与 Andrew Schulz 一起修复美国梦

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the All-In Podcast. You can subscribe to us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, yada yada, you know the drill. We're going to go to Miami for an epic F1 weekend—All-In Podcast live on stage Saturday, May 3rd. A couple of special guests. Go to allin.com/events to buy a ticket. And we're really excited today because, for the first time in All-In history, we have a comedian—somebody entertaining on the program. A real comedian, someone who knows how to make good jokes.

Andrew Schulz is here. How are we doing, boys?

Thank you for having me, Schulz. Pleasure.

You're on a heater right now, and you took time to come on the All-In pod. Thank you for doing that.

Of course.

Your Netflix special, Life, is crushing it. It's in the top 10 around the world. It's about your low sperm count. Tell us about it.

I'm the face of sperm, which is kind of crazy because you've got a mustache like a '70s porn star.

I think I'm overcompensating. I've got to trick people with the mustache, but in reality, the balls are firing blanks.

It's bad.

This special is so good. Thank you for watching it.

I appreciate it.

We all watched it. It's hilarious. You've got three old guys here who have also had to deal with some of these issues. You've all had IVF. Chamath, do you want to be honest here, or were you natural? Did you hit the three from half court?

My first 4 kids were natural. My fifth was IVF.

I don't think we're surprised. There are, like, 2 billion of you guys. It's easy to get the job done, bro.

There was a period after the Facebook IPO when I swear to God, I would look at chicks on Instagram and get them pregnant. It was brutal.

Are they coming to collect?

I hope not.

How many settlements have you got? How many NDAs?

We're off to a hot start here. Friedberg, you look like you have a low sperm count, but you have a fourth kid on the way. What's the story? Are you natural?

This is the first time ever—nobody knew this.

100%.

A vegan who's shooting with a sniper rifle. I love it. I don't believe it.

I'll find you guys a great study about veganism and libido.

Is that right? What does it do, reduce the woman's libido?

Exactly.

Oh, my God.

I know a place with the best roast cauliflower. Let your winners ride, Rain Man.

By the way, can I just tell you how much I hate cauliflower? Everywhere I go, that is the dish. I had it for dinner last night. It was the main course.

In L.A., it's the main course.

Except it's disgusting. There are 2 things they offer you: portobello mushrooms and roasted cauliflower. That's what Sean does every time you show up at the house.

Are you an Impossible Meat guy?

No, I don't like that stuff. It's gross. Not for me.

Do you want to hear a quick science corner?

You know how we talked about Yamanaka factors?

There's a resounding yes.

He's like, “Yeah, I don't care, Andy.”

Anyway, sure. Hit me.

Let me hit this real quick, because I know we're never going to get to it. You know how you can use Yamanaka factors—we talked about these—to basically turn a cell into a stem cell?

Of course. Andrew, you're familiar with the Yamanaka factors. I've been all over it for a while. I've seen Squid Game.

Absolutely.

You think I don't know about the Yamanaka factor?

Come on, we're not going to get into it.

I went to the Yamanaka factory when I was in Kyoto. I swear to God, a guy showed up 15 minutes late and stabbed himself in the stomach right there. He killed himself right there.

Yeah, it's called seppuku.

Exactly.

Okay, we'll come back to the cell biology. The interesting work going on right now is that you can take any cell from a person's body, turn it into a stem cell, and then ultimately turn that stem cell into an egg cell. You no longer need to harvest eggs from a woman. You can make eggs from skin cells, for example.

In the next couple of years, there are a few technical breakthroughs that will enable this. Fertility clinics may end up taking a little bit of your skin, creating stem cells, creating egg cells, and that's how we're going to do IVF in the future. You could make eggs at any age and ultimately produce offspring at any age. You don't need to have active, healthy eggs.

You like that one?

Fantastic. This is a workaround for the people who are trying to ban IVF because of the abortion protocol. Their belief is that life begins at conception. You could take 1 egg cell and 1 sperm and make a fertilized egg.

Those people don't understand what you do with IVF. You try to harvest as many as you possibly can because not all of them are viable, and it's a pretty brutal process for the woman to go through. But if you could just grab something from the skin, you'd have almost unlimited eggs.

When a woman is born, she has all her eggs in her body. As she ages, those eggs get depleted, and eventually she doesn't have very many viable eggs left. This gets around that problem. We can be very selective about the eggs.

There's a future here in the next couple of years where fertility becomes a simpler, hopefully easier, and more widely available service than it is today. Right now, it's technically challenging, invasive, and you have to hope that there are enough healthy eggs. This could change all of that.

This is awesome. Schulz, did they sit you down and give you the embryos that were viable, with the grades and the gender, and you picked one?

We just picked the best.

That's a lot of pressure on that first one. All the other kids afterward don't have as much pressure.

Come out of the gate strong. Have a good first quarter, and then whatever.

You didn't say whether you had IVF.

I was about to put it out there.

I didn't have IVF. The first time we had a kid, my wife said, “Hey, we're ovulating.” I said, “Put me in the game.” Boom. First shot, half-court logo shot—pregnant.

Then she said she wanted to wait before having the next one. It's a little traumatic to have a kid, so she waited 6 years. We tried for a year and nothing happened. Now I'm thinking, “Man, we waited too long.” It's a lot of pressure.

You talk about this in the special. For women, this is anxiety-producing. She said, “You have to go get checked out.” That was when the most humiliating day of my life occurred.

Andrew, what was it like when you went? Can they identify grifters through the microscope?

No.

I walk in, and there are 3 women at the reception desk. They're like, “Hey, Jason Calacanis, you're here to give a sample?” I'm like, “Yeah, I am.” Then they walk you to a room.

That's the spookiest thing.

They walk you to a room, open the door, and it's a nightmare scenario. There's a Motel 6 room, a couch that's about 3 feet wide, and a towel on it.

That sofa isn't cloth for a reason.

It needs to be cleanable.

It looks very much like the hotel you're in, Schulz. I don't know what's going on with the Netflix budget. Maybe they could put you in the Four Seasons or the Peninsula.

It's brutal.

You did this, right? You had to go?

The grainy television with the porn.

You're lucky you got a TV.

I had to go to the phone. I had nothing. I didn't even have service in there, which was another annoying thing.

So what did you do? You rolled the Rolodex?

No spank bank. You have to go through all the memories. Think about the memories, man.

All the great moments with your wife.

Only my wife. Nobody else.

All those great moments with your wife. Maybe there was accidentally 1 or 2 that got left in from when you were on the road.

It's possible. Some images might have jumped into the dreams I had with my wife. I would never want them to be there, but obviously, now it's the director's cut. There's nothing I can do.

It is funny how we dramatize the experience. We got the easiest thing to do in the whole process. We just have to go into a room and masturbate, as if that's hard for us. But we're like, “The room is destitute and brutalist, and the furniture was uncomfortable.”

Speaking of jerk-offs, Gavin Newsom has got a podcast.

I think this is a great idea, despite what you think about his politics. Is he a plastic bag in the wind? Yes. But it is a great demonstration of how Americans admire bravery or courage. We don't like weakness, and I think that's what the Democrats displayed in the last election.

I don't want to get too political about this.

No, give us your opinion.

It's just my opinion. I respond culturally. I don't care about the tribalism and politics, but I'll be honest with you: Having Charlie Kirk right there, who's a professional arguer—he's that guy who is autistic for arguing—to sit across from him and even address the French Laundry, I thought, “Okay, this is actually the right thing to do.”

As easy as it is for us to say, “This guy just wants to be president. This is dumb,” it's actually what the Democrats should be doing. We need to reward this behavior. We want more conversation, especially with people we may disagree with.

The second podcast he put out was the most impactful. There was 1 piece that was incredibly impactful. He was talking to some guy who grew up in San Francisco about taxes. The guy was paying all this money in taxes in California and asking what he got from it. Newsom said that rich people were going to pay more, but the actual functional tax rate for somebody middle class could be higher in Florida because of the other things you get taxed on.

This is the type of information you guys might be privy to, but the average person isn't. They get on the internet and hear somebody addressing real issues instead of just culture-war issues. He's putting out valuable information that defends positions he may have taken in government, and the average person doesn't really know about those positions.

