David Sacks、Larry Summers 与 Ezra Klein 的大关税辩论

Jason Calacanis

Looking forward to our thing in a few weeks.

Yeah. I don't know if I'll end up being there, but I'm hoping to. I'm hoping to.

Jason Calacanis

What do you guys have? You guys have, like, a liberal cuddle party, or what are you doing?

Yeah. Yeah. Larry takes a bunch of MDMA, and we all sort of go into the corner and hang out together.

Jason Calacanis

God, that sounds incredible.

Liberalism is wonderful, man. You should come try it.

Jason Calacanis

That's not liberalism. It's called something else. Sorry, Nikki. Is our crypto czar joining us or no?

He's—I'm talking to him now. It looks like he is.

Jason Calacanis

Oh, zing. This is going to be great. This will be like a ratings bonanza.

All right, we do have David Sacks here. David, make sure you have a good tie on. Look at Sacks looking so presidential. He looks thin, doesn't he? He looks fabulous. All right, here we go: 3, 2, 1.

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

All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. I'm your host Jason Calacanis with my besties Chamath Palihapitiya, our chairman dictator, and live from, well, the administration, Mr. David Sacks, our czar for AI and crypto, and amazingly two fantastic guests this week we have New York Times writer and host of the Ezra Klein podcast. He's got a new book with Derek Thompson, Abundance, and he co-founded Vox in 2014. He's our guest here today, before Trump ships him to El Salvador. Please welcome Ezra Klein. How are you, sir?

Glad to be here in my final hours of freedom.

Jason Calacanis

Okay, great. Good to be here. Sorry, Sacks.

And with us, of course, Larry Summers, economist, former Treasury secretary under Clinton, former director of the National Economic Council under Obama, and the president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006. Thanks for coming, Larry.

Good to be with you.

Jason Calacanis

Okay, we have a lot to get to here, so we might as well talk about the big news of tariffs. It's day 80 of Trump's second presidency, his second term, and Trump tweeted that he paused tariffs for everyone but China on Wednesday.

Basically, let me just cue up the details, Larry, and then we'll get your take on all of this. Just 1 week after Liberation Day, Trump announced on Truth Social that, in effect, he was raising tariffs against China to 125% based on their “lack of respect,” quote unquote, instead of negotiating, and that he was pausing reciprocal tariffs on all other countries for 90 days. Markets ripped 10% after he posted this.

Today, Thursday, when we tape, there's been a massive sell-off on Wall Street, so the roller coaster ride continues. What it will be on Friday when you consume this podcast is anyone's guess. The S&P is down 5% today. For context, the S&P was at 5,700 pre-Liberation Day, so that's about a 9% drop after these wild swings.

In fact, this has been historic volatility. Here are the top sell-offs in history. As you can see, 3 of them came during Black Monday in 1987, 3 of them came during the financial crisis, and 3 of them came during COVID. Coming in 11th is Trump's tariffs.

Also, in the gainers, you have these big rebounds. Wednesday's 9.5% recovery was number 3. The administration says this was all part of a master plan. We'll hear more about that later, and that they laid a trap for China. They lit a trap.

Bessent has been the spokesperson during this retreat, or whatever we're going to call the pause. “This was driven by the president's strategy. He and I had a long talk on Sunday, and this was his strategy all along.” I don't think we need to play the clip. That's the gist of it.

The White House account then tweeted, in all caps—my favorite way to tweet—“Do not retaliate and you will be rewarded.” The Wall Street Journal, on the other side, posted a story about why Trump blinked. They chronicled the decision as being affected by Jamie Dimon, who went on Fox to express fears of a recession while saying the tariffs were valid and that he knew Trump and the Cabinet would be watching him on Fox.

Other banking executives who felt they didn't have a lot of influence in this administration, according to the Wall Street Journal, started lobbying Republican lawmakers that the Trump tariff plan would tank the economy. The White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, started receiving calls from executives and lobbyists expressing concerns, and the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump was influenced heavily by Bessent.

They were flooded with worried calls from Wall Street, and the president was lobbied to find an off-ramp. Trump ultimately relied on his instincts, according to the administration. Larry, is this 4D chess, or is this something else? What are your thoughts?

This is dangerous work with a sledgehammer on a pretty sensitive machine, which is the global economy, and it's having really serious consequences.

First, it's important to understand that there are more tariffs around than you described. Even after the big back-off, there's a 10% across-the-board tariff, a range of structural tariffs, like on steel and automobiles, and a range of new tariff threats, like on pharmaceuticals.

Here's a kind of market-based estimate of what the damage the market thinks this is all doing to the U.S. economy is. The market's down—let's take today's number, 9%. If that's right, that would be about $4 trillion. That's $4 trillion since Liberation Day.

Of course, markets were down coming into Liberation Day because of some anticipation of these policies. So let's be conservative and say these policies have taken $6 trillion off the stock market. Now, the stock market only measures the adverse impact on corporate profits, not the adverse impact on workers and not the adverse impact on consumers.

One way of thinking about adding to it would be to say that corporate profits were 10% of the economy. So you could argue for multiplying by a factor of 10, but maybe that's too exaggerated or too bold. So let's multiply by a factor of 5. What you get is a loss in the $30 trillion range as the present value, as estimated by markets, of what's being done.

I know the Trump administration sometimes likes to say it's working for Main Street, not Wall Street. I noticed that they were pretty excited about the stock market rally yesterday, in a way that wouldn't really go with not caring about markets.

I think what markets are seeing is what's true, which is 3 things. This is an inflation shock because you're adding to prices. The CEO of Amazon got it right; the Secretary of the Treasury got it wrong. Increases in tariffs of this magnitude, the overwhelming part of them, will be passed on to consumers.

So you've got an inflation shock. When you raise the prices of people and their income, at least in the short run, is the same, they're poorer, and that means they can afford less stuff. That pushes the economy down. So you've got higher inflation, less demand, and therefore more unemployment. All of that's bad for the economy and companies.

The last thing, which I think is profoundly important, is that we are trading like an emerging-market country right now. For a serious country like the United States, the pattern is that when the world gets riskier, bonds go down in yield and the currency goes up in value because people come for the safe haven.

When you're a country like Argentina, then the assets all move together: falling stock prices go with higher bond yields and a weakening currency. Because of our erratic behavior, we have changed the zeitgeist surrounding America from the traditional zeitgeist surrounding America to the kind of zeitgeist that surrounded Juan Perón's Argentina.

That goes with all the other things that are happening: more protectionism, denying the independence of the central bank, fiscal irresponsibility, a breakdown of traditional boundaries between government and business, substantial cronyism as a strategy, authoritarian tendencies toward the opposition, and a lack of total respect for the judiciary.

Jason Calacanis

Larry, keep going, Larry.

What we're seeing is a pattern of America being governed on the kind of Juan Perón Argentina model. That sometimes produces some benefits for some people in the short run, and that sometimes generates popularity for it. Perón kept coming back in Argentina, but ultimately it's extremely costly for our society.

Jason Calacanis

You've heard Larry's take on all of this. Larry's giving it about a B+ on the Harvard grading scale, which might be inflated. I'm not sure.

Sacks, obviously, in the administration, you cover 2 things: AI and, of course, crypto. And you're a member of the pod. So let's get your take on what happened this week with these tariffs. Even the most ardent supporters of Trump have felt this is chaotic, not well executed, and not communicated well. What's your take, Sacks, on how this was executed, and could this have been done better?

Well, I think what happened, if you go back to Liberation Day, was only 8 days ago. It was April 2. If I had told you on April 1 that Donald Trump would find a way to get the entire world to eagerly embrace a 10% tariff on the American market, and not only would they not complain, but they'd actually be relieved that it was only 10%, you would have said that would be an April Fool's joke.

If I had told you 8 or 9 days ago that Trump would find a way to accelerate the United States' decoupling from China, which is something he's long wanted to do, and that Wall Street would basically breathe a sigh of relief over that, you would have said there's no way that could happen.

If I had told you 8 or 9 days ago that President Trump figured out a way to assert a presidential power in a way that gives America extraordinary leverage over virtually every country in the world, you would have said, “Well, I don't believe it. What is that power?” He proceeded to do that, and now basically every country in the world except for China is coming to Washington, seeking to negotiate a new trade deal for the United States on better terms for the U.S.

If you told me any of that a few days ago, I wouldn't have believed you, and I would have thought the consequences would be a substantially deteriorated American economy and a substantially less secure United States. I don't think we know that. I don't think we know that.

It's not any surprise. There's nothing surprising about the fact that the United States has the power to extort Lesotho. It's just that that's the country that was singled out in the Trump formula for the highest level of protection. There is no surprise in that. There is no surprise that the capacity to get countries to Washington will be very, very high.

Japan's coming to Washington. South Korea is coming to Washington. Everybody's going to try to cut a deal; everyone's going to come to Washington. It never would have occurred to anyone with experience in government that the United States would have any difficulty getting any major country to send a representative to the United States to have a discussion and a negotiation with the United States on a matter that was of concern to the United States. They never could possibly have imagined any such difficulty.

Jason Calacanis

Let me let Sacks reply to that, and then, Ezra, I'm going to bring you in. Sacks, go ahead. You reply.

Then why didn't they, Larry? Do you think that all these countries were going to renegotiate their trade deals with the United States if President Trump asked nicely? If he said, “Pretty please, renegotiate our trade deals so you take down your trade barriers,” they would have done it. If he had said, “Pretty please with a cherry on top.” That's not the way these things work. He had to establish the leverage in the negotiation first.

The fact of the matter is, he's the first president in decades who's been willing to do that. You don't get anywhere by just asking nicely. I think that what President Trump did over the last 8 days was, A, establish the leverage and, B, get all these countries to now want to negotiate a new trade deal with the United States.

Jason Calacanis

If this is such a terrific thing, why do markets think it's so terrible for the American economy? Maybe the market is just completely wrong. But at least another possibility is that the market is judging this. The job of markets, I mean, is to look forward. It's to look past the immediate. It's to see what the long-run consequences are going to be. Markets are making a pretty devastatingly negative judgment.

Not true. Not true. Not true. That feels emotional and nice, but it's just not accurate. So let's just establish a couple of facts about quote-unquote “the markets.”

Number 1, there are 2 markets, and they behave totally differently and sometimes inversely to each other. There's the stock market and there's the bond market. With respect to the stock market, what they are debating—and you're right, Larry—is what the effective long-term rate of return is that a dollar needs to generate in order to pay me back that dollar. That is what the fundamental stock market does.

