Trump的大周：中东之行、中国协议、药品行政令与“大而美法案”——与Ben Shapiro对谈

One thing I’m trying to figure out: do Daily Mail stories actually end? I’ve scrolled up like 7 times.

No, no, no. Daily Mail stories never end. Those guys are like the methamphetamine of clicks. It’s click crack.

Yeah, they’re like, “One more paragraph.” Every time I see a Daily Mail article, I’m like, “Okay, do I have 15 minutes here?” Because I’m going to click on one, look at the photos, then go to the right rail and click on the right rail.

That’s disgraceful. When you go on the right rail, you’re a true degenerate.

I love it. Stay off the right rail of the Daily Mail. Keep going on the carousel for hours.

One of my favorite Daily Mail stories was when Jared and Ivanka were over at our house and the paparazzi were following them around. They were like, “Can you give us a tour of the area?” So we drove them outside for a hot second, and the paparazzi immediately captured a picture of them on the back of our golf cart, because we’re in Florida, with my son and me in the front.

It was the Daily Mail paparazzi, and the headline was: “Jared, Ivanka, unnamed driver and small boy.”

Ben, this is going to be so good right now. You’re going to feel so uncomfortable. It’s going to be amazing. Jason will explain what happened last week. He’s going to issue a formal apology, and if that formal apology is not good enough, I’ll step in. Over to you, Jason.

We, the members of the All-In podcast, including Chamath Palihapitiya and myself, Jason Calacanis, would like to formally and respectfully apologize to poker legend Phil Hellmuth for our previous comments about his relationship with Hollywood actor Timothée Chalamet and the Los Angeles celebrity community more generally.

On a previous episode of this podcast, a number of inaccurate, potentially legally actionable statements were made by the host regarding Mr. Hellmuth. It was strongly implied on this program that Mr. Hellmuth was not acquainted with Mr. Chalamet, and it was further suggested that he had harassed and manhandled the Oscar-nominated performer during a social event in Miami, Florida. This was a flagrant misrepresentation of the facts, for which we are sorry.

We here at All-In are committed to journalistic responsibility and integrity, and we hope to use this time to correct the record. In fact, as a noted bon vivant and publicly visible representative of the gaming community, Mr. Hellmuth is acquainted with many celebrities from the worlds of film, television, athletics, business, modeling, finance and beyond.

The list of celebrity friends is far too vast to list here in its entirety, but we have prepared this section, which we feel demonstrates how overwhelming his popularity is among this demographic: Matt Damon, Steve Martin, Charles Barkley, Bill Clinton, Khloé Kardashian, MrBeast, the guy from Billions, Tiger Woods, Mario Lopez, Drake and, of course, Jay-Z.

Once again, we here at All-In regret the error. We should publicly apologize to Mr. Hellmuth and recommit ourselves to truth and accuracy in reporting.

Thank you, Jason. That was great. I would just like to add a couple of things. Phil is my best friend and has been for a very long time. I love him. He does have a lot of friends, and he opens his Rolodex to us.

To the extent that Phil was hurt last week because we were ribbing him—we rib him a lot and make jokes in the group chat—it’s because we enjoy it, and he enjoys it. But I think the way that we said it really hurt his feelings. So, Philly, I love you. We love you, Phil. We’re sorry.

I’m specifically sorry because, to be honest, I probably started the whole thing and got everybody involved. We were just trying to have fun with you, Phil. Sorry. We love you.

I called you a panda eating bamboo, and I did not mean to say that you put your meat hooks into Timothée Chalamet. I didn’t mean to say that you took credit for, and didn’t have a major contribution to, the All-In podcast, obviously. But Phil, honestly, you’re the best.

You’ve been really instrumental in a lot of these important relationships that have joined our group. So thank you, and we love you. Let’s keep going.

Yes, absolutely. And we wish you well in the World Series of Poker. Go get ’em. Hope you hit it. Go get ’em. World’s greatest 17th, 18th, 19th—who knows?

He’s not playing this year. He’s not playing in the Main Event because the WSOP is ridiculous in how they set up these tournaments. It’s stupid. We will do a better version, by the way, of the WSOP to announce us. We will be doing an event during the F1 in Las Vegas where we will be launching our poker tournaments. For those of you who would like to have some quality, high-class poker tournaments and some ridiculous cash games, let us know. Late November, guys, book it. Make sure you’ve got five, six days where you can pretend you have COVID, get out of your job, and come to Las Vegas.

