would be a better example in the sense that there wasn’t a global hegemon at the time.

If you’re talking about Bretton Woods, the rest of the world effectively did not exist in the post-World War II era. What was everybody going to bet on? They had to bet on the American dollar. There was no other choice.

By the time Nixon decides to go off the gold standard, he has to rely on the organization of the petrodollar to make sure that people don’t dissociate from the United States.

What is going to draw people to the United States as opposed to looking to a competitor like China?

Jason Calacanis

That’s a great question. What is that thing?

David Friedberg

AI is the only possibility, which is why I think the AI regime inside the Trump administration is deeply important.

I also think this is why I’m warning about the possibility that the anti-free-market forces associated with tariffs aren’t just related to tariffs. In some quarters, this is where populism can run out of control and turn against some of its technology masters.

I was talking with Danielle Smith, the premier of Alberta, the other day. She’s very conservative, and Alberta tends to be a more conservative area of Canada.

She said that if Mark Carney became prime minister of Canada instead of Pierre Poilievre, Carney would actually be eager for a tariff war because it would allow him to reorient toward China and away from the United States.

There are countries that would love to do that. The European Union might love an easy off-ramp with Russia and China. It could use this as an excuse to reorient back toward Russian oil and Chinese markets.

That would mean cheaper inputs, which would make life better for citizens. Citizens like cheap things. They like cheap oil in their cars, and they like cheap cars. China could bring cars into Europe.

The thing that worries me is the tariffs on the Southeast Asian countries—all the countries where production has been shifting out of China, such as Vietnam and Cambodia.

Production has been shifting to those places specifically because companies know the United States is going after China. Why would you manufacture in Vietnam if Vietnam is going to be hit with a 46% tariff?

They’ve made those investments over the last 5 or 6 years. There are hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in sunk costs. What do you do in that moment?

David Friedberg

These were specifically designed as diversification strategies. Japan was paying its companies to build factories outside China. Apple was diversifying into India and Vietnam for AirPods, laptops, and even iPhones.

Did you watch the press conference yesterday? The worst part for me was when Trump stopped at Sri Lanka and said, “Good old Sri Lanka. Very tough on us.”

Jason Calacanis

He was acting as if Sri Lanka were a great adversary.

The meme online right now is of the president and J.D. Vance lecturing a penguin, because the Heard Island and McDonald Islands got a 10% tariff.

Have you even apologized for eating all that mackerel?

No.

Jason Calacanis

There’s an island with nothing on it except penguins.

This is where I start thinking, “Come on.”

Jason Calacanis

You’ve got no cards there. The penguin has no cards to play.

Ben’s framing of this is helpful. If we try to reconvene a new Bretton Woods, we need an anchor asset. What is that anchor asset?

It has to be AI. But underneath that AI issue, we have 2 complicated problems. One is a meaningful energy problem. I’ve been talking about this incessantly. We don’t have enough electrons.

We’re going from 1 terawatt to 2. China is going from 3 to 8 over the same period. They’re accelerating.

The second issue is the delicate technological supply chain needed to make the underlying silicon. Neither problem is trivial.

David Friedberg

The AI supply chain is electricity. We’re going from 1 terawatt to 2, while China is going from 3 to 8 over the same period.

The second issue is rare-earth materials, which we don’t mine for. We outsourced mining. Doug Burgum told me an interesting statistic. He’s the Secretary of the Interior. He said we graduate only 200 people a year in the United States with degrees in mining.

Beginning in the 1990s, when globalization took off, we basically stopped mining in this country and moved everything elsewhere. We had a NIMBY attitude. We didn’t want mining in our backyard.

The third issue is semiconductor manufacturing. We don’t make the components needed to manufacture semiconductors.

There’s a company called ASML, which everyone who works in technology knows about. It makes advanced lithography systems for semiconductors. ASML doesn’t sell those systems to China, so China has developed its own systems.

We don’t make any of this in-house. We don’t mine. We don’t have enough power. We don’t have the materials. We don’t make lithography systems, and we don’t have enough fabs.

I’ve said this before, but one of the biggest national-security threats we created out of nowhere was when the Wall Street Journal was allowed to publish a detailed article about ASML.

One of the craziest and scariest statistics was that there is literally one person who can operate these machines, trained by ASML and forward-deployed. A woman was profiled in the article.

Jason Calacanis

That’s a national-security risk. You shouldn’t be telling people who this woman is. She could be kidnapped.