What we've seen for many years with trade imbalances, trade deficits, and close-to-zero interest rates—which happened more under Democrats than Republicans—is that we have allowed the stock market to inflate past historical averages. What we've actually seen happen in the last week is what most people would call mean reversion. The stock market is still way above where it was last year, 2 years ago, 3 years ago. What's happened is that the forward multiples have compressed. So that's number 1. That's a fact. You can debate whether that's bad or good, and I'm willing to debate that with you.

Now let's go to bonds. With respect to bonds, what we're seeing now is that there are 2 very complicated issues, and we don't know what the unknown known is. Let me be very specific. In the last 2 days, we saw one part of the bond market totally get out of whack. What we know is that the yields changed materially, in a very acute way, which is atypical of how the bond market typically digests a philosophical change in approach to policy.

Normally, when you see an acute reaction in the bond market, the underlying reason tends to be some financial calamity in a market participant. What we heard in the last 24 hours is that a lot of this move may have been attributed to an enormous leveraged bet on U.S. Treasuries by a Japanese hedge fund. It will take 3, 4, 5, and 6 weeks for us to really know, separately.

What we do know, though, is where the structural complexity of the market—and this is where, Larry, I agree with you—is acute and important to observe: in the credit markets for private companies. That is where you have to pay a lot of attention.

Jason Calacanis

Okay, Larry, let me let you respond to Chamath's response to you, and then, Ezra, I promise you're going to come in next. Larry, go ahead.

Chamath, as you well know, the vast majority of financial thinking emphasizes changes in the earnings prospects of companies associated with the strength of the economy as a major source of stock market fluctuations. If you look at dividend strips, if you look at what's happening to analyst revisions, negative prospects for the economy have a lot to do with why the stock market has turned downward.

The foreign-exchange market is very big, and it's a big referendum on whether people have confidence in the United States. Somehow, tariffs that reduce imports are supposed to reduce dollar selling and make the currency go up. Not only is the currency not going up, it's going down substantially. So we're seeing a pattern. Maybe it's all just due to one Japanese hedge fund, but maybe we're seeing a pattern that really looks pretty much like the Argentine pattern.

Jason Calacanis

Ezra, you're hearing this debate. I think there's no debate that this was done in a very extreme fashion, at a minimum. Do you wonder if this could have been done in a more gradual or thoughtful way? What's your take on the execution here by the administration of these tariffs and their response to the markets?

I can't say I wonder if it could have been done in a more gradual, thoughtful way. It could have. I defer to Larry on the markets. I'm more of a connoisseur of arguments, and something I've been thinking about over the past very long 8 days is covering the 2024 election and covering Donald Trump's tariff promises.

It was a thing that liberals like me were doing where we would do these shows and say, “Donald Trump is promising a 10% to 20% global tariff and then a 65% tariff on China. If he does that, it'll have this set of effects: higher prices, financial uncertainty, and so on.” What I would be told—the counterargument was—“Oh, you libs, you always take him literally when you should be taking him seriously.”

I had Vivek Ramaswamy on my show. He said he's not going to do that. That's just a negotiating ploy. This was the common line from Trump allies on Wall Street. Then I watched as he began doing not just that, but layering a series of bilateral tariffs on top of that plan.

The markets began freaking out. While they were freaking out, a bunch of his defenders said, “No, no, no. Actually, these tariffs, which we told you were never going to happen, are actually a great idea. We need to reset the entire global financial system, and you can't shift those tectonic plates without creating a few earthquakes.”

Then, the moment the tariffs paused with the 90-day pause on the tariffs on top of the 10% and the China tariff, I heard, “Nope, that pause is genius. Haven't you read The Art of the Deal?” What I would observe from this is that usually, when an idea is good, you don't need people jumping back and forth on it so often—going from “these tariffs are a bad idea, but they're a smart negotiating ploy” to “these tariffs are actually a great idea, and you should all calm down,” as Trump said, “You should all be cool,” back to, “No, these tariffs are a great idea.”

I think something I'd love to hear from David is what the measure of success in 2 years is. We can sit here and speculate about the effect of these, and I'm much more on Larry's side than what I'm hearing from Chamath and David. What are your measures? In 2 years, if manufacturing employment or whatever is below X, will you be unhappy? If GDP is what? What is an objective yardstick where we could come back in 700 days and say, “Did this work out, or was this a bad idea?”

Jason Calacanis

Go ahead.

I would say probably the biggest thing would be whether the U.S. can reindustrialize to some extent so that we're not completely dependent for our supply chains on a potentially hostile adversary. What is the measure of that? Is it the quantity of manufacturing we're making? Is it the share of manufacturing? I think that's a hard thing to understand.

During COVID, we discovered that we were horribly dependent on a supply chain from China for some of our most essential products—for pharmaceuticals, for other medical gear that we needed during COVID.

Jason Calacanis

Sure. If you were to put a metric on that, just as one example, what would it be? But we've also learned that our entire supply chain for all sorts of industrial products is now dependent on China and other countries.

So let's be more precise. We have 4% unemployment, at the record low of our lifetimes. Do you think Americans want to work in these factories? And if so, which factories? Obviously, pharmaceuticals—that's a dependency. Obviously, building ships and weapons—that's a dependency.

I think we can all agree on that. And that might be hundreds, low hundreds of thousands of jobs. Do you believe we should be making Nike sneakers here? Do you believe we should be making jeans here? Again, what would be the objective measure of success—a certain number of jobs, a certain number of factories, or certain types of factories?

Because the other piece that I don't understand, and maybe you can inform me here, Sacks, is, number 1, who's going to do this work if we're going to be deporting millions of people, we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetimes, we have automation coming to these factories, and Americans don't historically want to take these jobs?

How is this all going to work? It seems a bit farcical to me that we're going to bring these things back.

I don't think the millions of Americans who lost their jobs in the heartland because we let China into the WTO—which is something that Larry, I think, supported and championed—

You're talking about decades, though, right? That's what started this whole thing.

I don't think those millions of people want to lose their jobs.

You're talking nonsense. What are you talking about?

Respectfully, Larry, you were Treasury secretary when we walked China into the WTO, and you're still defending it.

Jason Calacanis

I was just watching an interview—hold on, David. Larry, you just did an interview with Niall Ferguson where he asked you whether it was a good idea to bring China into the WTO and whether it was a good idea to give them permanent normal trade relations status, basically MFN, which is something that Bill Clinton did in 2000.

Why am I the only one who gets to talk for 2 seconds before I get interrupted? You guys get 5 to 10 minutes.

Jason Calacanis

Finish your thoughts.

I got to speak for 2 seconds, then you interrupt me. You speak for 5 or 10 minutes. Go right ahead.

Larry, I just saw you do an interview with Niall Ferguson where he asked you, “Was it a good idea to bring China into the WTO? Was it a good idea to give them permanent normal trade relations status?” I admit it was bipartisan. George W. Bush continued it, and you were defending this as a good idea for the country.

What was the result of that over the past 25 years? Millions of industrial jobs were lost or exported to China. Millions of factories shut down. The United States has a diminished and hollowed-out industrial base. We certainly can't make the products of the future, like drones or semiconductors.

Jason, just to answer your question, obviously some industries are more strategic than others. Do I personally care about sneakers or textiles? No, I personally don't. Do I care about semiconductors? Absolutely. Do I care about circuit boards? Do I care about drones? Do I care about robots? Do I care about EVs and cars? Absolutely.

Okay, those industries—we are no longer in a position as a country to make those products because we exported our entire supply chain and manufacturing base to China.

So how is that a good idea, Larry?

Jason Calacanis

Okay. I have 3 questions, and then, Ezra, I'll go back to you and Sacks. Go ahead.

One, can you name a single trade barrier that was reduced by the United States associated with China's accession? A single restriction that existed in the United States, that had not been in place for 5 years before that, that we removed during China's WTO accession. Can you name one?

I don't think we should have done any of it, Larry. We threw open our markets to Chinese goods.

What restriction? Your thesis is that we threw open the market and therefore exposed ourselves to all of this China thing. The question I'm asking you is: Can you name any restriction on Chinese exports to the United States that was in effect in 1999 and was removed by our WTO accession in 2000? Can you name any such restriction? Just name one.

This was a policy that built up over time and was basically made permanent. It was made permanent when we walked China into the WTO and gave them MFN status.

Sorry, David. I'll ask the question one more time. We had given them MFN status 15 years before.

No, they had MFN status. They had it for 15 years. There was not a single reduction in a barrier to Chinese trade. So the way in which you're describing it just bears no resemblance to what it was. Bringing them into the WTO—what was the point of bringing them into the WTO?

Bringing them into the WTO was to use the leverage that we had to win a whole variety of concessions that enabled us to export more to China and get more reciprocity.

This is an extraordinary history here.

You're totally denying history.

All right, listen. This was a bad deal.

Jason Calacanis

Hold on a second. I want to go back to this for just a minute. I just want to know: The whole argument you are making is about increased exports to the United States that had bad consequences, and so I'm just going to keep asking you what barrier previously existed.

Okay, I'll name them. Number 1, prior to the WTO, China imposed a bunch of export duties and taxes on a whole bunch of goods to control outflow. That prioritized domestic supply. As part of coming into the WTO, China said, “We'll limit these export duties to only a specific set of products, and then we'll cap those duties at agreed rates.”

Number 2, they eliminated export quotas. They historically had export quotas to manage the volume of goods. Under that WTO commitment, they agreed to phase out all those quantitative restrictions on exports except where explicitly justified under the WTO.

Number 3, they removed the export-licensing restrictions. Number 4, they ended state-trading monopolies for exports. Number 5, they liberalized foreign-trade rights.

The point is, people thought that China was going to be a honeypot of economic activity, and it turned out to be a sucking sound—a grand sucking sound of opportunity—where the globalist corporations saw a massive labor arbitrage. So it's fair to say that it was done with the best of intentions, but it was a bad deal, and they got one over on us.

Jason Calacanis

Rather than having 30 minutes of debate over something that happened in the '90s, I would like to go back to this question. I keep not hearing an answer.

If in 2 years it is under X, I can come back and we can have a conversation. Here are the metrics.

Ezra, I'm so sorry. Here are the metrics for you. Let's go back to Bill Clinton's speech that was given at Johns Hopkins on March 9, 2000. It's a very famous speech. Larry, maybe you can tell us about how it got written.

Anyway, Bill Clinton promises several things. He makes a number of arguments for PNTR. He does not think that this does nothing. Larry, your argument is that Bill Clinton didn't do anything. You're saying that somehow it happened under Reagan or something like that. That's not what Bill Clinton was arguing.