The average person like me just goes, “I'm in New York. I'm getting clipped at 50%, plus the 5% city tax. I'm getting crushed. If I lived in Florida or Texas, I'd save 133%.” But there might be someone making $50,000 a year who moves from California to Texas and loses money. They don't know that because they're just listening to rich guys on podcasts talk about how much money they save when they move to Texas.

You don't have to take a shot at us.

Okay, a little personal.

I moved to Texas this year.

It's more of a shot at me and Friedberg.

Chamath, what are your thoughts on Gavin Newsom's new podcast? You were famously involved in a little dip of the toe where somebody made a landing page saying you were going to run for governor. We had a little fun with that. What do you think of Gavin and his podcast?

I think he's an excellent politician. It's clear he's starting the 2028 campaign. He's done a really good job so far.

I think Schulz is right. He's unwinding all the landmines that the Democrats have stepped on. He's learned what Kamala did wrong, and now he's taking this very narrow path: He's going to disavow the things people don't care about. I don't think you're going to hear him talk much about gender or woke ideology. He'll try to drive a narrow wedge on economic issues.

I think it's going to create a really dynamic 2028 campaign if he gets momentum. His popularity has gone up, which is insane. After the fires, all of the ineptitude in California, the corporations that have run away, the people who have left, and the chaos in San Francisco, he started a podcast and his popularity went up. It's incredible.

Coming around the horn: Friedberg, what do you think of Gavin Newsom?

I think the podcast was brilliant. When I watched it, I was hooked because there were 2 things that were critical in how he runs it.

First, he is showing what I think is the first time I've ever seen a Democrat—or a Republican in modern politics—actively listen to the other side. It seems crazy that this is some sort of special event, but that active listening moment breaks down the walls where you immediately feel on guard or on offense against the person.

If someone's actively listening to you, you feel like you're on the same side somehow and that you're trying to reach a conclusion together. It invites the person on the other side—in this case, the audience—to be part of that coming together.

The second thing he did that's brilliant is that modern political bipolarism means you're in 1 camp or the other, so everything is a 1 or a 0. Andrew talked about this. None of us would consider ourselves political-party affiliates. We're people who like to think for ourselves on a topic or issue, and we don't care what party it's associated with.

But the way modern politics has evolved, you don't debate the topics. You debate the 1 or the 0 because of what the party says. My party says this is the position, therefore I'm a 1 and you're a 0. The other side says, “I'm the 1 and you're the 0.” Everything has to be binary: I'm completely right and you're completely wrong.

I think what Gavin has done is shown that these are not 1s and 0s. They're 80/20, 60/40, or 55/45. He's willing to acknowledge that we might be only 45% right. On so many topics, the Democratic Party has ended up slightly wrong. They're 45/55. They're not a 0 or a 1. They're slightly off on taxes, slightly off on social issues, and they're off just enough that they lost the election.

Andrew, in 2028, Trump is running for a third term against Gavin Newsom. Who do you vote for?

We've got to run it back for a third term for Trump, of course.

No, obviously. Gavin versus Trump—who would you choose?

I have to see what his policies are, and I have to see where America is. The big misunderstanding with this last election is that the Democrats who are still trying to vilify figures on the right don't understand that this was a rejectionist vote.

They think it was a populist election where people fell in love with Trump and would do whatever he said. What's harder for them to grapple with is the self-reflection of a rejectionist vote. People rejected the Democratic proposal, and they went with the other alternative, which was Trump.

That's a much tougher pill to swallow. You have to look back at everything you've done and say, “Wow, we're off. We're not listening to the people.” Trump listens to the people.

It seems like I'm flattering Trump, but I would say his greatest skill is listening to what people say. There's an Ivy League pretentiousness in the Democratic Party where it's, “We know what's better for you. I know you say you want these things, but you don't really want that. We've studied it and talked about it in our little thought experiments in class, so we know what you need.”

It's condescending.

Exactly.

When people say, “The food is giving me cancer,” and Trump appoints the guy who says the food is bad to run the agency responsible for food, the American people say, “That seems like a good thing. I like that.”

It's an acute understanding of what people are saying. Sometimes it's to his disadvantage. He came out against congestion pricing in Manhattan. Initially, people rejected it. Then, 2 weeks after congestion pricing went into effect, everybody I knew with a car was saying, “This is the greatest thing the city has.”

You can actually move. You can take a taxi, and it's faster.

Government overreach is good. Bureaucracy is nice.

You want a car, stay in the boroughs.

Exactly.

You don't get a car in Manhattan.

Explain this to people. It's a little egregious.

You and I do, J. Our lives should be different.

Absolutely.

What's the point of having nice cars if we can't drive them whenever we want?

Exactly.

We grew up at a time on the Lower East Side when you could go to Tribeca, go to Club Limelight, park outside the Limelight at night, go to Palladium, or park on 14th Street.

I used to park right on 14th Street.

It used to be a church, right?

And then you sniff poppers, take ecstasy, do a little whatever.

You goofballs, between your stupid mustache and your turkey neck, go do something useful.

Are we going to let Chamath sit there in MacGyver's funeral outfit?

This guy's wearing a vest with a collar. He looks like he's going to a Punjabi wake. I can't believe he would even talk about the way you're dressed.

This is custom Loro Piana.

Really? What does it look like? You got it at Zara?

All right, listen.

More importantly, let's stay on track.

Can I tell you guys something about tariffs from a layman's perspective?

Yes, please.

You guys are acutely aware of how these things affect markets, but most people don't have a clue. I look at this and think, “It kind of sucks that you have to negotiate your bid for a car publicly.”

Let's say I go to buy a car, and the car is $100,000. I offer the guy $80,000. I don't want everybody around me yelling, “How can you insult him by offering $80,000? That's an insult.” I can't then tell them, “I'm actually trying to settle at $90,000. I'm just saying $80,000 so he comes down a little bit.”

The unfortunate thing about litigating these negotiations in front of the entire world is that, when Trump announces a 200% tariff, he can't say, “I'm just playing around with that number. I'm actually just trying to get them to come down 20% or 10%.” Getting them to come down at all is a win, but he can't say that because he loses all his leverage.

He's got to sit there and get criticized by half the country. I don't know who really cares about what these tariffs do. Obviously, there are repercussions in the market. I have a friend building a hotel in Joshua Tree, and he says he doesn't even know whether he can get materials brought into the country from Canada. It affects people in real time.

But it's impossible to negotiate with leverage if the people within your own country are questioning your ability to negotiate in real time. That's what a layman would think.

I think you're right in the sense that, in the early days when Trump was talking about tariffs, everyone said, “He's going to use tariffs. He's unpredictable.” Then the narrative became that he was using them as a negotiating tactic.

The problem is, just like in poker, once everyone knows that action exists, it's exploitable. This is now an exploitable mode of negotiation. Everyone assumes he's just trying to negotiate, so no one takes him seriously. The question is whether his response is going to be that he's serious about it, or whether he's actually exploitable.

You saw China's response. I view China like AI: Stuff goes into China, the AI processes it, and it comes back out. Given the way China is structured, it has very little of the psychosocial bias you see in other democratic governments. It's systematic. Every piece of data is systematically processed, and every action is systematically processed.

When you look at how the Chinese ambassador responded to Trump on Twitter a few weeks ago—“You want war? We'll give you war. Hot war or cold war, whatever you want”—we've never seen that from an ambassador to a United States president before, let alone done on Twitter by the Chinese ambassador.

It says a lot about how the Chinese are processing the Trump negotiating tactic, or Trump's positioning statements on tariffs. They've made a real assessment of how far he is willing to take it. They believe this is the fastest way to win their negotiating position.

Everyone now understands or views this as an exploitable moment, which unfortunately means tariffs may not work—or they're actually going to have to stick, which could be painful.

I want to give you some historical context. For almost the majority of our years as a nation, we had no income tax. From 1776 to 1861—that's 85 years—we funded the programs we needed not from insiders, but from outsiders. That's where the tariff was born.

People domestically in America didn't pay taxes on the things they did. Instead, if you wanted to sell into the United States, you paid a reasonable tax. We paused that for a few years because of the Civil War, restarted it in 1872, and then it stopped around World War I, when this entire war machine broke out. We've never looked back.