David Friedberg

Exactly.

David Friedberg

At the end of the day, the United States has models with 70 billion parameters, and we call that an AI model. If someone gets a copy of it, they have an AI model.

How much of an advantage do we really have? China has the whole supply chain. It’s making its own models. The thing we had was trade relationships with all the places that had what we needed.

That system was highly functional.

You also have the problem of what happens if there’s less demand for dollars on the world stage. The exit of the dollar as the global reserve currency would have nasty spillover effects. It would require the government to start sucking more dollars out of the American population in order to pay off all the debt we’re racking up.

Jason Calacanis

That leads to dollarization and stablecoins. Two stablecoin bills are circulating. One would not require know-your-customer, anti-money-laundering, and terrorism controls, which is allegedly Tether’s bread and butter.

The other would domesticate the business and give it to American companies such as Circle and Stripe. It would force them to buy a certain percentage of Treasuries and potentially allow them to pay interest.

That could be a way to keep a buyer for our currency.

There’s an important analogy. When you look at Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio of 250% or 260%, one of the critical questions is how you can have a functioning economy at that level.

One of Japan’s advantages is that it exports incredible goods abroad while maintaining an incredibly deep domestic pool of buyers for its own bonds. There’s a permanent bid because the net buyer can be a Japanese person on the margin. It can also be an insurance company or a pension fund.

US-dollar stablecoins start to replicate one of those advantages. If you think about a release valve for the American economy, and we needed to move to 200% debt-to-GDP, the real question is where the incremental net buyer of U.S. bonds would come from.

It could be the person who has to back the stablecoin. That means the people in charge of the crypto strategy need to make the legislation incredibly permissive. We want the bid for U.S. Treasuries to exist and be as ferocious as possible.

Jason Calacanis

I don’t think you should let Tether do it until it has a proper audit and stops the money laundering, terrorism, and other alleged activity.

I’m not going all the way there. Circle’s model is structured, and I think that is the pitch for USDC.

Jason Calacanis

The Trump family also launched its own stablecoin this week, so we may see 10 stablecoins. That’s a good way to create competition.

I still think it’s the right question: What responsibility does this administration have to articulate what makes America the linchpin of the global economy and Western democracy as we enter this new era with China rising?

I’m not sure there’s clarity today. What do you think it is?

It’s pretty clear. The reason we keep winning and China keeps stumbling is that we have rabid entrepreneurship, investment, and an incredible investment infrastructure.

We bet on entrepreneurs. We allow them to become billionaires, flame out, and start again the next day. That entrepreneurial spirit is what needs to be preserved.

That’s what created SpaceX. That’s what created Circle. We just talked about Stripe. We need American exceptionalism, and it has to be backed by recruiting—meaning immigration—brilliant people like David Sacks, David Friedberg, and me, who weren’t born in this country.

You can’t do it based only on Ben Shapiro and Jason Calacanis. You need to look around the world for the smartest people and plug them into the entrepreneurial system here. That’s the magic. That’s the golden America.

David Friedberg

That’s credible, but I don’t know if I can be dismissive of China by saying it keeps stumbling.

There was a very good interview with 3 people from the Brookings Institution. They talked about China and its rise. China increased GDP per capita by roughly 30 times in 30 years because it allowed entrepreneurs to operate.

When it let people run free, entrepreneurship thrived. Then sometimes it pulled the throttle back. Now it has pushed it forward again. That drives growth, productivity improvement, and an extraordinary abundance of energy, mining, and manufacturing.

I think it’s going to lead to a great era of prosperity for China. Whether or not there’s a conflict with the United States, China has dramatically improved conditions in that country over the last 30 years in a profound, historic way.

I’m not going to be dismissive and say China is stumbling.

China does face serious structural problems, ranging from demographics to debt. I also think that if you look at the history of economic fascism—using capitalist methods to prop up a tyrannical government—you can see how it might work for a short period of time.

The problem is that you can find yourself in a blind alley fairly quickly. Right now, AI is not a blind alley, but we don’t know exactly how it will develop in the most profitable way.

The amount of money poured into AI has not yet been justified by the return on investment. The benefit of the American market is that everybody is chasing everything all the time, and one of those things is going to hit.

The benefit of the Chinese market is that everybody is chasing one thing all the time. If that thing hits, they’ll do amazingly well. It’s possible that they completely miss it.