He said, number 1, there would be huge economic benefits to the United States. He says, quote, “By this agreement, we will increase exports of American products”—he means to China—“that will create American jobs.” Did that happen the way we intended? I don't think so.

Number 2, he believed that when you looked at the data on export flows from the United States to China, it actually did happen at a quite substantial rate, but with huge trade deficits for the United States. You're arguing that they did not act in a discriminatory way toward our products. This idea that Americans could just do business in China the way that they could do business here is ridiculous. Anyone who tried to do business over there knows you had to create a joint venture. You had to get a local partner and give them 51%. It was extraordinarily difficult. We were discriminated against, Larry. It's ridiculous to try and claim that somehow this was an equal relationship. And we imported far more from them than we ever exported to them. So Bill Clinton was wrong about that.

Number 2, he said that signing PNTR and bringing China into the WTO would promote democracy in China, that we would export one of democracy's most cherished values: economic freedom. Did that happen? I don't think so.

He said this would strengthen global trade by ensuring China adhered to international trade rules, reducing trade barriers and resolving disputes through the WTO. Did that happen? I don't think so.

Then, on national security, he said it would improve our national security to bring China into the WTO and help make them rich. He said, quote, “If we don't deal with China in this way, we will increase the prospect that they will turn inward.” That's not what happened. We helped make China rich. We've exported millions of jobs to them. They built up their economy and their supply chain to the point where now they are a global competitor to the United States. They're a pure competitor.

We turned that baby dragon into a dragon-sized monster that can now challenge us in Asia and across the world for primacy. Why in the world would we have done that, just for national security reasons? That was a very foolish thing to do.

Jason Calacanis

So, Larry, I guess I have to let you maybe self-grade. How did you guys do? Are there any regrets, as Sacks is pointing out? Obviously, China has not magically become a democracy, but I guess you could argue they do have a middle class now. We haven't gone to war with them, so I guess you could argue that this has been good for relations. But to Sacks's point, they are incredibly powerful, and they are our top adversary. How would you grade the history of this so we can move forward?

China was a surging, growing, reforming economy, growing at double-digit rates. That was before there was any WTO agreement. The WTO agreement did not change a single rule that represented a U.S. restriction on imports from China. It did change a variety of rules—not as far as I would have liked—that let the United States export more to China and that protected United States intellectual property in China.

And that brought China more closely into the international system. You need a counterfactual for what would have happened if China had been excluded from the World Trade Organization. That counterfactual is not that they would not have sold goods to the United States. That principle had already been crossed 15 years before. Not a single restriction was reduced.

Is there anything you would have done differently? I just don't get the whole mindset here. I understand that we should have done more as a country for the Rust Belt and invested in it much more heavily. If I was worried about dependence and strategy and all that, the last policy I would have wanted to abolish was the CHIPS Act. That's the largest, boldest thing the United States has ever done to avoid dependence in a national security area.

Jason Calacanis

Great. Let me bring in Chamath. The Trump administration has killed all of that. Chamath, you heard Ezra's original question and the history here from Larry and David. Looking at the industries that we need strategically—pharma, military, cars—these are fairly obvious. Rare-earth minerals are obvious, but we also have the lowest unemployment of our lifetimes, and Americans probably don't want to work in factories en masse.

What is your take going forward? What are some metrics that this administration should use? Sacks is saying this, you're saying it—what would you measure this success as in terms of onshoring and reducing dependencies? If, to Ezra's point, 2 years from now we were degraded, give us some specifics here.

There is a major issue that the United States has that's much bigger than China, which can be framed in the lens of resiliency and the ability to fend for ourselves. There are supply chains that have many single points of failure, and independent of whichever country that single point of failure exists in, it could be an ally, it could be a foe, or it could be a frenemy. That creates risk.

I think what we are learning—and David's right, it was really highlighted during COVID—is that we are not in a position to take care of what we need. So if I had to answer Ezra's question very precisely, I would say that we need to measure and protect 4 critical areas. Everything else, I think we can deal with some inefficiency and some single points of failure, but the following 4 areas, Ezra, I would say are sacrosanct.

Number 1 is all of the technology, both the chips as well as the enabling technology around artificial intelligence. It must be a robust, largely American supply chain. You cannot have single points of failure outside the United States, because what you see is that even in allied countries, their posture toward things like free speech and other things can ebb and flow—their posture on trade, their posture on defense.

Jason Calacanis

Chips. Got it.

Number 2 is energy. We have a critical deficit of electrons in America. We do not have the capability we need to make the energy we need quickly. In many ways, we have supply-chain issues on natural gas. We have critical supply chains that can be shut off by China around photovoltaics. So whether you believe in coal, natural gas, or clean energy, we've got to shore that up.

Jason Calacanis

Okay, I think we're in agreement. Keep going.

Number 3 is critical material inputs that drive the materials science of the future. Rare earths are an example. Going back to chips, things like gallium, things like phosphorus, even. So we have a critical-minerals, rare-earths, and materials-science input problem.

And then the 4th, Ezra, is pharma APIs, so that when American citizens get sick, we have the ability to not just make it but also design it and manufacture it. Some of these APIs—the active pharmaceutical ingredients for many of the drugs—require very convoluted and complicated processes, cold chains, and the like. And again, there we depend on folks whose view of the United States can change in real time.

If I had to say to Ezra what I would expect, it would be that the United States government, whoever was in charge, would put those 4 things on a board, detail out all of the key inputs, measure how much we can make ourselves versus import, and then basically try to level that playing field. We would be in a very good place.

A couple of things, because I think I probably agree with all of that. What it sounds like is an excellent argument for Joe Biden's policies, which were functionally—maybe not on the pharma side—literally, let's pull out semiconductors and the semiconductor supply chain, let's pull out energy, let's pull out a couple of things like that. What was it? A “high fence around a small garden,” as Jake Sullivan called it. Let's particularly try to restrict the export of AI-critical materials to China. They had a whole set of policies about this.

Now, the Trump administration—the thing we are in theory here discussing—is an extraordinarily broad-based set of policies. It's tariffs on not just China; it's on Brazil. It's not just on critical industries like Chamath is talking about; it's on mangoes and avocados, lumber from Canada, and basically everything else.

I guess there's an argument I could sort of extract out of this: the Biden administration believed in what they called friend-shoring, which is that you want to create an integrated supply chain of allied countries that we can work with and rely on. And the Trump administration, I think, believes—depending on who's talking—more like the entire supply chain needs to be onshored to America specifically.

But one of the problems, and the reason I keep trying to push people to be very clear about their arguments and very clear about their metrics, is that I feel like there's this kitchen sink of what we're trying to achieve here. One day it's that we're trying to achieve the reindustrialization of the American heartland; the next we're trying to replace the income tax with tariff income; then we're just using it as all-purpose source of leverage against any country that does anything we don't like; and the next day we're using it for an entirely different purpose. Maybe we're just going to use it to isolate China but bring in our friends.

None of these—you can't do all of these things at once. And it needs to be very stable if you're going to get companies to make these long-term capex investment decisions that take decades to play out.

You guys didn't want to change anything. You guys didn't want to change anything about anything.

I wasn't in the Biden administration.

I'm treating Ezra and Larry as a team. I would love to change; I just want to make sure we change all of this here. Larry won't even admit that PNTR did anything. Can we not keep doing PNTR for a minute? Let's look forward, not backward. Look at the CHIPS Act. Look at the IRA. They did the exact things we're talking about.

Jason Calacanis

Let's see if we can find a little bit of agreement, please.

I agree with Chamath's agenda. I may not agree in every detail, but I broadly agree with Chamath's agenda. And I'll go a little further than that, Ezra. I think Joe Biden's attachment to energy security was kind of selective and heavily oriented to green technologies, not others.

I thought canceling the Keystone pipeline was a clear mistake. I thought stopping a variety of things involving liquefied natural gas was a clear mistake. So I think the Biden administration's approach to regulation, which empowered every NGO with respect to stopping transmission lines and constructing power plants because of the importance of Democratic constituencies, was a mistake.

I think energy security is a central objective of policy, and there's a lot of room to move beyond what the Biden administration did. I actually believe that very strongly and agree with Chamath and David.

What I don't understand is—Chamath is absolutely right. The CHIPS Act was all about making sure there was an American semiconductor industry, with production in the United States as a central priority. The Trump administration has declared war on that.

On rare earths, you want to have a strategic stockpile for any rare earth. You want to do more mining in the areas that Chamath says we should—in the United States or in friendly countries. I am all for that.

Here's what I cannot understand, Chamath. I don't see how your resilience agenda drives anywhere near Liberation Day and the emphasis on tariffs. It drives toward a set of specific industrial policies, perhaps including tariffs in some particular product areas, but steel from Canada, anything from Lesotho, any natural-resource product—across-the-board tariffs on everything?

I think you are absolutely right about resilience, and that traditional conventional economics has given it too little thought, and that COVID pointed that up as a central issue. What I can't understand is why Donald Trump's echoing of Lee Iacocca from the '80s about tariffs is responsive to any of that.

But this is the point I'm trying to draw around Biden. I'm not saying I agree with every way the Biden administration defined its objectives. I just wrote an entire book about the failures of Democratic policymaking in this specific era.

What I am saying is the Biden administration's view of trade was that there are targeted industries we should be putting a lot of both domestic policy and international policy into play in order to protect and reshore or friend-shore. The Trump administration's view is that you have a generalized problem running all across the world that requires highly generalized policies, which then, when I ask people to defend it, they sort of move to this targeted argument.

I feel like we end up making something that is not that complicated into something much more complex than it is.

Since the '80s—and this is Larry's point—Donald Trump has appeared to hold the view that anytime the United States is operating at a trade deficit with someone else, that is evidence we are being ripped off. That is how you get at least the initial set of tariffs here that work off bilateral trade deficits and try to correct every single one with every single country, be it Lesotho or a collection of islands inhabited by penguins.

I think it's really important to be connected to the policy that was actually announced and not sort of projecting all of our own onto it. Yes, Larry's right that you could have a different set of critical industries than Biden did. The Biden team was very focused on clean energy over other kinds of energy. I also did not agree with the LNG pause. I thought there were some things there, and we did not do nearly enough on things like permitting reform.

There's a lot you could have done that they didn't do. But if what you have in your head is a targeted idea of reshoring specific industries, or nearshoring, or friend-shoring, or whatever—which is what I'm hearing from a number of people on this call—then it seems like you would want targeted policies. What we have is not targeted policies. It's broad-based policies: a 90-day pause on larger, broad-based policies and a huge trade war with China.