One way to think about this is that we have an incredibly vibrant and rich country of 330 million people with a ton of purchasing power. What happens if we put the burden not on them to fund American infrastructure, social programs, and the safety net, but on all the companies and the other 7.7 billion people in the world, across the 185-plus countries that want access to those consumers?

Should there be exceptions? Probably. Should there be waivers in very specific and narrow cases? Absolutely. But I think that's where these guys are going.

You heard this yesterday from Howard Lutnick. He said the Trump tax plan is going to cut federal income taxes to 0 for anybody making $150,000 or less.

What would the strategic vulnerability be in putting the burden of all these expenses on other countries?

There are 2 vulnerabilities. The first is that we keep the expenses. That's the key. If we charge them an extra 25% to come into the market, but we cut the budget, it can be net neutral. That's part of what they've said.

The other problem with tariffs is that, if today you announce a tariff and tomorrow you say, “We've found an agreement and we're taking it off the table,” one piece of logic says, “Great, we're able to change our mind on a dime.” The problem for countries and companies is that they can't think in 24-hour blocks of time. They're making decisions in 5- and 10-year blocks of time.

They're saying, “I'm going to borrow $1 billion and build a data center. I'm going to borrow $10 billion and build tanks.” Once you start that, you can't just stop it and restart it.

One strategic problem is that, if you're not careful, some markets that are really crucial can be disrupted. Right now, 95% of all the energy we generate in America is from renewables, whether you like it or not. The reason that's possible is that America has a sophisticated market where people come from all corners of the world—insurance companies, life insurance companies, banks—and fund all of it.

The incentives exist because they can take a tax credit, lower their effective tax rate, and get a higher rate of return. If you play around with that market, half of that energy could go away. Electricity prices would rise, inflation would go up, and then, if we have to compete against China for AI and other things, where is the energy going to come from? Are you going to brown out people and turn their energy off so you can fund a data center and make the TikTok algorithm better? That's literally what we'd have to decide.

The second problem is that if you're providing a critical service or good to American people for which there is no alternative, that becomes really problematic. The producer can pull the product and say, “I can't afford to make it.” The obvious example is pharmaceuticals for rare diseases.

Those are all multidecade decisions. You'd love to make them and unmake them every 24 hours, but that's not possible. You make these decisions and you're stuck with them for a long time. That's where tariffs become problematic if you change them often enough.

If you implement them and say, “This is what it's going to be,” the world can adapt and people can figure it out.

The other problem is that the communication has been terrible. We were on the program last week or 2 weeks ago, and Joe Lonsdale said, “This is about fentanyl.” So is it about fentanyl? Is it about getting rid of income tax at the federal level? Is it about supply-chain resiliency?

These guys get a D in my grade book for communication. It's terrible. You can't take Trump too seriously about his claims. He said he was going to overturn Roe v. Wade, and he did it. He said he was going to close the border and send people home, and he did that. He said he was going to do a Muslim ban, and he did that.

For every time he says something and you think, “That's cap. There's no way he's going to do that,” I think people are starting to realize that he's going to do something with these tariffs. They're not just a negotiating position.

The other problem is that this centralizes his power. Anybody can go to Trump now and say, “I'm a car company. I want an exception. I'm a solar company. I need an exemption.” Now you've got everybody going to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring, give him a donation, and bow down.

We don't want to live in a world where you're bribing Trump to get your tariff. That's how people feel. That's how the business community feels. You need a clear strategy for what the rules of the game are, and he's changing the rules so that you have to go to him. He loves that. It's a clever hack.

Perception is reality, so you have to react to people's perception. We can throw data points, research, and all this other stuff at people, but if they're not meeting you there, you're not communicating effectively.

You guys have information that the average American probably doesn't. We can complain that people don't read or aren't looking up what happened in 1913 to change the course of American history and how we started taxation, or we can say, “We need to find a way to disseminate this information so people can make these decisions and feel comfortable with the results.”

Do you think America would be okay with taxing outsiders and relying on that, rather than collecting income tax from its own citizens?

The second half is all that would matter. I think the majority of people are thinking about the next week. If you tell them, “You don't have to pay taxes,” that's what they care about.

This is what Republicans are doing far better than Democrats right now. Democrats don't have “Build the wall.” They don't have slogans. They don't have things that immediately tap into a core emotional feeling, regardless of whether they're going to do it.

“We want Greenland.” That's cool. Democrats need eggs for a dollar. They need things that echo their sentiment about how they want to take care of people and provide for the disenfranchised, but it has to be done in a digestible way.

If you want to make housing more affordable, say, “We're seizing public land and building 10,000 units.” You have to tap into what Americans need, which is a feeling of comfort. Every American thinks they're going to be a millionaire. That's what this country thrives on.

That hope.

Exactly. The second they stop thinking they can be a millionaire, it falls apart. When they no longer feel that hope, they become completely disenfranchised.

That's why they celebrated when the health-care CEO was shot.

Exactly. They feel so disenfranchised.

I've been saying this for months: Nobody cares about the stock market.

Nor should we. People who own these assets have benefited more than we've deserved for the last 15 years, ever since the Great Financial Crisis.

Anybody like us who could get leveraged and go into the stock market was richly rewarded. We left everybody else behind. I think the great thing about Trump is that he's going to reset that. He's going to take a lot of wealth away from asset holders. You're seeing it every day—$500 billion, $500 billion. There is no sympathy. I think it's fantastic.

It's great to hear you say that, because a lot of people in your position don't understand that disconnect. It's important to understand it.

Look at what happened in the Palisades in Los Angeles. The second people heard it was rich people's houses, there was no empathy. They didn't care.

“They burned down a million-dollar house? You don't have a house. You can't find a house. They burned down their house and moved into their vacation house. They're living at their ski house. That's a tragedy?”

You're right. It probably explains why we don't hear much in the news anymore about reconstruction or any of the disruptions. It's a rich-person problem.

Trump is a master at connecting with people and listening to them. One of the greatest things he did in the last election was say, “No tax on tips.” He was going right for Nevada, right for that swing state, to get people who live off tips.

But he was also saying, “I know that some of you get cash tips and put them in your pocket. It's the gray market. I get it. I have caddies who get a hefty tip when they take somebody out on the golf course. We're going to make it official. You don't pay tax on tips because we know you're at the bottom third of the country in terms of economic power.”

Those kinds of statements connect with people. Trump has mastered that.

This is the Democratic Party we grew up with. It's kind of crazy. The Democrats became this elitist group that seemed to be in the pocket of business interests. I don't know what Bizarro World we're living in.

I think you tapped into it. The Democrats could easily win the next election if they made it a class war, but they don't because it feels like they're in the pockets of billion-dollar corporations.

Bernie did it effectively. This random Jewish guy from Vermont said, “We need to get some money from these rich people and give it back to the poor,” and suddenly all of America turned him into our surrogate grandfather.

Then Hillary and the machine shivved him. They said his supporters, the Bernie Bros, had a sexism and bigotry problem. They made him radioactive.

They did the same thing with us during the election. They said the podcast bros had a sexism and bigotry problem. They try to make people radioactive, but that card has been played so many times that people are desensitized.

I think there's one big shoe left to drop. We've started the process of taking a lot of heat out of the asset markets, especially equities. We've taken trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth away, and I think we're going to take trillions more.

But the next big market—and this is where we reestablish some hope for a lot of people—is housing. We're going to whack the housing market. It's going to happen.

How is that going to happen, given that there are 7 million homes we still need to build just to service current demand?

There are a bunch of mechanisms that have to be cleaned up. One is that a whole host of mortgages are being propped up by a program that got out of control under the Biden administration.

We're going to figure out how to get the 2 government-related agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, out of conservatorship. They're responsible for wrapping guarantees around mortgages so the mortgage market can function.

The details don't matter as much as the point: We're unwittingly propping up the U.S. housing market with American taxpayer dollars. Why is that bad? It's locking an inordinate number of people out of the first critical step that makes them feel like they're winning and achieving their dreams: buying a home.

We have artificially inflated prices around the country as a result. I think this next wave is deeply beneficial to the middle class. When I see an article saying, “This house just sold for $65 million on 4 acres in some random place in Miami,” it makes no sense.