This gets back to the political situation in the United States and the need to avoid a recession. The scariest thing happening inside the Trump administration is not necessarily a bad thing. When President Trump was inaugurated, one picture summed up the inauguration: Trump with Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and all the billionaires behind him—the tech bros.

If there is a recession, what comes next will not be salutary for innovation, investment, technology, or anything remotely like that.

The idea of short-term pain had better mean really, really short-term pain. The American people don’t have patience for this. If it goes sideways, you’ll get a populist revolt on the left and a populist revolt on the right, taking down everybody remotely connected with free-market capitalism.

The danger in trying to manipulate the economy this way is that we say, “We’re going to use government control to rejigger the world economy, and then we’ll magic our way out with stablecoins and AI.”

Maybe the best way would be to let the thing that has always thrived in America thrive: lower regulations, let people innovate, let people fail, let people succeed, and get out of the way.

We also have to do the hard things to cut government debt. The only way to do all that is through continued success. It can’t be a short-term pain plan. It has to be entrepreneurship.

There are subfactors. To have a vibrant entrepreneurial community, you need immigration. That’s why I asked Trump on this program whether we could get green cards for people with degrees, especially people coming out of Stanford, so they could stay in the country. He said yes, that he would staple them to their degrees.

The next thing is getting Lina Khan out and ending the war on mergers and acquisitions. We need M&A. When companies get bigger, they create more value.

YouTube, Android, and AdSense were purchased by Google. That helped make Google the massive global success it is today. Meta was able to buy companies, even if Lina Khan doesn’t like it when companies get too powerful.

What happened to Jack Ma is why I don’t believe a dictatorship can ever compete with our country if we stay entrepreneurial and avoid socialism. Socialism is a cul-de-sac. It may work for a short period, but then somebody like Xi Jinping will do what dictators do and implode.

He saw Jack Ma getting popular, sent him away to be reeducated and do some painting, and then eliminated every educational company.

I need a step ladder to get off my soapbox so I can ask Ben a question.

Jason Calacanis

When you said that in a recession, they would go after tech companies, can you explain that more? I’m not sure I understood.

When there’s a recession, people don’t think about politics on a granular level. They see a pixelated image. They see the entire painting, not all the dots.

If there’s a serious recession, the image that will come to mind for the Trump administration is that it is extremely friendly to business, particularly to technology. Whoever is standing next to President Trump will get nuked and caught in the fallout.

If that happens, you’ll see a resurgent left led by the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, not a technocratic Obama-style abundance liberalism.

You’ll get a Bernie-style argument: Rich people screwed you in order to get ahead. You can feel it because you’re in a recession while they’re still rich. You’re still poor, so you need a complete reorganization of the American economy along lines of fairness.

You’ll see something similar happen on the right.

My friend Matt Continetti, the former editor of the Washington Free Beacon, has a great point about presidential elections. Candidates don’t become president unless they run against their own party.

To capture the imagination of the American people, you almost always have to run inside your own party against your party. You saw this with Trump. It was clearly true with Barack Obama. It was true to a certain extent with George W. Bush, who ran a compassionate-conservative campaign against the hard-hearted Gingrich-Dole Republicans.

Bill Clinton did this too.

If you have a politician on the right, what does he run against? Trump has taken tremendous command of the Republican base and the Republican Party. What is there to run against?

If there’s an economic downturn, do Republicans run against Trump for not being capitalist enough, or for being too capitalist and too friendly to technology?

That’s how you get a populist uprising on the right. You end up with horseshoe-theory politics, where both parties favor Lina Khan.

President Trump has expressed public support for Lina Khan from time to time. That’s inside the Republican Party, and there’s tremendous support for her on the left.

If we’re saying that one of the things we need is not Lina Khan, we should be careful not to step on the rake and have Lina Khan hit us in the face.

Jason Calacanis

That’s why I said my contrarian bet for this year was the rise in socialist policy and the response to some of the administration’s actions.

How do we avoid making the bottom half of society feel excluded from all this wealth generation? What’s the plan? Is it universal health care? Is it lowering taxes?

The administration says there will be no taxes for people under $150,000. We have to give something to the working men and women of this country—the people who feel they can’t get rich and can’t reach the middle class.

Does anybody here have a suggestion?

I do. It’s shockingly easy.

President Trump has a visceral connection to blue-collar workers in this country. He clearly has that connection. He should stop preaching that blue-collar workers are getting screwed and start preaching that they’re succeeding, because it’s actually true.