Jason Calacanis

I would like to hear a defense from somebody. Ezra and I agree on specific policies. I'd like somebody to explain to me why it's a remotely sensible theory to say that the United States is being exploited by any country where the overall pattern of trade is such that we are running a trade deficit. Maybe in the process, you could explain to me why my grocery store is exploiting me because I'm running a massive trade deficit with it.

Okay, trade deficit. Chamath or Sacks, who wants to take it?

I can start, then maybe Sacks can—

Let me actually start by giving some credit to where Biden did do a few things right, just in the spirit of finding some common ground. Inside the IRA, I think there were 2 things, and I've said this pretty repeatedly, but I just want to put it on the record again. The ITC credits and the ITC transfer markets for those credits—the tax-equity markets—are critical industries in America to support private investment in all kinds of very complicated markets, energy markets being the most important.

What the Biden administration did, to their credit, was remove the uncertainty, because those things had to be renewed over and over again, and they gave us a very long window where we could underwrite investments. To your point, Ezra, that was smart. But it's important to also remember that in order to get Biden's budget done, what they did was have Manchin roll over on permitting reform.

Ezra, you know this probably better than all of us. When you look inside of the CHIPS Act, as smart as that initial policy was, if you ask why nothing has actually happened, why no fabs have actually been built other than grandiose statements, the answer is what you speak to in your book. It's just this complete malaise and inability to actually get these things permitted and turned on, even when it's right.

I just want to acknowledge that that's there. So, Larry, very importantly, to your question, the thing that we have to acknowledge is that in certain countries, what you have is a very blurry line between private and public industry, and they have this very tight coupling. Again, I hate to go back to China, but it is the best example of this. What do they have? Choose one other country just for the sake of it. We can use Korea, Japan, or Germany.

There are instances where government balance sheets support private industry. They can support them in 3 different ways. Number 1 is the tax credits and subsidies that they can use to build the things that they need. Number 2 is how they can support that in the active selling and engagement in public spot markets to shape the demand curve for the things that are made. Number 3 is the taxation on the back end, the terms of repayment, and the capital cycle. Those are things that, in the United States, we overwhelmingly turn over to the private markets. We are the cleanest, purest form of capitalism in that sense. Many other countries are shades of this.

Jason Calacanis

So, Larry, hold on a second. What you have is: How do you defend dumping? How do you defend that? How do you defend spot-market manipulation that drives American companies out of business? How do you fight that?

And I think here's the problem. If President Trump had announced a big broadening of anti-dumping law to confront a variety of instances of what the administration, after careful economic analysis, saw as inappropriate subsidy, I might or might not have thought that they were doing that in the right way, but we wouldn't be having this argument. The front pages would not be about tariff policy day after day, and the stock market would not be down by $5 trillion.

The central thing we are discussing is not whether there are sensible modifications to trade policy to respond to bad practices in other countries or to promote resilience. Those are technical debates that, frankly, aren't that interesting to a large number of people. The question is whether declaring that we need a whole new era of U.S. economic policy around universal tariffs against everything, or using bilateral trade deficits, is, I think, a rational step forward.

Now we're talking about the Monte Carlo simulation of how to achieve the outcome, and what I am saying is, as much as you and I want to guess, the fundamental and honest answer is none of us know. The people in the White House, what they know, they will share a little bit at a time.

Because the reality is, if what you wanted was a white paper, or if what you wanted was paint-by-numbers, I think, back to David's point, all that would do is take any leverage that they had and give people the opportunity to shape their response. I think, in traditional game theory, the right thing to do is, when you're playing poker, you play street by street. What's the flop? Make a set of actions. What's the turn? Make a set of actions. What's the river? Make a set of actions.

If you're going to play to win, this is what they should do: Keep their cards very, very close to the vest. Realize that you can't necessarily surgically go and attack the lithium market first, then the rare-earth market second, because it all goes back to the same balance sheet. It's the same actor over and over.

I think there's a useful analogy to draw here. I think a lot about an article Mark Danner wrote in the New York Review of Books many years ago about the Iraq War, and it's an article that has stuck in my mind forever. What he says about it is that one of the difficulties of the politics of the Iraq War is that there was no one war. There was everybody's private war that they were projecting onto the Bush administration.

You had the liberal humanitarian vision of why we were going to war and what that war would look like. You had a realist vision for it. You had a vision that was more about weapons of mass destruction and keeping the homeland safe from terrorism. You had people who believed there was an Iraq–al-Qaeda connection. There were really dozens of these, which is how you got as broad a coalition behind as bad a policy as that together, because everybody said, "They're being a little bit vague about what's really going on here and why we're really doing this."

But I bet you, if you go into their heart of hearts, what they want is the thing I want, even though the policy doesn't quite match what policy you would get from starting from my premises. That's really what I hear here. I hear it on this show, but I hear it in general in the discussion around this: There are a lot of different objectives being projected onto Donald Trump and his trade war.

The objectives do not fit the policies we're seeing. The objectives are not stably articulated by Donald Trump or the people around him. Nor is any specific objective being articulated in a stable way without contradicting objectives also being articulated at the same time. Maybe in the end—and this is why I want to push you all on metrics—you get something you like out of this, but you're giving away a lot of clarity just on the trust that what is happening is people are keeping a good hand of cards with a good strategy of poker hidden from you, as opposed to what's happening is what we seem to be seeing in public.

Donald Trump is a chaotic and erratic person. They are making policy in a chaotic and erratic way. That policy is having chaotic and erratic consequences. Then they are operating and moving on the fly in a chaotic and erratic fashion.

Jason Calacanis

Sacks, you heard Ezra say that he feels this administration is being a bit chaotic in its approach here. What's the counter to that? You heard Chamath say, "Hey, this is really thoughtful. They're holding their cards close to the chest." Maybe you could clarify what your position is. Is this too chaotic, or is this crazy?

What I'm hearing is a bunch of process objections to Trump's policy, and I'm hearing a bunch of nitpicking. What about Lesotho or whatever? Okay, look, this is a very unrealistic view of politics when we've had a bipartisan consensus in Washington for decades that unfettered free trade is a good thing.

No matter how big our trade deficits got, no matter how rich and powerful China got, no matter how unfair the trade practices got, no matter how many millions of our jobs and factories got exported overseas, this has been the bipartisan consensus in Washington. And, Larry, you're right that it started before the Clinton administration and the George W. Bush administration definitely accelerated it, but there has absolutely been a bipartisan consensus in Washington that this sort of unfettered free-trade policy was good for the country. Now, how do you change that? You can nitpick this and make all the process objections you want, but Donald Trump has changed the conversation.

I just want to keep you from saying I've offered a process suggestion when I'm objecting to the absence of a clear objective. Can I finish? You were pointing to Donald Trump's views when he was a public figure in the 1980s and 1990s on trade as somehow he was wrong. He was not wrong. He was one of the few people and public figures in America who was right about this.

I think most people today would say he was right about this: that throwing open our markets to these foreign products without thinking about the consequences was a mistake.

You guys have me completely confused.

Really?

You do. No, I'm confused about the incoherence of your position. Larry, David, you still believe that the Clinton administration—or, let's call it, the bipartisan consensus of that era—was correct, while at the same time you're arguing that PNTR didn't do anything?

I think it is really telling that you are so much more loath to defend what we are seeing than to attack what has been. It would be interesting to have you and Larry go 12 rounds on the Clinton era, if you'd be interested.

You know, when I say to you, "Listen, there is not a stable set of objectives that fit the policy here," you say that's a process objection. I just would like somebody to defend the thing they keep actually doing. I would like somebody to explain it to me here. I understood Chamath's resilience thesis as centered on 4 sectors. Are we more resilient in those 4 sectors? What's the answer 2 years from now?

I got that. I agree with all that. I cannot make any linkage between a 10% across-the-board tariff, a tariff on steel, a tariff on automobiles, and much of what the president says, and your very valid objectives. I hear David saying, "This free trade has destroyed America, and we're going to undo that and eviscerate the heartland," and all this, and I just want to understand how we'll know whether we have fixed it.

Jason Calacanis

Chamath, let's try to look forward here. This obviously has been a cataclysmic, chaotic, intense—whatever descriptor you want to use—past week.

Productive is okay.

Jason Calacanis

Sure. It certainly created massive swings in the market. Is this all going to cause a recession? Is this too violent of an approach to markets? That is, I think, a valid criticism that people have, including the majority of business leaders, who are saying, "Hey, I think I have to start layoffs." You had United Airlines say, "We're not going to give any guidance."

This feels to business leaders, Republican business leaders primarily, and market participants like it's far too chaotic, and they can't plan. If they can't plan, then they stop planning, which is going to cause layoffs, bankruptcies, and who knows what the second- and third-order consequences are going to be. So what's going to happen here over the next couple of weeks and months?

Just on the recession question, and then I'd like to give an answer to Ezra and Larry: I think that, and I've said this for about a year, it was clear to me that we were sneakily in a recession before. The reason was the vast amounts of money and deficits that were being pumped into government services, which perverted the actual GDP picture in America.

As DOGE slows down that money flow and as the consensus in Congress gets to a better budget, I think you're going to see that the government was probably responsible for 100 to 150 basis points of just waste. If you take that out, you will technically be in a recession. That was independent of these tariffs. I think that's where the true economy was, Jason, and I think we're just going to find that out.

So that's where we go from here. I can give you an anecdote, and I'll give you a projection. The anecdote is that this weekend, my wife and I were in bed when a very successful businessman called me. He was representing the president of a country and said, "Hey, I need some advice. What do we do here?"

We walked through the 3 things that he and his government were trying to figure out because they wanted an off-ramp. They were ready to cry uncle. They were ready to tap out. Again, he was calling me as a private citizen, but I think this conversation was very instructive.

Number 1, he said, "Look, we have these really high tariffs on inbound American products. We're happy to cut these things to zero." I said, "Well, you should do that." Second, while we were exploring this, he said, "We have an enormous capital purchase with Airbus." I said, "Cancel it. Swap it to Boeing." He said, "Done."

The third, which was interesting, was that he said, "We need to import an enormous amount of energy." I said, "Who do you give that concession to right now?" It was a non-American company. I said, "Why wouldn't you just RFP that to an American business and let them compete?" He said, "We'd be open to that as well."

He said, "We're getting prepared. We want to find a way to talk to the Trump administration." I said, "Great. However I can be helpful, I'll be helpful to you." I got off the phone, looked at my wife, and said, "If even 30 of these 75 countries do a deal anywhere remotely close to this, that would be an enormous win."