When you rationalize equity values and the cost of a home, you allow more people to find a reasonable way to enter the housing market. That's a major step in allowing them to feel like they're part of the dream.

You lower asset prices. Maybe you own some stocks, or maybe your employer offers a 401(k) for the first time and it makes financial sense to put a small amount in it. If you've never been able to own a home, suddenly home prices are down 30% or 40% and you're able to do it.

If the rate the U.S. government pays to borrow goes down, your mortgage rate goes down. All of a sudden, you can enter the market because home prices are lower and you can actually get a mortgage.

These things may seem random, but they can come together to give 50 or 60 million people a shot—something they've been screaming for since the Great Financial Crisis.

This is huge because, on a core emotional level, you want as many Americans as possible invested in American success and excellence. The greater the distance between them and their first home or first investment in a stock, the more disillusioned they become with America.

When they feel left behind—like you guys did when you could take out loans for nothing and see incredible gains—they feel like they're not part of it. The second they feel like they're in on it, they own an apartment or some shares of Tesla.

That's why crypto is so popular. It feels like the only access they have. It's like comedy in some ways. All I need is a microphone, and there's a path for me. Crypto is obviously a giant scam, but people feel like they can get a piece of the American dream.

I would rather they were invested in a Vanguard account or the entire market. There's an idea that every American born gets $1,000 put into an account. Our friend Brad Gerstner has this concept called Invest America.

Regardless of whether the concept is good, the emotional connection to the success of American industry is important. When you're 22 and know that something has been compounding for 22 years, you can pay off college loans, put a down payment on a house, or pay for trade school.

You have a different energy toward America and its success. You have fewer kids saying, “America is a horrible place and capitalism is bad.”

Capitalism is bad when you're left behind. When you're invested in capitalism, it's the best thing in the world.

Let me give you some statistics. The U.S. Social Security program is meant to be a retirement program for people who don't have access to private retirement accounts. It was set up in the 1930s, after the Great Depression.

There's a trust fund, OASDI, where the money from our Social Security taxes goes. Do you know what it gets invested in? One thing: U.S. Treasuries, which have averaged about a 4.8% return since the beginning of the program.

Meanwhile, the S&P 500 has averaged 11%. Here's the math: If, in 1971—the year the United States went off the gold standard—we had invested the Social Security trust fund in the S&P 500, its balance today would be $15 trillion.

That would be roughly one-third of the value of the total S&P 500, jointly owned by all Americans who put their capital into it. Here's what's messed up: Middle-class people who had access to private retirement accounts benefited by buying the S&P 500, and wealthy people were able to access it.

All the equity value that accrued from American enterprise and the prosperity of the American system accrued to the people who had access to private accounts. The people who only had access to public accounts got stuck owning Treasuries.

Today, the Social Security trust fund has a balance of $2.7 trillion. Based on the outflows and inflows, it's going to go bankrupt in 2032. Social Security will either get cut or the Fed will print a ton of money to keep it going.

The retirement age could go up. There are a lot of levers.

Exactly. I did the math. If you assume the S&P 500 continues to grow at 10.5% per year on average, there are ups and downs and drawdowns, but here's the important point: We could put about $500 billion into the trust fund today and it would not go bankrupt again. It would continue to grow every year.

Then all Americans would participate in American enterprise. Importantly, this would become the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. We don't need a separate sovereign wealth fund. We already have one. It's called the Social Security trust fund.

We've totally mismanaged it. I went back to understand why we've only ever bought Treasuries. Early on, the United States needed someone to loan it money, so it forced citizens to loan the government money in the form of Treasuries.

Today, the Social Security trust fund owns less than 10%—about 8%—of the total Treasury bonds outstanding. The rest are owned by the Fed, foreign investors, private investors, and others who want to own them.

Why are we forcing American citizens to own something that produces a lower return for no reason? We've created deep inequity through the Social Security system. If we had allowed it to invest in the S&P 500, buy American enterprises, and fund American businesses, every American would be wealthier.

The middle class that participated in the market through private retirement accounts would not have had that advantage over people who were forced to own Treasury bonds. We can fix it right now.

People will argue, “What if there's a down year, or 2 down years in a row?” We're already going to print money to make up the hole in Social Security. We're not going to let Social Security go bankrupt. We're not going to let it dry out.

We can create a backstop for Social Security. We're going to have to do it either way, so we might as well take on the growth.

No, no, no. Chamath, you were going to say something.

The reason we didn't do it goes back to what you said. We had a bunch of very well-educated, Ivy League-trained people running these institutions.

The feedback was probably, “There's too much risk. We've sensitized the model. It doesn't make sense. This is the safest thing to do.”

It goes back to the need for more practical thinking. Why does the S&P 500 exist? Of the thousands and thousands of companies in the world, more than 20,000 make over $1 billion a year. The S&P 500 is simply the 500 best—the best of the best of the best.

It didn't take a Ph.D. from Harvard to figure out that owning an index of the 500 best companies would have gone up. Since when are Americans risk-intolerant? There's something baked into the DNA of people who decide to leave their families and move here. We're an immigrant country.

Imagine logging in. We've all had a 401(k) account, and I remember how exciting it was to log in, see the account, see the businesses I owned, understand it, and watch the value go up.

Jason, you talk about people like us. My first job was making $4.25 an hour cleaning toilets in a pool hall in upstate New York.

I had a similar story.

I made $4.25 an hour working at Burger King in Canada.

The worst part about my job in the pool hall was that the manager made me go play poker at his house, and he took all the money back.

I stole chicken fingers at night and brought them home. My mom would heat them up. But it was so exciting in my career and my life to go from that moment to having a 401(k), logging in, seeing the businesses I owned, and participating in their value.

Imagine if every American, when they get their Social Security statement, saw not just a dollar amount and how much they would get in the future, but all the businesses they owned a piece of and could participate in. We can fix this.

Every dollar going into sovereign wealth fund ideas, or into a crypto fund, should go into the Social Security trust fund. That trust fund should benefit all Americans. It should be equities, ownership, and participation in American enterprise.

It's not about a $1,000 payment when you're born. It's about ongoing participation—putting money in and having it allocated in the way smart and wealthy Americans allocate it: owning businesses.

I think this is a really important framing. We see comments on YouTube saying, “You guys don't understand.” I remember being in debt when I graduated college, finding a job, working my ass off, putting in 20-hour days, and never sleeping. It wasn't easy.

I feel emotional about this because none of us inherited anything. We came to America, and to see the joy and what we benefited from is overwhelming.

It wasn't given to us. None of us inherited it. We worked for it. To see people talk about being successful and getting there as if it's a crime—as if being successful makes you a bad person—is painful. It's a dream. It's a dream.

My mom is also an immigrant. She came here from Scotland and had no education. I think she stopped going to school at 14. She came to America and became massively successful relative to where she came from and where she got to.

She bought a home in the East Village of New York City and a beach house, all through grind and hard work. What she saw here, and what I think a lot of immigrants see when they come here, is opportunity.

She had ambition and opportunity. A lot of immigrants come from places where they feel like there is absolutely no opportunity. The second they feel there's a little bit of it, they work those 20 hours a day.

I saw my parents grind. My work ethic comes from watching them kill it every day. What you guys are speaking to is really important, and it's important that people know your stories because it becomes more accessible when they see what you came from.

They know you were working at Burger King and now you're worth billions of dollars. It's important that Americans know that's possible for them. Maybe they won't become billionaires, but maybe they'll become millionaires, or make $300,000, or buy a $100,000 house they're proud to own outright.

What you just said is hope and abundance. We put the money there, everybody is invested in the success of the American economy, and when we see the stock-market ticker turn green, we get excited. We start rooting for it.

Chamath gets excited when the market is green, too.

He's going to start crying.

It's been red for a week.

Think about CEOs. They've become villainized because we're not attached to the success of their companies.

If your biggest holding is Tesla, you're not upset.

Exactly. People think their success works against their best interests. They think the system is rigged, that they can't be part of it, and that they're being ground down.

This is a really good proposal, Friedberg.

If I ran for president, do you know what my position would be?

What's that?

I'd build 5 cities with 3 million homes in each. You could only buy them if you made under a certain amount per year.