The fiction politicians always rely on is that the middle class in America has completely dissolved. That is not statistically true. The middle class has turned into the upper middle class.

People also have this bizarre idea that you were better off being 30 years old in 1980 than being 30 years old in 2025. In 1980, the only person with a cell phone was Gordon Gekko, and it was the size of a shoebox.

The reality is that everything in your life is better in 2025, on a material and economic level, than it was in 1980.

The lie politicians tell to gain power is, “You’re getting screwed. Somebody is screwing you. I can unscrew the screwing.”

That creates a constant race to the bottom in rhetoric. President Trump could avoid that because of his unique connection with blue-collar people.

He could say, “We’re all on the same side. What we’re doing here is innovation.”

The most important line I heard from President Trump on the night he won was when he said to Elon, “We love our geniuses.” I thought, “Yes. That’s the thing we need.”

We need to celebrate success. We need to celebrate entrepreneurs. This could be you.

As Marc Andreessen has discussed, we need hiring programs designed to find the best people—not just abroad, but also in the United States—who might be underserved in rural areas or blue-collar areas. Find the next J.D. Vance. Find the next person who needs a hand up.

A rising tide will lift all boats.

The problem with the short-term-pain plan is that Americans have a long memory. In politics, people’s relationship with politicians is like a marriage.

In good marriages, people talk through minor problems, and things continue to maintain and grow. In bad marriages, people ignore minor annoyances for years, and then something bad happens and the bottom falls out.

That’s what I’m afraid of for the Trump administration. Everybody is willing to ignore mildly annoying things—such as penguins at the White House—until there’s a serious recession.

At that point, everybody looks around and asks, “Why are we even doing this?”

I think that’s what happened with Biden and the Afghanistan withdrawal. Making a misstep is why I’m critical of the tariffs. It isn’t because I want Trump to lose. It’s because I want Trump to win.

Too many important things are happening, including the work Antonio is doing, to roll the dice on a strategy that hasn’t even been articulated.

If you’re going to make the case for long-term gain, I need to know what the long-term gain is so I can explain to the American public why they should endure the short-term pain.

You’re having surgery because you’ll feel better afterward. If I say, “You’re having surgery, and there will be short-term pain,” you’ll ask, “How will I feel afterward?” If I say, “I don’t know—maybe, maybe not,” then why are you having the surgery?

Jason Calacanis

We have so many job openings and the lowest unemployment of our lifetime. Consumers today can get and live an incredible lifestyle that the rich didn’t have in 1980.

The car you can buy today can drive itself. For $20,000, $30,000, or $40,000, you can buy a used Tesla with capabilities better than any car made in the last 50 years.

You also have Generation Tool Belt. There are plumbing, electrical, and construction jobs available today that pay massive hourly wages. We have too many job openings and not enough people to fill them.

You never hear Trump say that. To your point, it’s always, “Everything is a disaster. I’ll save you,” when people don’t necessarily need saving.

David Friedberg

I’ll answer Jason’s earlier question about what America can anchor to in order to attract the rest of the world.

I think it’s what the American story has been from the beginning: ambition.

We pioneered the West. We launched the Industrial Revolution. We went to space. We landed on the moon. We had the Manhattan Project. We unleashed the information-technology revolution with the development of the transistor.

Ambition is what China has exuded in the last 20 years. It has built 30,000 miles of high-speed rail. In the next 15 years, it plans to add more electricity-production capacity than the United States has today, multiplied by 2.

There is nothing short of ambition coming out of China. What we’re lacking is ambition.

All of our political gambits and debates are centered on what went wrong in the past, what we did wrong, and what we need to do to make it right. We don’t talk about where we can lead the world next.

China is the only country doing that. If we want to attract partners and get Americans thinking outside this week, we need an important pivot on the global stage.

Jason Calacanis

NERC put out a study that is tactical but connected to what you and I are talking about.

Did you know that about 25% of all utility workers in America became eligible for retirement between 2017 and 2022?

David Friedberg

I did not know that.

Jason Calacanis

Most people—56% of all utility workers—now have less than a decade of experience.

What has that resulted in? In 2021, the average U.S. electric-utility customer experienced 7.5 hours of service interruptions. It’s getting worse.

The average plumber is in his 50s. We can’t get people to become plumbers.

NERC says 19 states could face rolling blackouts during normal peak conditions if these issues aren’t addressed.

This is a human-capital problem. If you multiply it by 10, 20, or 30, it becomes a massive issue.