What about you, Ben? Do you like to gamble? Do you ever play the horses, the ponies?

I can say that I’ve been big on gambling. It hasn’t worked out well for me. I have an addiction, so I wouldn’t want that to get out of control.

All right. Well, we will absolutely take advantage of your addiction. Ben, have you ever rolled the dice? Have you ever rolled dice?

No. I’ve never rolled dice.

Okay, so this is perfect. We have to take advantage of this. There’s an incredible rule in craps where, when you have a virgin shooter—somebody who’s never touched the dice—you can make millions. I don’t know what it is, but those are the people who go off.

I have seen this 20 times in my gambling life in Las Vegas. I remember I took my father-in-law and my kids while my wife was pregnant. She was like, “Get out of the house.” So my father-in-law and I took our 3 older kids to Vegas. He had never shot dice before. He touched the dice and broke the casino.

It is the most fun game, Ben. I’m telling you. You need to come November 22nd. We’ll make the arrangements. You’ll have a really great time. You’ll do something with us onstage, and Ben is going to touch those little dice and break the bank. I’m going to be there to finance it.

You are going to get such great parenting and husband advice from Chamath, Ben. All of this dedication you have to your family—we’re going to teach you a new approach, which is to just go off to Vegas. Take your kids and your father-in-law and leave your pregnant wife at home. She’s got work to do.

Ben, you’ve been covering this Trump Middle East trip all week, so let’s get into that. As everybody knows, Trump was in the Middle East. He secured a huge investment from the Saudis—$600 billion, plus $140 billion for a defense partnership—and MBS said he wants to make it $1 trillion.

A bunch of high-profile CEOs joined Trump, including friends of the show, Elon Musk and, of course, Dara from Uber, Andy Jassy from Amazon, Alex Karp, Jensen Huang—tons of people. David Sacks was there as well.

He also closed a $200 billion deal with Qatar, which includes $96 billion from Boeing to send 160 planes there, with an option for 50 more. He removed sanctions against Syria, which is a little controversial. We’ll get into that, but he said it was to give them a chance at greatness.

He gave a speech at a Saudi-U.S. investment forum in Riyadh where he powerfully outlined his vision for a new Middle East, basically rejecting 20 years of American interventions and forever wars. He gave big credit to a “new generation of leaders,” including MBS, for building better societies.

Ben, what do you think here? What was your take on the trip? Is this the best Trump? Of all the versions of Trump, this did seem to me to be the best version. He seemed really comfortable with this category of leader in this region in particular. What were your thoughts?

Oh, for sure. There’s no question about that. He likes MBS. He obviously likes the Emiratis. He likes the folks in the UAE. We’ve known that for a while.

He’s really signaling a shift away from the Obama-Biden policy toward a lot of these places, where Biden liked to say the word “democracy” and then immediately distance himself from Saudi Arabia on the basis of that and chide MBS, all this kind of stuff, and then try to cut a deal with Iran at the exact same time, which of course pisses off the Saudis.

Trump is going over there in dealmaking mode, and you can see he’s in dealmaking mode. His entire approach to the Middle East is what he said in the speech: “Commerce above chaos.” Let’s do some business here.

He understands that there are a lot of people in KSA—Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—and also in Qatar and the UAE who are really looking to do business. I think there are a bunch of strategic aspects of this that are really good.

One of them, obviously, is driving these places away from China. The more business ties you have with places like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, and Qatar, the farther away they're going to get from China.

I think you do have to be careful with Qatar in particular, which has some divided priorities, shall we say, when it comes to terrorism. Obviously, the case they will make to steelman what Qatar says about itself is that they have to have good relations with terrorists so that the West can talk with terrorists on occasion. To not steelman the case, they gave $2 billion to Hamas over the course of the last several years and have funded the American university systems to the tune of $6.3 billion, for a country that has a grand total of 2.6 million citizens. It's smaller than the state of Connecticut in terms of its citizenship.

It spends something like two-thirds of what China spends on lobbying, which seems pretty weird. But with that said, the idea of bringing dollars into the United States and combining on things like AI is what David Sacks has been working on over there. That stuff is all really good.

The warning that I'd issue to President Trump is just make sure that you have strings attached, too. Clearly, there are strings attached from the other side when you're talking about Qatar, so the United States should have strings attached as well.