So let me give you my projection, Jason, of what the art of the deal could be here. What you do is rewrite Bretton Woods 2.0. What was Bretton Woods 1.0? It was fixing exchange rates.

It was setting up the IMF. It was setting up the World Bank. Those were the conditions on the ground post–World War II. It made a lot of sense. What would we do if we had to write the Mar-a-Lago Accords right now?

I think what we would do is work backward from the question that Ezra asked and the answer that I gave. How do we create resiliency in these critical markets? Number one, a framework for that. Number two is, how do we create limits for government-sponsored intervention against capitalist, for-profit companies, many of whom are American, so that we can actually compete on a level playing field? And then number three, very simply: If you can do business in my country, why can I not do business in yours?

I'll just give you that story for one second. I was responsible—I was the head of every single entity of Facebook outside of the United States. I opened every market. My team and I created a framework for dominating. We figured out how to crack Brazil, India, and Russia.

You know, the one market where we never could ever make a single iota of progress? Say it, Jason, with me.

Jason Calacanis

China, China, China.

No, Iran. We won in Russia. So my point is, in every single market except one, is it that we were just lucky in 174 markets and stupid in one? No. So I think that the Mar-a-Lago Accords, this sort of Bretton Woods 2.0, is the outcome, Ezra. It will basically use tariffs as a way to get these governments to a table and allow us to negotiate a much fairer economic quid pro quo.

Here's my concern with this theory, and I'll leave the question of what the real economy looked like to Larry. This world in which what is happening is a business leader who represents a country is calling you and saying, "Okay, what do we need to do to deal?" They're coming to Donald Trump, and they are going to come to Donald Trump. As Larry said earlier, there's no doubt that U.S. economic leverage is enormous, and virtually every country faced with our might is going to try to cut a deal with us.

But then there's a call they're not making to you that they're making to someone else, which is: We have approached the U.S. as a functionally benign partner for a very long time, and now it's becoming a dangerous partner. It is very, very strong, and it will use that strength to crush countries smaller than it when it suits the whims of a personalist regime run by a person whose feelings—even about people or countries the U.S. traditionally considered allies, like Canada or much of Europe—change.

And so, yes, on the one hand, for the next year or two, we want to avoid getting a big tariff slapped on us, and so we've got to figure out what it is that, if we offer it to Donald Trump, he will say to himself, "That was enough of a give that I can move on to someone else. I can make them the focus of my ire."

On the other hand, they're going to begin to build fortresses and deals and partnerships and approaches that make sure they are less exposed to our ability to wield this power against them in the future. But before I came on the show, I had gone on X and saw a clip of you going around where you were saying that one of the problems with the Biden administration was that you couldn't get anybody on the phone.

In the Trump administration, you make the call, the deputy chief of staff picks up, and you say, "Hey, I need you to talk to this company. I work with them. They're freaking out about the tariffs." The deputy chief of staff tells the company, and they work something out.

No, no—not that they work something out. They listen. They listen.

This world in which we are doing the deal by individual relationships, by who can get their calls answered, not by rules that feel clear and stable—

Hold on a second, but that's how the Biden administration worked.

That's not what I said.

Well, no, Ezra, you're trying to make it sound like corruption.

Hold on. It was George Clooney who was making the call. Who cares what George Clooney thinks? Didn't you just say on—

Jason Calacanis

Well, I was very, very critical of Biden. I saw that clip, Ezra, and what Chamath said is simply that the White House listens when he calls, whereas he couldn't get his calls returned by the Biden administration.

Great. I think we're actually not saying anything all that different.

You made it sound like corruption.

Well, I actually think what Trump is working through is deal patronage based on how he sees the company—I'm sorry, the other country.

What happened?

Ezra, can I just make sure that this is clear to you? This is a 150-year-old American business. I have no interest in that company except for a friendship. These are Americans hiring Americans, trying to compete with China, who were very negatively affected. All I said was, why don't you give them a chance to explain what's happening on the ground?

My point that I was trying to make—and maybe I didn't make it clear enough, so let me set the record straight—is that the Trump administration, what I have seen as a businessman, is willing to hear the conditions on the ground. As a businessman, when I was building critical rare-earth supplies for America under the Biden administration, battery-cathode materials to compete with China under the Biden administration, and AI chips to be the best inference solution under the Biden administration, I couldn't get a call back.

That's just the facts. Not because I wanted anything, just to tell them what was going on.

So, fair enough.

Jason Calacanis

Insane.

Okay, fair enough. I am not telling you that the Biden administration shouldn't have returned your calls. What I am saying is that the degree to which Trump first, and then everybody around him, as an example of him because culture comes from the top, is working off this kind of individual call and deal-making worries me.

I believe that every one of these calls you're saying happened exactly the way you say they happened, and then there are the calls that you are not getting. Two minutes ago, Ezra—you were saying that a 10% across-the-board tariff was too broad and that we needed to go industry by industry, and now you're saying that it's going to be too particular and that he shouldn't do country-by-country negotiations.

The word "dealing"—people listening to people—is not deal-making, Ezra. It's just listening to people.

Are you really going to be telling me that the way Trump himself works is not individual deal-making?

Is this really the argument here? I will tell you what I've seen, and David's seen much more. What I have seen from the president is that he takes in hundreds of opinions and starts to figure out what the ground truth is. The reason is, when you only listen to one or two—and every president probably deals with this—you have this information-asymmetry problem because you are the president of the United States.

So how do you cut through it? You talk to hundreds and hundreds of people, and you triangulate what the truth is. So it's not like he's giving any favor; he's collecting information. That is a good process. You want the most powerful person in the world to get to the ground truth.

Go ahead, Larry.

I am all for information gathering. I agree that the Biden administration did not do as good a job as it could have of maintaining relations with the business community. I agree that it's a good idea for there to be quite extensive connection.

I am also appalled by the half-dozen phone calls I have gotten from prominent people in business who have said, "I'm used to being shaken down when I try to do business in some parts of the world. It's a new experience to be shaken down by representatives of the president of the United States."

What's the shakedown?

When you have close connections, you help us, you contribute this way—

That makes no sense at all. It makes no sense.

What the president has been trying to do is encourage domestic—

Maybe it is an erroneous perception to which I have been exposed repeatedly, but it is total nonsense. But it is pervasive, total nonsense. You guys are very confident that you're right and everybody else's perceptions aren't. It is a perception shared by almost everyone who has experience in the conflict-of-interest area and who has looked at the situation of Trump administration officials and those working as special government employees in the Trump administration.

What are you saying? I just went through that whole process, Larry. It would be false, but I can speak to this because I just went through this process. It took forever—months. I went through the same process everyone else goes through. The OGE career staff have to go through all of your disclosures, figure out what the conflicts are, and then you have to divest them. It's the same process everyone goes through.

So you're all over the place making all sorts of accusations here. If you have some proof or you want to accuse someone, then why don't you just do it? Otherwise, what you're saying is just not true. It's not backed up by anything.

They shut down Eric Adams. That's a direct accusation that happened in public. They shook down Eric Adams because they put him in their pocket. That's a big deal, y'all. That is the way they are doing business here.

You guys are all over the map making wild accusations. First, it was a set of resignations because of their discomfort with being overruled by your colleagues in the Trump administration. So the suggestion that you have been held to the same ethical standards that I was held to, and that other members of previous administrations, including the Bush administration, were held to, unfortunately is not right.

No, that's false.

All right. Well, there are 2 issues. You may not be familiar, but I had to divest—

Hold on. I had to divest a lot, as I talked about on this show.

In any event, you guys are all over the map making wild accusations. 2 seconds ago, the shakedown was at the level of companies. Then, all of a sudden, it was OGE and ethics.

Jason Calacanis

Then it was something about Eric Adams’ indicted business. I like that you’re like, “Who’s Eric Adams?” I know who Eric Adams is. I supported him on this show for the way that Trump does business at every level at which he operates. And so it is happening at every level of his administration.

You know, I’ve got to say, it’s not that I don’t want to hear you. I don’t want to hear it. You know how this started? Hold on a second, Ezra. You misquoted something Chamath said on another podcast. All he said was that I can get my phone calls returned by this White House, where I couldn’t with Obama or Biden, even though I was a big donor.

You guys have somehow morphed that into some sort of broad-ranging accusation of corruption or something like that. Now, let’s be clear about what the accusation of the way Donald Trump works is. Ezra, your accusation of me tried to infer some form of corruption or some form of dealmaking. None of that happened. What I’ll tell you again is that I connected the White House so they could hear on the ground what was happening from a company that was very negatively impacted by the tariff, so that they had the context of that feedback as well.

Jason Calacanis

Do you deny the possibility that your experience with the Trump administration might be different from that of people who they feel are less allied to them than you are?

Ezra, I’m willing to ask a straightforward question: Are you sure that you’re a good sample?

I don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore. Also, I think what we’re talking about right now is that people who donate to politicians have unique access to politicians. I think we can all agree that’s not true.

Just to be very clear, I have given way more to the Democrats than I’ve given to Donald Trump.

And you were disappointed about that.

I didn’t say anything about your donations. I said something about where your ally is now. And, by the way, what’s crazy is I was the same intellectual person under Biden that I am under Trump. It’s just that it seems like the Trump administration is like, “Well, this is a smart guy with some opinions. Let me listen.”

Biden—and, by the way, Larry, you know this—these were some very close friends of ours that we share mutually who would not even return my calls. So it is a little personal for me as well, Ezra, just to be honest with you.

I’m not going to go there. But the point is, that’s fair.

I have never seen a single iota of any form of anything other than just gathering information from the Trump administration. They’ve never asked me for anything. They’ve never tried to direct me to do anything. They just want to know what’s going on.

When you ask them, “Hey, can you talk to such-and-such a person?” I can assure you that your experience is not the experience of quite a number of the nation’s major law firms. It is not the experience of quite a number of the nation’s business leaders. It is not the experience of quite a number of the nation’s universities. I am neither the first nor the hundredth person referencing efforts at extortion, to use the movie The Godfather as a metaphor for aspects of the way in which our country is being governed.

What a surprise. Democratic universities and Democratic law firms are making accusations.

Jason Calacanis

All right, let’s move on. We think we’ve covered the tariff issue, and I think we can all agree that if you donate money, you might have better access to politicians.

Especially Jason—if you give 10% to the big guy, then you really get access.

Jason Calacanis

Listen, we can do these allegations. There’s a long list of people who’ve made donations, and there’s a long list of favorable things that have happened to them afterward, across all administrations. We can debate cause and correlation all day long here, but I wanted to talk about the future of the Democratic Party while we’re here.