It wouldn't be like the projects or subsidized housing in New York.

It would be nice houses.

That's pretty good if you can get it.

Stuyvesant Town isn't bad, but I'm not talking about the projects. I'm talking about proper homes.

We're the most innovative country and society ever created. The Greeks were pretty great, too, but we could build 5 new cities. Why can't we build 5 new cities with 3 million homes each? Let's do a Manhattan Project for housing.

And health care—how do we not have good health care for everybody in this country? We're the richest country in the world, with the greatest economy. We should be able to solve these problems.

For young people, I think they would forgive health care if they were invested in the market. Being invested in the market is daunting, but the feeling that everybody else is getting rich while you're not is the reason I bought crypto without knowing anything about it.

It's the reason everybody else bought it. They feel like the train is running away and they're not going to be part of it. How do we get them to feel part of that success?

Today, 60% of the net worth of middle-class households is in their home. Only 10% is in the S&P 500, index funds, or retirement accounts.

By creating the American dream around housing and allowing the federal government to provide loans for housing, we've increased the cost of housing. We've created a destructive housing bubble because we've reduced people's exposure to productive value creation through owning businesses.

Instead, we've stored net worth in the house. To keep the economy and social structure stable, we've created policies that allow home values to continue growing. People feel like their net worth is increasing, so we keep inflating the value of homes.

Unfortunately, that's making new housing more expensive, which makes the problem worse.

Have you heard of Warren Buffett's most public failure?

No.

Warren Buffett's most public failure was when he was brought on as an adviser to Arnold Schwarzenegger when Schwarzenegger was running for governor.

Buffett looked at the laws in California and found one saying that when you own a home, you can pass it on to your kids and keep the original cost basis for purposes of calculating property taxes. That has had an enormously negative effect on the turnover of homes, and it's a major reason why homes are so expensive in California.

Buffett looked at this, and there was a lot of fanfare. Schwarzenegger said, “Here's my economic genius.” The first thing Buffett said was, “I think we should repeal this law.”

He was gone 2 days later.

He's not popular.

There are a lot of policies like this. If you do a true macroanalysis as an investor, you should probably have about 20% of your net worth in U.S. real estate, not 60%.

We need to give people the ability to own other assets, and we need to think about the follow-on effects of policies that incentivize almost all of your net worth to go into a single asset—your home.

That means we have to keep pumping up the value of the home. We need a system that makes people feel like they're getting ahead, so we keep inflating. Eventually, people can't afford homes, and that's where we are today.

When did you guys first start your education in the markets? At what age did you seek it out?

I bought my first stock in the company I was working for—or, more accurately, its parent company—in 1989, when I was 18 years old.

I bought $300 in stock. I signed up for an E-Trade account in college because I saw that TV show Bull. Do you remember that show? It was about investment banking during the dot-com bubble.

Nobody knows that show.

I was an astrophysics major, and I didn't know what I was going to do after college. I might have gone to graduate school. Then I got caught up in the dot-com bubble and started reading The Wall Street Journal every day.

I would take it down to the plaza and read it at school during lunch. I tried to learn about technology, business, and markets because I'd always been a tech guy. I saw all these startups and wanted to understand how the markets worked.

I put some money into an E-Trade account, bought some stocks, and read Investor's Business Daily to figure out what stocks to buy. They had a rating, so I bought those stocks and they went up. I thought, “This is awesome. I love owning stocks.”

That kicked me off. I got an investment-banking job after college, and it totally changed my career trajectory. I wanted to work in the tech industry and in business.

What about you?

It shifted for me when I bought my first equity.

By the way, what you asked is a really important question, Andrew. My interest in the stock market at that time changed my career trajectory. It reset what I was going to do with my life. I went from planning to work in science as a researcher to wanting to get involved in business and work in the tech industry.

What about you, Chamath?

I was 14 or 15 years old. Rodney King had been beaten and nearly killed, and there were all these race riots in Los Angeles. Nothing had changed in America, but where I was growing up in Canada, the provincial government created a program saying that if you were a minority and on welfare, they would pay for you to get a job.

I was a minority on welfare, so I got a job at a startup that was going parabolic. Its stock was going nuclear. I lived in a terrible part of town and saw the controller of that company drive past me every day while I waited for the bus.

One day he stopped. His name was Sam Legg. He drove me around that whole summer and taught me: What does the company do? Why is the founder a billionaire? What does any of this mean?

I saw firsthand what it meant to work not just for a salary, but to get a stake in the thing you were working for. I bought a couple of shares, they went up, and it was great.

Then I fell in love with the idea that I could understand something and own a piece of it. It accelerated after I graduated from college because I was in debt and asking, “How the hell do I get out of debt?”

I traded stocks on behalf of my boss, Mike Ferre, whom I thank to this day. I made a lot of money right before the dot-com crash, and he gave me the money to pay off my student loans.

Wow.

Ever since then, I was hooked. I thought, “Okay, I can learn this and deal with the vicissitudes of the market.”

The markets are brutal. There are moments when you wake up and everything looks like it's working. Then there are moments—and everybody needs to understand this—when it looks like the bottom is falling out.

I cannot describe the pressure you feel on behalf of yourself and your family when it looks like your net worth is down 30%, 40%, or 50%. It inflicts a level of psychological damage that I can't describe.

There was a period when I could tweet something and the markets would go up. People were asking what I was going to say next. Then it all stopped, and there was a 2½-year period when I gave it all back and then some.

That's frustrating.

The magic touch goes away. It's beyond frustrating. It shakes you to your core.

If we do these programs, I think Friedberg's idea is beautiful. But we have to teach people how to deal with drawdowns. If you don't teach them how to deal with the volatility of losing money, it's great when everything is green, but those red days matter.

How you carry yourself, how you act, and how you treat other people on the red days are the only things that matter.

It's a growth experience.

What about you, Schulz? When did you buy your first equity?

I was probably 19. My parents may have owned stock without me realizing it. Maybe a business manager set up a retirement fund or something, but I wasn't actively choosing a stock and buying it.

My wife's father is a very successful businessman. I don't want to say he predicted the markets, but he was in NVIDIA incredibly early, along with a bunch of other companies.

We were sitting somewhere in Aspen, and he said, “What do you mean you don't own anything? Can you take $10,000 or $100,000 and put it into these different stocks?” I said, “Okay.”

I opened an E-Trade account—or whatever it was—and did it. But what's interesting is that you guys were so young: 18, 22, 24.

How old are you?

I'm 41.

It might have been a little later for you.

I may have owned stock without realizing it, but my parents did well financially and were financially illiterate. There was no passing on knowledge of investing—when to invest or what it meant to invest.

They made their money by working every day. They taught dance lessons. A dance lesson cost a certain amount, and if 40 people showed up, more people were paying. Then other teachers could teach as well.

Investing was intimidating to them, and it was intimidating to me.

This is the upside of crypto in some ways, and also the upside of PrizePicks, gambling, poker, Robinhood, Coinbase, and all these services being available.

These young kids love to gamble.

They're learning.

They're learning how to take the downdrafts.

I think they are learning. The barrier to entry is lower, but my concern is that they're treating it more like gambling than investing. We've almost tricked the American public into thinking investing is gambling.

The way you guys are describing it—investing in the S&P and leaving it there through the downturns—isn't gambling.

You have to learn these lessons at the poker table. You can't play poker without real money, or you're not going to feel the burn and stay up at night. That's what these kids are doing.

How do we educate them?

Education comes from doing. If you let these kids trade, they'll figure it out over time. Then they get married, have a baby, and want to buy a house. They say, “I'm going to stop buying meme coins and start buying Bitcoin. I'm going to stop buying Bitcoin and buy NVIDIA and companies with real revenue.”

It happens all the time.

I agree with Schulz that you're being reductive. It's not as if they'll suddenly understand David Swensen's Yale endowment asset-allocation model.

I've seen thousands of people deeply steeped in this business wash out. The more sophisticated they get, the more they fall into the same pressures: They don't know how to simplify and they don't know how to be patient.

Those are things every human being needs to learn. I don't think time in the market solves those traits. They're psychological traits you have to figure out in a different way. You have to look inside yourself and work them out.