There was another tweet about an organization trying to find people to help build nuclear submarines. They needed 100,000 people and could barely find a few hundred.

David Friedberg

The good news is that we’re going to have robots to do this.

Jason Calacanis

Ben, if I run for president, I’m one of the few people here who can. My position will be to build 3 new cities with 5 million homes in each, because families can’t buy starter homes.

Have you ever considered running for office? If you did, what would your platform be?

It would be horrifying to run for office. It seems like a terrible job.

I think the appropriate age to run for president is now in your 70s, so I have 3 decades to consider it.

If I were going to run, I’d run on the basic idea that the only thing you’re promised in this country is the adventure. I’m not going to make promises I can’t keep about how I’m going to fix your life, because the truth is that I can’t.

All I can do is help get obstacles out of the way so you can fix your life and make it better. I can help break the institutions that have a stranglehold on your future.

When you’re talking about electricians and plumbers, we’ve set up an enormous con game in our higher-education system, particularly in the liberal arts, subsidized by taxpayers. Most of the jobs we’re talking about do not require a college degree.

There are so many things the Trump administration should be doing and is doing that could break the stranglehold on opportunity.

The thing that maybe no other politician would say—and I can say it because I’m not a politician—is that your future is here in America, and your future is in your hands. It isn’t in somebody else’s hands.

It’s your responsibility to strive and succeed. We want you to be able to try again if you fail, but we want you to try. That’s rugged individualism.

The other point is that politicians always say, “I created X jobs,” or, “We created X jobs.” You didn’t create a job. The government doesn’t create jobs. The government takes money from some people and gives it to other people.

Only entrepreneurs create jobs.

The way to compete with China is not through a centralized government directing people in a particular direction. It’s by unleashing the collective knowledge, wisdom, and ambition of the American people on an individual level.

The promise I’d make to the American people is that I’ll get everybody the hell out of your way so you can succeed.

We have breaking news. It turns out the DOGE reciprocal tariffs have dropped.

Jason, you’ve put a 500% reciprocal tariff on purchasing dogs from breeders. That’s now a 100% tariff.

David, you’ve put a tariff on Laura Piana slippers.

David Friedberg

That’s pretty stiff.

Jason Calacanis

Chamath has put a 200% tariff on them. Too many people have them.

It looks like Ben Shapiro got in on it too: Having Candace Owens on your podcast is now subject to a 200% tariff.

That’s unkind.

Jason Calacanis

And Palmer Luckey has put the biggest one in: a 1,000% tariff on working with Jason Calacanis for Chamath Palihapitiya.

I have to tell you about a new Polymarket bet I created. It’s on annualized GDP growth in the third quarter of this year being below negative 5%.

Jason Calacanis

Negative 5%, yeah, that’s brutal.

Chamath, do you want to do a victory lap? We’re going to wrap here. What do you want to do?

I actually think it’s fun because we’re going to kick off a different Polymarket around this. I think it’s interesting. The thing that we haven’t talked about sufficiently—with all of the tariffs, all of the financing questions, all of the recession questions, short-term rates, and long-term rates—is that there is a tremendous amount of corporate debt that supports these businesses today.

You would say, “Well, if long-term rates go down, there’s no real risk.” But the tariff picture actually impacts revenues, and the problem with that is that there are a lot of companies that have debt covenants tied to revenue and EBITDA.

This is what I spoke about at the beginning of January: The one risk that is uncontrollable is what happens to corporate debt. Could we see a wave of defaults and a wave of action? Nick, you may want to just play the clip, and we can talk about what we can do about this. This was my pick for the best investment idea.

Jason Calacanis

Go ahead. What do you got?

Let me preface this by saying that this is a pick that 92 times out of 100 goes to absolute zero. Six out of the remaining 8 times, you make 10 times your money, and the final 2 times, you make anywhere between 100 and 1,000 times your money.

This is a loser trade, but I would be long CDS. What am I buying? I’m buying insurance. I’m buying insurance using credit default swaps. I’m buying what’s called protection against a default event in 2025.

I would like a little bit of an insurance policy in 2025 so that the men and women we have voted in have the chance to do their work in peace. I think there’s a small chance of some volatility next year. I hope it doesn’t happen. I hope that this trade loses money, but if it hits, it will be the best-performing asset of 2025.

I just want to be clear: This is not something I think will happen. It’s not something I want to happen. But I do think that if you look back in terms of just the tonnage of dollars you can make and the massive risk asymmetry that it presents to you, when you look at the concentration of the S&P, when you look at just the total gross amount of debt that we have, and when you look at rates spiking, all of these things say having a little insurance may not be a bad thing.