Ezra, you have been on a tour talking about exactly how incompetent—how terrible—a campaign they ran. What is the future? I’ll let Larry get his 2 cents in here as well. Is there any saving this party? And if so, what would it look like?

Well, the problem of the party and the campaign—let me bracket that, because my book, Abundance, with Derek Thompson, is more about how Democrats govern at the state, local, and federal levels, and some of the pathologies of governance there. There are versions of this on the right, but I’m not really writing about that in this.

My book, Abundance, is about the tendency Democrats have to subsidize things while choking off the supply of the thing they want people to have more of. Think about housing in California: we get rental vouchers from the federal government, but we make it incredibly hard to build homes. Clean energy, which a lot of the Biden administration’s policies were about, involved putting huge subsidies behind the building of more clean energy. But they didn’t really do anything to make the permitting, the siting, and the state capacity to do all of that capable of building the amount of clean energy at the pace they foresaw us building it.

Behind this—and I can go into a lot of detail here—is a diminishment of state capacity that comes from wrapping the state itself in red tape and regulation. I think we have an intuitive way of thinking about the idea of deregulation in the private sector, right? When the government is imposing regulations on private companies and making it hard for those companies to act, to do business, et cetera. But this happens first and foremost to the government itself.

One of my favorite examples I’ve been using lately is a new RAND report that looks at how much it costs to construct a square foot of housing in California, Texas, and Colorado. It does this with 2 kinds of housing: market-rate housing and affordable housing subsidized by the public sector. The cost of creating market-rate housing in California is 2× what it is in Texas. But when you get into publicly subsidized housing, where you have all these new standards, rules, and regulations being triggered by the addition of public money, it goes up to about 4.4×.

And so you have this real problem, I think, in a way of governing that evolved in the 1970s and 1980s. There’s a kind of small-government version of the Democratic Party—the New Left, more individualistic—that was worried about too much exercise of government power. Now that we are in a different world with different problems, we’re thinking about reindustrializing. We have a housing shortage, and you have things like the Biden administration, which really was thinking about how to build a lot more in America. But you don’t have either a policy architecture or, I would say, a governing culture that makes that possible.

Jason Calacanis

Yeah. And so a lot of this came from Francis Fukuyama, I think, and vetocracy—vetocracy? How do you pronounce Fukuyama?

Fukuyama is a great, sort of related concept of vetocracy. He also has another great concept, since we’re bringing up Fukuyama, which is that neoliberalism—which we’ve sort of been talking about here with the WTO and other things—people think about it as the veneration of the market. But what it is first and foremost is the degradation of the state, and I think that explains a lot more about the world we’re in than people recognize.

Jason Calacanis

Ezra, you can agree with this: Francis Fukuyama is probably one of the most polarizing modern academics in America. As you read him, people end up very pro-Fukuyama.

Yeah. I mean, look, what happened is that you had Fukuyama write The End of History and the Last Man, which basically said that democratic capitalism is the end-all, be-all, and we’re basically down to 1 system. The whole world’s going to run on that system. And that philosophy then animated, I would say, a neoliberal and neoconservative consensus in Washington for 25 years.

There were 3 key pillars of that, let’s call it, globalist consensus. Number 1, we’d have open borders and free flow of labor. In fact, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which is considered to be conservative, actually supported a constitutional amendment saying that we’d have open borders. Number 2, we’d have open flows of trade and capital—basically, the unfettered free-trade agenda. And then number 3, the third leg of it was Pax Americana. We’d deploy American troops all over the world to defend this consensus because they’d be greeted as liberators, not occupiers.

I think all 3 pillars have been refuted, and the person who has represented the shift in this consensus to, I’d say, a new agenda of economic nationalism and geopolitical nationalism is Donald Trump.

Jason Calacanis

Okay. Wow. I was going to guess that. Listen, The End of History and the Last Man is a much more complicated question at a very high level.

Let me finish the point here, because I’m kind of on a roll here.

Jason Calacanis

Yeah, keep—wrap. Bring it home.

When you have a bipartisan consensus that included both Bush Republicans and Clinton Democrats around these 3 pillars of globalism, and then I’d say that country turns against that, that’s not going to be a smooth process. That is going to be potentially a violent process. It’s going to be a disruptive process. And you guys want to raise all these nitpicky objections or whatever. Donald Trump is bringing that realignment.

But the real question—the real question—is: Was that consensus correct, or was it a failure? I would argue it was a failure.

Jason Calacanis

Larry, let me ask you a question, then. When you see something like DOGE happening, and people start taking a more unilateral, quicker, less veto-based approach, is that encouraging to you, Larry? Do you think that’s the right way to do it? Because we haven’t been able to get the government smaller since Clinton.

So, are you pro-DOGE or not DOGE? And do you think this sort of objection to “Hey, we're going too fast, too violently”—maybe that's what we need to do at times? Then I'll go back to you, Ezra, to answer the same question.

I think that Ezra is broadly right about the promiscuous distribution of veto power. He's broadly right that we need to be able to do more things more quickly in the state if we're to be an effective government. I think we need much more reform. I think Democrats have allowed themselves excessively to become hostage to particular groups and particular traditional concerns, and have lost touch in important ways with an American mainstream.

I think that insofar as the election outcomes in recent years have not been what they wanted, that is an important contribution to how that has happened. And I agree with David that Donald Trump represents a transformative and profoundly different ideology than has been present in governing America before. I do believe that it is fundamentally not new under the sun, just new in America: that it is the Juan Perón approach, which is very familiar to students of Latin American history in particular.

The general experience of that approach is that its leaders, particularly when they have galvanizing personalities, can be very popular for a substantial period of time, but that they are very rarely remembered well by historians of their countries. My best judgment is that this project is going to end in disastrous failure, despite having put its finger on some important concerns and issues.

Of course, there should be much more aggressive reform of the government than there is, but that does not excuse or mean that some of the mindless savagery that DOGE is bringing to traditional American institutions is likely to work out well. To take just 1 example, my belief is that the revenue loss from DOGE's destruction of a significant part of the functioning of our nation's tax collection system is likely to exceed, in terms of contributing more to the deficit, any savings realized.

Jason Calacanis

What do you mean by that? What is this? They've identified the right thing, but they're executing on it too much. Go ahead, Cham.

No, no, I have 2 questions, Larry. Just tactically, what do you mean by the destruction of the revenue-collecting mechanism? That's question number 1, which I just want to understand what you meant. A second question, which is more broadly: Larry, if you were president for a day, just give us the Larry Summers plan. What is the counterfactual to what's happening now? You can include tariffs, you can include DOGE. I just want to understand how you would frame the solution to what ails us.

So maybe tactically, just talk about the collections part because you referenced it, and then, more strategically, what the Larry Summers 2.0 plan is.

We are firing, en masse, people whose job it is to audit people like you. The result of that is that we are losing revenue directly. We are losing revenue further because people, once audited, go straight in subsequent years. And we are losing revenue because more and more people are playing the audit lottery, engaging in problematic practices in the expectation that they will not be caught.

Can I burst your bubble on this? Let me tell you my experience. I get audited every year automatically. And the reason you get audited every single year is typically the way that you acquire your wealth creates complexity: 700-, 800-, 900-page tax filings.

Now, you don't do that yourself. What happens is you typically pay a large Big Four accounting firm millions of dollars to do it—Deloitte, PwC, Andersen, et cetera. Every year that I've been audited, the biggest delta has been about $1,000. In this case, I actually was owed $1,000 by the US government last year.

Jason Calacanis

What did you spend it on?

Incredible. I'll spend it everywhere.

Jason Calacanis

So, Larry, just so you know, I'm well aware of everything you just said, and I have no doubt about your personal integrity. In fact, I think it's less than a quarter of people with incomes over $10 million who are audited. Is that not true—that not everybody is audited?

It's just not true that everybody is audited.

Jason Calacanis

I get the sense, Larry, that you like DOGE, but you don't like the execution. Got it. Ezra, you talk about your book: We have to move faster, we have to do things faster, and we have to take more risk. Your book seems to be a plan to do these things. So, are you pro-DOGE or not?

And if you look at the Democratic Party—if you look at this administration, I'm going to call it Trump 2.0 for clarity—I would say 2 out of 3 people around Trump, whether it's Chamath, Joe Rogan, Bessent, Howard Lutnick, or even Trump himself, are Clinton Democrats. So it's basically the Clinton administration. You were going to say that yourself. What? I don't matter. Ezra, are you happy about DOGE?

I think building state capacity is 2-dimensional. One is what the state can do, and the second is the rules under which it does it. DOGE seems to me to be fundamentally destructive of state capacity.

First, this goes again to my endless frustration that I feel like the goals are not clearly laid out in the Trump administration. What are the measures we are looking at, and how will they achieve them? Is it just trying to cut? They've been very clear. But that's not efficiency, right? I could save $1 trillion in ways that would make it—let's put it this way: What Larry was just saying, right?

If you cut everybody at the IRS, just cut every single one of them, on the DOGE measure of “How much did you save in headcount?” that will look like it counted toward your “save $1 trillion” goal. But in terms of what Larry is saying, which is the long-term efficiency of US tax collections, you'd have just made the IRS much, much less efficient.

Jason Calacanis

No, no, we get that. But they've also cut all this software and consulting nonsense.

I am not going to tell you that there are zero DOGE cuts that made sense, but I am going to say that what I see them doing overall is highly destructive of state capacity. Similarly, a lot of things are happening around USAID and PEPFAR funding.

Is PEPFAR efficient? I mean, yes, you save money by not giving HIV antiretrovirals to children in Africa, but I think it is good that you do that, right? So that's not the kind of efficiency I'm looking for. I am interested in state capacity that is connected to achieving specific goals.

I've talked to a bunch of the people around DOGE, and again, here you get a lot of different ideas of what the goals are. Some people say, “Well, what we're trying to do is save money.” But if what you wanted to do is save money, you could go to Congress and do a very big bill.

There was a lot of interest in Congress. People like Ro Khanna wanted to work with DOGE to identify big spending cuts that both sides could agree on, defense being a big piece of this. And then they decided not to do it. So DOGE, to me, is—it would be great if somebody tried it, but I see this as much more of a destruction of state capacity and a hack-and-slash operation.

Jason Calacanis

Larry Summers, we're going to thank you for coming. I know you've got to drop off right now. Thank you.

Wait, what about Larry Summers 2.0? Would you like to do your Larry Summers plan? Before you leave, I want to know what the counterfactual is. What's your plan, Larry?