Fair enough. But between the choice of growing up blue-collar with no access to the markets and having no way to trade or learn, and the system we have today, I think the system we have today is better.

Can people jump the fence and lose all their money? Of course. But they could go to Vegas and do that. They could work with a bookie or do football sheets. I think they're learning.

When you use modern apps and look at strategies and see people on Reddit working on stock theses, I think it's trending in the right direction. There can always be more education.

America doesn't even know what compound interest is.

I agree. I'll tell you a great story. One of the best things that happened when I invested in the Golden State Warriors was that I bought 10% of the team in 2011 and got to meet all of them, including many of my heroes.

I remember sitting with one player and he asked me an incredible question: “Can you explain compound interest?” I still have the spreadsheet. I showed him a compound-interest table, and he had no idea how much bigger 10% versus 8% becomes over 20 or 50 years.

Exactly.

To your point, unless you jump into it and live it, you don't get it. Stan Druckenmiller says the same thing: invest, then investigate. There's nothing like putting risk on. There's nothing like playing a hand of poker or taking a shot with a different strategy in blackjack. Win or lose, you get feedback.

But my point is that most people don't get better. That's what you have to solve. How do you make it interesting and fun? How do you talk about the losses?

I had immense trouble with this, and I still do. How do you talk about getting hit for $4 billion? I can do it now, but it was brutal.

It stung for a while. It was hard for you.

It was hard. Imagine your entire identity is built around being successful in the markets, and you measure it the wrong way. You point to the number in the bank account, not the way your wife treats you, the way your kids treat you, or the way your friends treat you.

Then you say, “I'm 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70%, or 80% poorer, so I'm that much less of a human being.”

That's a good reality check—to lean into your family and the things that matter.

My point is that if we can get people more involved in the market, it's an incredible thing. But you have to wrap it in guardrails that have nothing to do with the market and everything to do with who you are as a person.

The first step is showing the simplest version of the market's benefit. I think that's compound interest.

Remove the stock market. Don't even talk about it. Just ask, “What happens if I leave money in a savings account earning 4% and don't touch it?”

The rule of 72 was what opened my brain. Whatever percentage you grow per year, divide it into 72. If you're growing 7.2% in the market per year, divide 72 by 7.2, and it takes 10 years to double your money.

If you're growing 7% a month on your investments—say you own a great business that's growing like Facebook—that means you double the number of users or revenue every 10.3 months.

Once you understand that, you can do it quickly. In poker, you know the number of outs. Each card represents roughly a 2% chance because there are 50 of them. They each count for about 2%. You can start doing this in the back of your head.

I had the idea of doing a kids' investment club. I bought the domain Kids Investment Club. I need to prioritize this and find a CEO for it, or do it as a nonprofit.

Kids need to learn this early. Robinhood or someone should make an app where they can invest with a shadow account and their parents approve the trades. We should be learning all of this in high school. What could be more important?

Remove the fear. The reason it's important is what we were saying earlier: Get the American people invested in American success, and you'll find so much more patriotism. We won't nitpick about all the little things that don't affect us.

I can't begin to explain how quickly people would forget about the bathrooms when the S&P is up 15% and they're looking at their portfolio saying, “I don't care where you take a shit.”

Absolutely.

Look at this, Friedberg. Here's your time machine. There's your favorite show.

I don't want to get more emotional, but there he is—your guy Stanley Tucci from Bull.

I think it only made it 1 season.

One season. Tucci gang in full effect.

I was such a tech nerd growing up, but I never thought about the business of technology. Then the startup boom happened, and you had this show on TV. I thought, “This is so much more exciting than sitting in a lab doing mathematical modeling and pulling my hair out.” I wanted to get after it.

The rest is history.

Have you guys watched Stanley Tucci on HBO, where he tours Italy and cooks?

It's so great.

I've seen him cook on TikTok. He's like, “Today we're going to make frico. We're doing it in the carpaccio base, and we're going to put—” I just want this guy to do ASMR or put me to bed at night.

I have a man crush on Tucci. Tucci's the best. I would like to roll with Tucci. Can you imagine if we went to Italy and just rolled through Italy with Tucci?

I love that guy.

Any dream is possible, J. You could pull it off.

We're all dreaming here.

We're still dreamers, by the way. Everyone should know that.

The thing a lot of people assume about humans is that there's an end to the rainbow. There isn't. You ride the rainbow until you die.

That's it. There's always hope, always dreams, and always more. It doesn't stop. That's what makes it fun.

Are you taking ketamine in Austin? What happened? You just got very philosophical.

I'm a little hungover today. I started drinking at 10 a.m.

Yesterday we went to the Mothership, and we hung out with a couple of your boys, I think—Tony. Tony Hinchcliffe was very nice. We met Shane Gillis; Shane Gillis was there, but he was big-time. There was a mob around him, and we didn't get to meet him.

The guy Bert—I didn't recognize him.

Yeah, he had a shirt on, so I didn't recognize him.

Of course. I was like, “Who is this guy?” Then I saw the body shape and thought, “Yeah, that's probably him.”

When did you start in comedy?

I think it's been almost 18 years.

So you started in your early 20s in New York, going to the Funny Bone or what? Actually, I have a question: How did you get into it, and how did you pay for your life before you made it? Did you have a normal day job?

I lived with my parents for a very long time. My parents lived in the East Village, so I was within walking distance of multiple comedy clubs. It was incredibly convenient.

I worked with my parents for a little bit, then I managed restaurants. I started in Santa Barbara when I was in college. That's where I did my first comedy gig. Then I managed a restaurant out in Brooklyn called Biscuit Barbecue in Park Slope.

After that, I started to make a little money in stand-up. It was enough to buy a Mamoun's Falafel. I had a $5-to-$10-a-day budget. I could eat cereal for breakfast, and I saved some money because I was in school and working at that restaurant.

I had a little pipe dream of opening a bar with a friend of mine in New York. Then I thought, “You know what? I'm just going to spend this money trying to be a comedian. I hope by the time I get rid of the money, I'm making money in comedy.”

It came down to about $700 in my bank account. I was renting out the room where I slept, so I would sleep in a closet in my apartment. It just worked out. I started making a little money, doing a couple of gigs, started touring, and got on a TV show. Then it kind of worked out.

Was there a moment when you broke through? When cancel culture was alive and well, that's when I first encountered you. It was initially on TikTok, and you were on fire because you were saying stuff nobody else was saying. I thought, “How does he even dare to pull this shit off?”

You kind of break and then you go away. I broke on some MTV shows. I was doing all these things on MTV, had my own shows, and all that kind of stuff. Then the MTV thing dried up, and I kind of went away.

Luckily, I was doing a podcast with Charlamagne, and the podcast was very popular. That was providing for me. I was also doing some shows on the road, and people would come out from the podcast.

I really couldn't get any traction in the stand-up world. When I was doing comedy stuff with MTV, it wasn't really in the stand-up world, because my stand-up maybe wasn't of the ilk of what was popular at the time.

I have a lot of empathy for the people who are just working at a network and producing these shows. Their kids are in private school, and they want to tell a crazy joke about women or gay people or whatever it is, but they're thinking, “I'm not trying to get fired. I'm just trying to get my kids into private school. We just got them into Dalton. I don't want to rock the boat.”

I understand the reason. I don't think that they're self-preservationists, exactly, but I didn't want to change my comedy. I thought, “Okay, where can I put it out?”

Luckily, we were putting the podcast out on YouTube, and it was successful. I started putting things out on YouTube, and I started doing these shows. The shows started selling out. It was really weird. The first thing I put out sold out the next weekend.

How many seats were these?

They were 300-seat clubs. You'd do maybe 4 or 5 shows a weekend, and you'd get $50 a seat or $20 a seat?

No. You didn't even get that. You got a flat rate. You'd get $2,000 to do the weekend or something like that. A lot of the time, the comedy clubs would just call people and say, “Hey, do you want to see this guy?” They'd give away the tickets for free.

The old model was basically like a bar: You just get people in, and they sell drinks. The weekend would sell out, then another one would sell out, and I thought, “Holy shit, maybe there's a conversion rate that I didn't see.”

I kept putting stuff out on YouTube. I did a new clip every week for a year on YouTube. Then I put a special on YouTube instead. I learned very quickly that there was this huge white space in the market.