Jason Calacanis

It has hit. Nick, you can show the CDS graph. This thing—for every $1 billion of risk that you would have put on, every $1 billion that you put on would have cost you about $1 million, and that $1 million would have made you about $7 million in about 3 months. Did you put it on?

I’m not going to comment on my trades, Jason.

Jason Calacanis

Okay. Well, we talked about it off-air already. But if you did put it on, does that mean you’re taking us all to Italy this summer?

No.

Jason Calacanis

What’s happening here? Are you getting a boat for us to record from the All-In yacht?

No, but there may be some boats for sale if this trade keeps going this way.

Jason Calacanis

Why is this important?

The CDS actually represents the structural risk in the United States private economy, in the corporate economy. Nick, if you just put it back on, when you see these spreads blowing out, this is actually a very important warning sign.

This is something that I think Scott Bessent understands well and Howard Lutnick understands well. I think they’ll translate this to the president. If I have an opportunity to explain it, I will, but this is a really important market to pay attention to.

This was the canary in the coal mine for the Great Financial Crisis. This was the stuff that showed us there was a big default event happening on the mortgage side of the market, but then that spilled over to the broader economy.

The tariff picture and the recession picture will get played out in this chart, and I think it’s something that folks can and should probably pay tremendous attention to. Now that this trade is in the money, the question is—I don’t think we want this to happen—that one-sigma, two-sigma event where all of a sudden this trade returns 1,000 times your money is really bad.

Jason Calacanis

Well, let’s keep our eye on the markets. As of the taping here, we’re down about 5% across the boards. Ben, you’re excellent. You should come back. Yeah, well done, Ben. You fit right in.

We’re in Florida. Are you? We’re doing an event in Miami at the end of the month.

Sure, yeah, that’d be fun.

Jason Calacanis

Let’s do it. You want to come to Miami and hang out? We’ve got this nightclub—we’re doing a stage. We’ve got the trackside of Formula 1. Ben’s got a table at LIV. It’s got his name on it: Ben Shapiro at LIV. We’re going to LIV.

Stop.

Jason Calacanis

Okay, sorry, sorry. I don’t know which strip club is sponsoring All-In on this trip, but we’ll figure it out. That was awesome. Ben, thanks for doing that.

Thanks, guys. That’s a blast.

Jason Calacanis

Is it true, $100 million in revenue for The Daily Wire? Is that true?

No, the figure actually last year was $220 million.

Jason Calacanis

Oh, my God, $220 million. What’s going on? I saw some headline that you’re going bankrupt. How are you going bankrupt with $220 million?

We’re not going bankrupt. We’re not going bankrupt. There’s some restructuring.

Jason Calacanis

Actually, Ben, now that you saw what’s happening with Newsmax, any thoughts about maybe raising some capital?

Yeah, it has crossed our minds, yes, for sure.

Jason Calacanis

You’re making 50 times the revenue of Truth Social. Congratulations. But actually, what do you think when you see this Newsmax thing trade like this? I mean, it’s incredible. What is it saying, do you think?

I think it’s saying a couple of things. One, obviously, look, I think the P/E ratios on the Newsmax trade are ridiculous, in the sense that it’s going to revert back to something closer to normal.

I think it was supposed to trade at $10, and it came out at $14. It spiked to around $240, so it’s more like GameStop than anything else. There are a lot of retail traders who are fans of Newsmax who bought the stock, and then it leapt. I think it was today back down in the 40s, something like that.

It’ll end up being—you know, the total market cap will probably be somewhere, when it lands, in the $2 billion to $3 billion range, somewhere around $3 billion to $4 billion, something like that.

I think what it says is that the stock market in the short term is a voting machine, and in the long term it is a weighing machine. When you look at stocks that have name-brand recognition, you’re going to get a lot of voting in the early going. Then it’s a question of whether you can keep that up so it turns into weighing.

Jason Calacanis

Fair enough. $39 million in quarterly revenue, so they’re at $150 million or $160 million a year. Their valuation right now—I don’t have the market cap here—but what did it peak out at, $30 billion or $40 billion or something?

Oh, no. When it peaked, it peaked above $20 billion.

Jason Calacanis

Yeah, the stock went to $170, $200, $240, $245 yesterday—or 2 days ago. Something weird is going on there.