The counterfactual is to focus on necessary strategic investments in infrastructure, in making America unambiguously the leading country in the world in technology, particularly disseminating large-scale artificial intelligence for collective benefit. Build a larger network of alliances so that we are in a position to counter China, both with hard power in the form of increased military expenditures and with moral strength, with the world as a whole behind us, as a central organizing theme of foreign policy.

And reinvent our education system at every level, to pick up on Ezra's notion of being about results, and do all of that while you're doing the abundance agenda as well—freeing stuff up so that we're in a position for government to get things done. I believe the country is best governed from the center, not best governed from a radical fringe.

I believe moving to a transactional model of leadership is the approach of Latin American strongmen, and history does not find it to be a successful model. And so I would venerate rather than denigrate the rule of law as part of governing the country.

Jason Calacanis

All right, there you have it, folks: Larry Summers. Appreciate you coming on the pod.

Thank you, Larry. Spicy, spicy episode here. Sacks, you wanted a chance to respond on the DOGE issue as we wrap?

Wow. Pretty productive episode. Let me partially agree with Ezra here. I mean, I think that he's trying to introduce this idea of an abundance agenda to the Democratic Party. I think that's a good thing. I know you've talked about permitting reform and not tying up projects in so many hoops and so much environmental regulation, and even DEI and all this kind of stuff. So I think that is all well and good. We should do those things.

The thing that I take issue with is that, on the one hand, you're saying that there's way too much process around just getting things done when you're talking about public works, but the objection you're making to Elon is that he's not following enough process. There's not enough niceties. Larry called it mindless savagery. This is the problem: How do you expect anything to ever get done?

The reason why your public works projects don't happen is because there are too many special interests who get organized and stop them. What Elon is trying to do—we have a $2 trillion annual deficit. He's trying to figure out how to cut it. Every single program that gets cut, the interests who receive that money—and we found out that it's hopelessly corrupt.

Stacey Abrams gets $2 billion for her nonprofit, and you have all these NGOs who are basically cashing in. They're all going to do everything in their power to stop those cuts from happening, and they're the ones who are ginning up this hysteria, burning down car dealerships, and so forth and so on.

So this is the problem that I see: You don't really have a kind word to say for the people who are actually getting things done, who are actually reforming things. Elon is the one who's actually making a difference. Can you find any good in this? I mean, you sound like you're cherry-picking. When I brought it up and I questioned you, like, “Do you support DOGE?” your first thing was to say, “Well, here's my favorite pet projects. I want to keep those.”

But yes, right. This is, I think, really important, and weirdly, it's the through line of almost everything I've said on the show today. Knowing what you are trying to achieve is the first part of achieving it.

So if DOGE is cutting things that I think do good in the world, I'm not going to say, “Hey, look, they're making the government more efficient. We no longer have a strong foreign-aid program,” or whatever it might be. They've destroyed the Department of Education without knowing what they're cutting there. I don't think DOGE is doing a good job because I don't think they have, in a thoughtful way, connected means and ends.

And weirdly, my critique often of Democrats is also that they have not been outcomes-focused. They've been process-focused. So David's point here is actually not the critique I've made here. I would make procedural criticisms of DOGE, but there's a world in which my take on DOGE is, look, I agree with what they are trying to do, but I wish they would follow the law. But that's not my take on DOGE.

You have to pick: Kamala Harris continuing the spending that was going on, or Elon and DOGE cutting. Which would you choose?

I would absolutely prefer the Kamala Harris administration to the Trump administration. Would I like to see Democrats be significantly more reformist? Yes. I've written a book about it. I'm trying to persuade them of this argument.

But your book is about getting rid of this red tape, and you just said you want to keep the people who put us—hold on. You say you want change. This is radical change. I agree. But you just said you would rather have had the person and the administration that put $9 trillion on top of this.

This is why you'll never get that change. Ezra, you guys all invited me here. You'll never get the abundance agenda that you want, because it's people like Elon or Trump who get things done. This is the way that politics work. You have to have a paradigm shift to get what you want.

I think getting dumb things done is not good change, right? I actually don't understand how this point is so hard to grasp. If you get a lot of change and the change is bad, I'm going to think that is bad, not good.

I would hope that is true for all of you, that if Kamala Harris or some other Democrat came in and began wrecking things, you wouldn't say, “Well, we needed a bunch of change. Let's break everything in sight.” I want to see things done well. There should be good permitting reform. So let me give you an example of the kind of thing that I am looking for.

We talked about CHIPS a bunch on this show. I like the CHIPS Act. I did a big piece that coined the term “everything bagel liberalism” about the way in which the ideas inside that act, when they began building out the grant program, layered on too many standards and programs and so on.

But one thing they then did was pass a bill—or Biden signed a bill—by Ted Cruz and Mark Kelly taking CHIPS out of the normal environmental review because they said, “Look, if this is a matter of national security and we're trying to build these semiconductor fabs so quickly, we cannot have this layered in years of environmental review,” which now take, on average, 3.5 to 4.5 years.

So because I care a lot about clean energy, one of my arguments is that we should have a speed run for clean energy. It should not go through the normal levels of review. What is happening in California high-speed rail, where it had 12 years of environmental review, was not, in my view, a good idea.

At the same time, that doesn't force me to say, “Well, I think we should build a bunch of coal plants without environmental review,” because I can make distinctions between things I want to see happen in the world and things I don't.

I think you're totally right with that. Let me give you the more practical day-to-day example, because those are these albatross projects that are largely a byproduct of ineptitude and corruption. But let me tell you a more tactical example so that you can understand why what Elon and Trump are doing is so necessary.

As I told you, in 2020, on the back end of COVID, I started a business to build battery cathode active material in the United States. That's a business we need so that when you want to electrify everything you want to electrify, there are batteries that we can make that aren't reliant on the Chinese supply chain.

It made sense. The guy that I started it with worked for Elon. The other guy I started it with was a professor at Stanford. And the third guy I started it with was the head of battery engineering at Toyota. A more complete group of people, I think, you couldn't put together.

So we start to build. We get a deal with General Motors. So far, so good. But eventually you hit a point where, in order to really commercialize, you need some form of government acknowledgment that you're good. And the way that you do that is you apply to the DOE.

The DOE has a very legitimate grant program that tries to accelerate these key things, especially things that are critical. We went through that program, Ezra. We paid a couple million dollars in consulting fees to the people that we were told to pay them to, and we were rejected.

Okay, fine. Kept going. I kept funding the business. And then, last year, we applied again. 125 companies applied. 25 were shortlisted. We all went through incredible diligence. We won. Incredible validation at the end of that entire process.

So really, 2 years from when I started and millions of dollars later, we got a $100 million federal grant from the DOE and $50 million from Michigan to build a plant in Michigan to help re-domesticate battery CAM in the United States.

It turned out that in that same period, while we were going through that rigmarole, Stacey Abrams got $2 billion after 30 days. And I just asked the question: What is broken inside the government that that's possible? It's hopelessly corrupt. That's exactly right.

A company of 50 people—50 people—where none of this money goes into our pockets. We take that money and we then have to raise more money. I have to put in more money. We try to hire people. We try to build a battery factory that can basically give us resilience against the Chinese, which I think is great. They're an incredibly forward, strong, and viable competitor.

In 30 days, she got 20 times more than we did. How do you explain it?

So here's what I'll say on the 2 things. I have not myself looked deeply into the Stacey Abrams story, but I'm very skeptical of the accounts I keep hearing about it. I suspect that if she had made $2 billion in 30 days, she wouldn't be now hosting a podcast on Crooked Media. She'd be on an island somewhere. So I can't comment on that piece of it.

The Abrams thing is a joke from Donald Trump, actually.

I don't know. The broader thing here, though, which is what you're getting at—frankly, what I worry about is that what you had in that DOE process was fairly quick for the government.

One of the things that I am targeting in the book is a way that, even when members of the administration or governors want things to happen, they are not willing to upend the process, to pass the new bills, to reconstruct the architecture of the federal or state government to get it to happen. Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom wanted high-speed rail.

Can't you acknowledge—can't you acknowledge—it's insane that somebody can get $2 billion after 30 days?

I am not going to acknowledge a story I have not looked into myself because I'm not sure I trust the account of it. I don't think it's crazy. I don't think it's crazy to get the money after 30 days, but it depends on whether or not the process was good.

Hold on. I want to stop before you guys move around to a bunch of random people. The thing that I want to stay on with abundance for a minute here is that what I think would be useful to do is actually build legislation to make these processes work more quickly, with more discretion from decision-makers and then oversight after the fact, rather than heavy process before the fact.

I was talking to somebody highly involved in the rural broadband programs under Biden, and one of the things they were saying to me was that there is this entire edifice, as he put it, of policy that is here to make sure I do nothing wrong.

What would be better, and I think this is right, is to allow me to act more and then look afterwards to see if I did something wrong and then hold me accountable for it. I think too much of our regulation is precautionary, as opposed to being able to let people move quickly and make decisions in the real world and then go back and see how they worked out.

All right. I think that's a great point, and I agree with you on that. I think there are a lot of people out there who would say that government is too bureaucratic. There's too much red tape in terms of getting things done.

Any kind of project like rural broadband takes 15 steps. Three of them were DEI. That's crazy. The environmental reviews and the lawsuits that bog these projects down for years make them unfinanceable.

There are people who agree with you on that. You know what they’re called? Republicans. Republicans agree with this. But you know who doesn’t agree with you? AOC, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders. Maybe you’re in the wrong party, because I don’t think you’re going to convince Democrats of this.

We’ll see.

I wish you well in that.

I hope you do.

I appreciate that. I do. I think if you can convince Democrats of this, it would be a great thing. But look, this is my issue with some of what you and Larry are saying: You want Elon and Trump to abide by all of these procedural niceties. You want them to play by the Marquess of Queensberry rules.

You keep saying, “This is my view,” but it’s not my view. You know who gets things done? This is what we say in Silicon Valley: Disruptive people. Founders. Founder mentalities. They’re the ones who get things done. Your response, Ezra, as we wrap here—I know you have to go.

Getting dumb things done quickly is not a good idea. That is why Starlink is a much better idea than rural broadband. Neither are bad ideas. Batteries are not dumb things.

You’re asking me about what Trump and Musk are doing right now. We started here on the tariffs.

What you’re watching with Trump is the use of expanded tariff authorities to do things that have a bad process behind them and will have a bad set of outcomes. So look, you’ve asked me many, many times here. I don’t really feel like I got the set of metrics I was looking for, but maybe we’ll talk again in 2 or 3 years and decide together: Was this genius work by the disruptors, or was this a really, really dumb approach to economic policy?