The comedy on TV was corny, and people didn't really like it. Nobody was putting out the “real comedy.” There are different versions of comedy, but I'm being very simplistic. The more edgy stuff I put on YouTube just exploded.

My career really took off from there. Then COVID came around, and I was able to be a little bit more honest because I wasn't tied to a network and worried about maybe losing my job at the network.

I think in America we reward bravery. You just signed a Netflix deal, right? You did this show?

Yeah, we're actually doing the show in Austin tonight. We're going to talk with some folks about this general concept: You start out as an independent, say whatever you want, and you're totally free. It's your own platform and your own voice.

Yeah, and then you sign a deal with another platform. Are you now—did you find it hard to trade the money for whatever might come along with that? Are there restrictions?

There are 2 ways to look at it. I don't want to give myself too much credit, but I think what we did was create another marketplace for comedy that the streaming networks had to compete with.

They were losing comics to YouTube because it was more advantageous to put your comedy up on YouTube, build a following, and then sell tickets on the road. Before, the only way you could really make a big chunk of money on your comedy was if you got one of these fancy specials.

Now people are saying, “I don't even want to do the special. If I put it on YouTube, I can tour for years and really build a fan base.”

The Netflix thing is interesting because Netflix is the second-biggest streaming service on the planet. It's YouTube, then Netflix. If I already have this huge imprint on YouTube, it would only be smart for me to tap into the second-biggest platform and see if there are people there who aren't consuming my content on YouTube.

Back to the guy whose kid is at Dalton: When you go and negotiate a deal with Netflix, are they basically silent, or do they give you notes?

Not a single note. You do whatever you want, and it is what it is. Let it rip.

My last special was supposed to be with Amazon. It was with Amazon, and they had some notes. I bought it back from them and put it out myself.

Wow. Really? You don't really know what you're worth. Walk us through that. What did the notes say?

It was 2 jokes. I get it—they make money selling toilet paper. Why are they going to have this huge—

Toilet paper. Big T. Very powerful lobby.

What's funny is that culture has changed, and I feel like a lot of times the streamers are downstream from culture. I bet now I would be able to put it out on Amazon and be totally fine, but at that time it was maybe very edgy and a volatile time culturally.

I was able to put it out myself, and I sold it myself. It was one of the coolest things ever because I think I may be one of the only comics who actually knows what they're worth.

I’m not risk-averse at all. I actually enjoy risk. It kind of excites me. What excites me more is putting out the piece exactly how I wanted to put it out.

I can't scream about censorship and say comedians should do the jokes they want to do, and then, the second somebody gives me a big check, go, “Whoa, we don't have to do the jokes.” I have to be at least consistent on that.

Culture continued to change, and you have to give Netflix credit, too. They took a lot of hits for putting out comedy that some people thought was maybe a little too offensive. The Dave Chappelle stuff really put them in the crosshairs.

They stood strong.

Absolutely. They stood strong, and seeing that gave me a lot of confidence. I thought, “Okay.” We literally just made the whole thing, and they gave us money. They were not involved at all in the creation.

They're involved in giving us money for it, and then they're involved in the marketing, obviously, their algorithm, and getting it out. That's all Ted Sarandos. He believes in comedy.

He's a huge comedy fan from back in the day. I think people don't realize that about him. You need somebody who actually loves the art and isn't just looking at it as something they can monetize.

There was a term this guy used: You have to find somebody spiritually aligned with you. That's not mumbo jumbo. They truly understand the intention of comedy, so things aren't hurtful or painful to them because they understand what you're intending to do.

They tried to cancel you. What was the joke?

Who? The mobs?

They went after Tony Hinchcliffe twice.

Oh, yeah, and each time he went 10 times bigger.

They came after Chamath on this program. That was the first level-up. We got 3 times the audience after they tried to cancel Chamath.

The White House released a statement.

It doesn't really work when you have core fans who believe in you. I feel like you guys have probably built that. There are people who are very grateful for the information that you give them.

When they try to paint you in a certain light, you actually have 100 hours of time with those people. They know you to be more than that one statement you've said. They're not as concerned about the thing you said that maybe was taken out of context or offended people.

I think the biggest thing people miss about comedians is that you're allowed to be offended by the joke I say. You're allowed to react however the fuck you want to react to it. You had your life, you went through some crazy shit, maybe you were bullied as a kid, and you don't want other people to potentially have those feelings.

You see a joke that could elicit those feelings, and you're like, “I want to protect them from that.” That's kind of noble. I'm cool with that. If you tell me you don't like me teasing you, I'm not going to tease you personally ever again. I want you to feel good.

That doesn't mean I won't continue to make those jokes somewhere else. I think my shows have the most diverse audience in comedy history. You come out to one of my shows, and you can't tell me that people don't like these jokes.

I try very hard—if I'm curious about your culture, you'll know it through the jokes. It's not some little shit. I'll try to dive deep and even surprise you about something I might know.

In that way, people start to feel seen. They don't feel bullied; they actually feel represented. They're excited about it.

You said something at the beginning that I thought was really interesting: You're a great comedian, and great comedians are great observers of culture. Can you just observe the cultural moment for us? We talk about it a lot, but I want you to put a point on it. Where are we? Where's America? What the hell is going on?

There's an all-time-low confidence in institutions and low confidence in information. There's an obsession with conspiracy because it's 2-fold.

One, it's the easiest way for dumb people to feel smart. When you know something no one else knows and get to share it with people, there's that dopamine hit: “I bet you didn't know this happened.”

Those things thrive in times when there isn't real transparency. I think everybody's looking for answers, and nothing is exactly how it seems. The only way to restore that confidence is brutal transparency. You have to be really honest with people and say, “This is what it is.”

We're Americans. We're proud people, so we can get through whatever you say, but you have to tell it to us as it is. I think we're assessing relationships right now.

When the economy is rough, you're seeing all the Jewish stuff right now. Obviously, with the crazy—

Most people have never met a Jewish person. Most Americans have no clue what a Jewish person is outside of Curb Your Enthusiasm or Seinfeld. They don't know what it is.

They think Jews are Upper East Side New Yorkers. They think it's either Seinfeld or Hasidic. They don't even know what a Sephardic Jew is. They don't know what an African Jew or a Moroccan Jew is. They have no clue what that is, and they shouldn't. They're like, “How many Jews are there?” There are more people from L.A. than there are Jews.

It's a very small population. I think there's a little bit of a disconnect. I could be off, but I think there's an ambient feeling toward Jews from people who don't know Jews, and the stereotypes probably aren't the best.

As long as the economy is good, everybody's cool. They're like, “They're successful, they stick together, they own businesses,” whatever. Then eggs get expensive, you're behind on your rent, you don't feel hope, and you start asking, “Why do they have all that? What are they about? Why are they separatists?”

I'm here praying and trying to get everybody to go to heaven, and they just have their own thing. It's very easy for them to become this other group.

Then you extrapolate that with what's happening with Palestine and Israel, and you get people assessing the relationship between America and another country. You saw America become very uninterested in Ukraine quickly.

The second the economy goes down, we start asking, “What do they do for us? Why are we giving them this?” They're starting to ask similar questions about Israel. There are a lot of antisemites jumping on it and muddying the whole thing, saying, “Do they control the government? Do they do this?”

Every conspiracy is tied together, by the way.

You're speaking a profound secret that many administrations and governments have known for a long time. I think this is where some of the mistrust comes from.

I talked about this a couple of months ago, but the most incredible stock market was actually under Biden. The most money printed was under Biden. The largest cumulative total budget deficits were under Biden. The most short-term refinancing of debt was under Biden.

Part of what you can explain is that if you keep the signals that everything is healthy or up, you're allowed to prop up all of these other things that would get very quickly repriced. When you take the gas out of the market and all these other markets, and suddenly the price of energy is up, the price of this is up, and the price of that is up, then you start to question, “Hold on a second. Why are all of these things as expensive as they are?”

That's the above-the-line, below-the-line conversation that we've tried to have several times on this pod, Jason.

You have to meet people where they feel in order to communicate with them. When people are assessing America's relationship with Israel, they hear these sound bites like, “That's our closest ally,” and then they ask, “What does that mean?”