What was the issue with the metrics that I gave you, Ezra?

I don’t think they’re remotely complete. I think you’re processing us. You’re doing to us exactly what the government bureaucrats did to rural broadband. What’s your metric? How long is it going to take you to deploy this? We have to go through a checklist.

Exactly. Come on. These are debate tactics. Here’s all you need to know, Ezra: It’s $100 to get Starlink. It’s $15,000 to do fiber. We’re trying to debate principles, and you’re trying to bog it down in procedural arguments.

Hold on. This is amazing to me. Do you really think saying to you, “In 2 years, what are 3 or 4 metrics that would give you what you gave me?” doesn’t fit the policy? We don’t need to do this whole thing again, but what you gave me doesn’t fit the policy. It’s just reindustrialization.

Hold on. We said that we want to reindustrialize America, especially in critical industries, and reduce our dependence on foreign supply chains that are based in potential adversary countries. That’s concrete enough as well. Those are basically sufficient objectives.

The other thing that I did not hear that seemed to be measured was, okay, where is the economy? There’s got to be some cost you don’t want to pay. What metric would you want?

I’d like to see GDP growth. GDP growth has been X; I would like positive GDP growth. We want resiliency for those 4 critical industries, amongst others. It would be nice for the trade deficits to come down, especially with certain countries.

We’ve got the 4 critical industries, we’ve got the GDP increase, and yeah, trade deficits.

It’s an open debate.

Jason Calacanis

All right. Ezra Klein’s new book, Abundance, is out in fine bookstores, on Amazon, and all kinds of other places you can get it. You can hear him on podcasts incessantly. When are you going to stop this podcast, Ezra?

Oh my God, I know, man. It’s a growth industry—one of the last.

Jason Calacanis

Absolutely. We’ll talk to you soon, Ezra. Bye, y’all.

Thanks for having me.

Jason Calacanis

Thanks, Ezra. Thanks, Ezra. All right.

How do you think the debate went?

Jason Calacanis

I think it was a good debate to have, and we made progress here. The paradox of all of this is that what they’re describing, in some ways, is what Trump and Elon are doing. But it’s a bit too hot.

If I were to give a criticism or room for improvement to the current administration, to maybe pull some of these people over, it would be to slow down and explain what’s going on a bit better. I give the administration, like I give DOGE, an A++. It’s obvious they’re doing the right thing. I give the communication a B. Just increase the communication, and you can see they’re doing that. Antonio went out and talked a bit about DOGE, they did a roundtable, and they’re updating the website faster. The more you do that, the less the opposition’s mind is going to wander.

The same thing with the tariffs. If Bessent were out there front and center every day, talking methodically about what their plan was instead of using shock and awe, I think people would be able to process it quickly.

Let me just add one person’s opinion. Obviously, you can always say that communication should be better, but here’s the reality of it. Take DOGE, for example. You have crazy leftists firebombing Tesla dealerships, painting swastikas on Tesla cars, accosting Tesla drivers, creating violence and chaos, and trying to depress Tesla’s sales. Who’s to blame for that?

What people say is, “Well, somehow Elon’s the disruptive figure here.” You have a crazy left wing that’s reacting in crazy ways to sensible things that DOGE is doing. Then what people do is reinterpret this chaos that’s being created by the left. They somehow put the blame for that on Elon.

Jason Calacanis

I think your explanation there is even more reason to be proactively communicating decisions. That doesn’t forgive anybody drawing swastikas on Teslas. Obviously, they should go to jail, and if anybody’s coordinating it, that should be a RICO case. We should find out who it is.

If we’re going to bring these 2 parties together—which I think we came close to here by finding some common ground—I think we outlined what should happen and what the measures should be in 2 years. Have we onshored those important industries? Is GDP robust? Is the trade deficit more balanced?

This is the same debate we always had over immigration. Let’s pick a number and work toward a number, right? That’s where the debate in our country breaks down, in my mind: We don’t pick numbers. We can agree that we need a ton of innovation.

Segue, Jason. Go.

Jason Calacanis

Hey, Chamath, I saw that you were at the Breakthrough Prize ceremony over the weekend. Sorry I couldn’t make it, Yuri. I had family stuff, but Friedberg was there as well.

As everybody knows, the Breakthrough Prize is like the Oscars for science. They had hundreds of guests there, and about a third of them were scientists, a third were tech founders, and there were a bunch of Hollywood folks there. It was hosted by James Corden, and you had Jeff Bezos, Yuri Milner, as I mentioned, Zuck, Vin Diesel, Sergey Brin, Gwyneth Paltrow, and MrBeast. Lots of excitement there.

I know, David, you were at a secret conference that I was almost invited to, where you met Gwyneth Paltrow, friend of the pod.

David Friedberg

Jason, my man, you can show some photos here.

Jason Calacanis

We do have photos. Why don’t you show them?

David Friedberg

My wife sent me a letter to read on the air. Let me just open this up here. Is this an open letter? What’s the letter to?

Dear Gwyneth Paltrow

Last night, when I met you, I learned in that moment that pheromones are not a myth. They are real and apparently trademarked by you. You have the kind of femininity that could destabilize the stock market. I left the encounter slightly dazed, unsure if it was your presence or an as-yet-unlisted Goop candle.

Jason Calacanis

Wait. Let’s just stop here. Let me mansplain what she’s trying to say here, guys. Are you saying she’s got a girl crush?

David Friedberg

Gwyneth Paltrow crashed the stock market.

Jason Calacanis

Gwyneth Paltrow is hot as balls. That’s the truth. Are you saying she crashed the market?

David Friedberg

She has so much aura and rizz.

Jason Calacanis

David, you have to—I mean, I don’t know if we have the picture where David met her at the JPMorgan conference. But she is so kind. She’s got high EQ, but I have to say, she’s so cool. I’ve met a lot of stars, but that’s a star-star. That’s a star-star where you’re just like, “Holy shit.” You’re just a little bit in awe.

She’s a star. She’s a star. Look at that. There she is. Fifth bestie, Gwyneth Paltrow—Goop. Nat was stunned. Nat was stunned. We were all stunned.

David Friedberg

So, wait, are you saying that Nat has a girl crush?

Jason Calacanis

I think so. A girl crush has been declared here for the first time on All-In. We have an official girl crush.

What I think is remarkable, Jason, though, is that another conference lost your invitation in the mail. It just keeps happening. You’ve got to talk to the post office about all these invites. Your mailman must hate you or something. I don’t know. I’ve got to get invited to something.

Jason Calacanis

I think you’re the party. I guess I’ll see everybody at F1.

You’re a great family man. You’re always busy with your family.

Jason Calacanis

I try to prioritize the fam. I’ve got young girls. What am I supposed to do?

Big shout-out to Yuri and Julia Milner.

Jason Calacanis

Incredible. What they’re doing to inspire people to get into science is just so important. The awards are enormous—it’s like $3 million awards—which is an amazing reflection of how important this stuff is.

And every year for the last 2 years, I've also had a little tear. I had to shed a little tear because they do these things where you bring some of the folks who have been impacted positively. There was a girl who had her genes edited. She was literally on her deathbed, and this guy, David Liu, who won the Breakthrough Prize, did a very targeted gene edit.

She's alive and thriving, and she gets to present the award to him. You're just like, “Oh my God.”

It's like Sacks when he said he was shedding a tear, or almost shed a tear.

Jason Calacanis

I thought he was going to say he saw his reflection in his tuxedo and just got a little choked up because of how good he looked. Sacks does look good in that photo. Put it back up. Put it back up. Let's see. What are you wearing? The silhouette on your tuxedo is just outstanding.

So Nat Friedman is wearing Armani Privé, and I'm wearing Loro Piana, which is like a double-breasted tuxedo. They make a double-breasted cashmere tuxedo.

Wow. I didn't know they made that cashmere tuxedo.

Jason Calacanis

I cannot comment on the material choice. That is absolutely wow. That's a gorgeous garment.

Well, actually, Friedberg was going to be on the program today, but then he found out how many endangered species were murdered. Did you see that? Nick, do you have the picture of us with Zoë Saldaña?

Oh, there's our Friedberg. Oh, there's Zoë Saldaña, MrBeast, and her husband.

Jason Calacanis

Who's the guy with the man bun? Marco Perego. Great guy. This is Zoë Saldaña's husband. A cooler, funnier, fun dude. That guy should be at every party.

Really? Man bun, huh?

Jason Calacanis

He definitely looks like he's carrying. Look at Zoë Saldaña's tattoo on her chest. I want to see what that clothes guy on X who's always critiquing Republicans says.

Oh, he's awesome. I love him.

Jason Calacanis

I wonder—yeah, Derek Guy or whatever. I want to know how he responds. Well, that's terrible. MrBeast fails, but I want to know how he responds to your tuxedo, Chamath, and finally gives you credit, because I think he only compliments Democrats. That's sort of the problem.

Oh, is he really?

Jason Calacanis

Yeah, he's always picking on Republicans. Jimmy's looking good. Did you guys see the picture of Julia's dress? I just want to say one thing about Julia. Did you see Julia's dress?

I haven't.

Jason Calacanis

Let's take a look here. This is an insane story. So this is Julia Milner. The cool thing about this, guys, is that this is a very incredible and famous painting by Raphael called The School of Athens. This is like a visual manifesto of human knowledge. There are all these very important people: Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, et cetera.

She got the license, I think, from the Vatican, and then she worked with Dolce & Gabbana to make it into a dress for the occasion, just to celebrate learning. There she is with our boy Jimmy Donaldson. So anyway, it was a great event. Thank you, Yuri and Julia, for including us. All right, guys, I gotta wrap. All right, David. I miss you. Thanks for the invite. All right, bye.

I will handle Jason's invitation for 20 seconds. I'm pretty sure.

Jason Calacanis

I mean, I have a phone number. You could text me the invite. You could send me a calendar. I have a GCal. I've got a Google Calendar. You could invite me.

It's so funny that the event that Sacks was at—one of our mutuals was like, “Hey, guys, this incredible event's going on. This famous person's hosting it. These celebrities are coming. Jay Cal, Friedberg, everybody, you're all invited.”

Then, 2 weeks before, I was like, “Are we going to this thing?” because I'm just looking at my calendar and everything. They're like, “Ah, yeah, yeah, the event's happening.” And I'm like, “For you, Jason? Did you send the event?”

You're my ride or die. Texting me the invite, but you didn't email it.

Jason Calacanis

I will never go to an event that rejects you, ever. Like a ride or die, baby. For our chairman-dictator.