Explain to them what that means. Explain the importance of that relationship and how it's beneficial to Americans. If you don't explain it and just say, “Be quiet,” then they start looking at these lunatics on Twitter and asking, “Wait a minute, is that true?”

Then they're down the conspiracy hall. You have to explain these relationships. I don't know what the minerals deal was about with Ukraine, but I know that, for a second, some Americans heard, “We're going to get some minerals out of that.” They thought, “All right, minerals sound good. They're going to pay us back.”

It's that simplistic. That kind of communication is important, and it will help people understand these relationships, which I imagine are very important. I'm not privy to all the geopolitical decisions that are going on.

Who knows? Intelligence from Israel could have thwarted 20 more 9/11s. Maybe you can't say that because you would expose the intelligence operatives you have in the field, but I think it would be helpful for everyday Americans to understand the value of that relationship.

Then, when you see something crazy on Twitter, you can go, “Okay, you're just an antisemite looking for a justification for your hate.”

This is your point about Trump. Sometimes he has these takes—

We'll see you later, bro. Take care, David.

Take care.

This is the point: There's going to be a conspiracy theory about that right now. We were talking about Israel, and he's like the one Jewish guy left. Way to go. This is how it starts, David. You drove them out.

When you said Trump is a masterful communicator, Biden gave all these weapons to Ukraine under the auspices of what's called a Lend-Lease. They have to pay them back, but Biden never communicated that well.

Then Trump comes out and says, “You know what? We gave them $180 billion. They're going to give us $500 billion back. We're making a 42% compounded return.”

Sounds good to me. It's better than anything that's ever happened.

Chamath, as we wrap here, any final thoughts? What do you think about Trump, how he's doing, and what he's doing so far? And what do you think about Elon and DOGE?

Trump and what he's doing, how he's doing so far—I don't know. I don't know if I can assess it right away. Maybe I'm giving him a little bit longer landing strip than other people because I have a little more hope or optimism.

If you don't like the guy, you're going to see how horrible this is immediately. I'm going to give him a little more leeway to see what happens. If it doesn't work out and it's really horrible, I'll be the first person to call it out.

He's in power, so we should definitely check the people in power. I'm hoping that these actions in the short term are beneficial in the long term. Is everything going to work out? No.

DOGE—I’m so depressed about it. Not depressed per se, but I'm bummed because I don't think there's any American who's pro-waste, inefficiency, and bloat. This should be a bipartisan issue.

All Americans should be coming together and saying, “Oh my God, the DMV is going to get better. This sounds awesome.” I have a lot of respect for Elon, but sometimes on Twitter he's twisting the knife a little bit.

You don't need to twist the knife. We all want this. It's something we can come together as a country to support. This sounds great. Don't twist it—just let it be. Show your wins. When you do something wrong, we can acknowledge that what we did was wrong, and we'll respect that.

It bums me out that this has become so partisan. I do understand that there are a lot of people on the left who are making it partisan as well. They're weaponizing it.

There was a crazy clip between Joe Rogan and Elon where Rogan asked, “How does all this go down, actually?” Elon said, “I can't really speak about the corruption because I'm afraid it would get me assassinated.”

It was the weirdest 2-minute clip. Then they just left it and moved on. My brain was like, “What are they talking about? What must be going on there?”

There's a lot of money going out the door.

Who's killing Elon? If we're going to have World War III, don't you want the guy who has the rockets to go to Mars on your side?

Yeah, you want the super-genius on your side, for sure.

Another thing that's really interesting to me is that people keep asking, “What's Elon's play? What is he doing here? Is he actually going to take over?”

Elon has been dealing with local government for so long, trying to push things through. He's not an American citizen, so he cannot be president. He is at the highest position he will ever be in his lifetime in America. You can't get higher than being the right hand of the president, since you're not from America and can't be president.

I think he's going to behave really well because now he's in the most powerful position he will ever be in. If you want to talk about power plays, you have to watch out for J.D. Vance.

That guy has high emotional intelligence. That's somebody I would be keeping my eye on if I were Trump.

Elon is going to be your best friend, because it's only downhill if he pisses Trump off.

Interesting. Interesting little Manchurian candidate for J.D.

No, no, no. I'm not saying he's going to do anything bad, but don't treat him lightly. Don't sleep on J.D.

New Yorkers do this all the time. We hear someone with a Southern accent and think they're a goofball. That guy went from a broken home in Appalachia to Yale and then became vice president. He's 40—he's your age.

He called Trump Hitler or something, and ended up as his vice president. He said, “I'm a Never Trump guy.”

To say that he's not emotionally intelligent is to say he doesn't know how to manage up, or whatever that term is. He's savvy. Keep an eye on him.

Andrew Schulz is playing at the Funny Bone on April 16th and 17th. He'll be at Chuckles on the 20th. Two-drink minimum. You know where to find him. Incredible Netflix special. Who do you think is the funniest, if you had to take a wild stab? Me, Jason, or Friedberg?

Okay, so you can say me. Jason is the most naturally inclined to be funny. He's probably the funniest to be around.

Chamath will probably get the biggest laughs when he says something funny because he's not asking for much. He'll just say something that's like a dart, and it'll hit you. You'll be like, “Oh.”

David will structure something really funny, and you'll be like, “That was clever. I see how you did that.”

I was actually funny myself when I was an astrophysicist. I did Summer Stock.

That would be my take. If we're off the pod, I think Chamath says some wild shit that everybody goes, “What the fuck?” I think you say that the most.

There you go. Andrew Schulz picks me. They have it, Mom. I would like to clip that.

I like the way Schulz pronounces it, but I may go with Chamath. I like that—“Cham-ch-ch.”

Chamath is too—it's too used, actually. We should go to a different pronunciation.

I love “Chamoth.” Chamoth is just so—

It's tough with the names from over there. My podcast co-host is Akaash. Everybody calls him “Akash” now, but his name is spelled with 2 A's next to each other, so it's “Akaash.” It is tricky.

His parents specifically picked a name they thought Americans would be able to pronounce. They calculated that, and they were wrong.

That's a beautiful thing for a kid. They could have named him John or Steve if they wanted to. They had to keep it real, though.

When I could read and write English well—it was my second language—and I saw my name written out, I was like, “What the fuck did they do to me here?”

My middle name has about 15 other letters. Name a name that has “math” in it. They knew what they wanted.

Yes. They were like, “If you can pronounce this, you can solve the Pythagorean theorem.”

This is harder than the SAT. Be an engineer.

I'm so proud of him. He's going to figure it out.

Andrew, is it racist if I do an Indian impersonation? I know I can do Italian and Irish, but can I do Indian?

No, it's funny, bro. I don't think so. I think it's about the intent.

Actually, I don't even think it's the intent. If you say certain things—if you say “B,” for example—that's my love. If you say little things that are more than just the sound, then it becomes different.

But if you tap into the culture to let them know, “Hey, I didn't learn this from The Simpsons. I learned it from my buddy's family,” then I think you'll see Indian and Sri Lankan people say, “Oh, he got it. He's got friends. He knows.”

I'm going to wait until I make my move to comedian. I'm going to save it for when I get my Kill Tony set.

What's your Korean act? Can you do that? Can we go through it?

I can go Korean because my wife's Korean. I'll tell you: My father-in-law is an industrialist in China. I went there and said, “Hey, listen, I'd like to marry your daughter.”

He said, “Okay. 2 conditions.”

I said, “Okay.”

He said, “Do it fast,” and he poked me so hard—a reinforced poke with his finger—on my shoulder. I got a bruise.

I said, “What's the second thing?”

He said, “No refunds.”

I had to marry her within a year because he knew. He had 4 daughters, and he was like, “Listen, I have to move inventory.”

I love it.

I married the oldest daughter. None of the other daughters could get married until I married my wife, which was the greatest thing I ever did. We have 3 beautiful kids. You know how it is.

Good luck. You're going to have a second and third, Schulz. I know you've got some.

I hope so, man. 3 is the right number.

If you want to do half-Elon, you can go with the Chamath plan. He's on 6 or 7.

I'm on 5, bro. I'm on 5.

5.

Well, anything's possible. Friedberg's on 4.

I'm on 3. I think 3 is the right number.

I'm going to catch up, boys.