You mentioned Syria there. If you're talking about getting rid of the sanctions on Syria, there's an argument to be made. Obviously, Erdogan in Turkey would love that because the leader of Syria now, al-Jolani—he changes his name—is kind of like the prince of terrorists, right? He's the artist formerly known as al-Jolani. Now he's al-Sharaa, thank you. He changed his name. He was al-Qaeda, then he was ISIS, then he's HTS. He basically works for the Turks.

Obviously, the Turks would love for al-Julani to have sanctions removed. That's fine. I think there's a case to be made for it, but you have to make sure that he actually delivers on the other end of that, which would be getting rid of the terrorists in his country.

What do you think, Ben, about Qatar? For people, it's the same word, just said differently here in the West and in their country. Do you think we should have deep ties to them? Is the steelman argument that their relationship with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood is acceptable to you, Ben Shapiro, or do you think we should hold the line with them and say, “Hey, you have to cut off these relationships if you want to have a relationship with the United States”?

I mean, it seems to me that we have a lot more leverage in the latter situation. Qatar has obviously paid some $8 billion to have this air base on its own territory, but then it puts restrictions on how the United States can use that air base. That air base was previously located in Saudi Arabia.

It's my perspective that after October 7, for example, the United States under Joe Biden should have gone to Qatar, which obviously has a deep relationship with Hamas, as proven by the release of that American hostage while President Trump was in the Middle East, which was done at the behest of Qatar. The United States should have gone to Qatar and said, “Listen, the air base goes away unless all the hostages come out and the Hamas leadership goes into exile,” and you avoid the entire war.

There is leverage that can be exerted. I'm not sure that the leverage is being properly exerted on Qatar. Let's put it this way: I'm much more enthusiastic about the ties that President Trump is fostering with Saudi Arabia and the UAE than I am about the ties that he's fostering with Qatar.

Back in 2017, there was nearly a war between Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. That's how bad the relations were back in 2017, and President Trump was on the Saudi-UAE side of that. Moving forward, let's just say that “trust but verify” would be a much better strategy than just trust: “Here's some stuff. We'll hope that you give us something back on the back end.”

Chamath, let's go to the business side here. Trump is making a lot of deals. There's a little bit of a brouhaha over a $400 million plane given to Trump. I'm not sure how relevant that is or if he's even accepted it personally, and I'm sure you've got some thoughts on that. But what did we see there? I saw Sunny, our friend from Groq—one of your investments—was there.

We're seeing a level of investment and collaboration between Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and America and the West that, hey, let's face it, we haven't ever seen. They do seem to be leaning more toward—I won't say democracy—but a lot of social reforms. A lot of women in the business community there was pointed out by David Sacks.

I've made a couple of trips there. It seems to have changed on a human-rights basis more in the last 3 or 4 years than in the last, I guess, 20. So what's your take generally on this position Ben has of, hey, better that they be doing business with us and let's build and foster these relationships as opposed to having them fall into the arms of Russia, North Korea, or China?

Let's just do a little cleanup on a couple of these things, and I'll give you my take. Sure. The first thing is, we announced an almost $2 billion deal—$1.7 billion, I think is what it was—for AI inference.

We're starting to build some enormous data centers in Saudi Arabia. I'll get to why Saudi Arabia is a critical place to do that, but they've been exceptional partners. We are the only inference company in the world with an export license from the United States to do this.

So, yeah, it was great. That's why Sunny was there, along with Jonathan Ross, our founder and CEO. That was really big for us. This has been a company that Jonathan and I got off the ground 10 years ago. It's been a long, long slog.

There's a lot of commercial activity that happened there. Our friend Brian Yutko, who was just announced as the head of the commercial-plane development group at Boeing, which is making all the next-generation planes, was there. Boeing was there. Kelly Ortberg was there, and they announced a $160 billion deal for Boeing and a bunch of other stuff.

Elon announced that Saudi Arabia now allows Starlink for maritime and aircraft usage. He also announced that robotaxis are coming to Saudi Arabia. The business community, I think, was quite central to this trip, which is cool.

With respect to the plane, just to do some cleanup, this is a gift being handled between the Department of Defense and the Ministry of Defense of Qatar. If and when that plane does get transferred over, it will then be scanned and retrofitted to military-grade specifications so that it can be used by the then-sitting president of the United States.

While people want to be up in arms, just to be clear, this has happened, and Qatar specifically has done this on multiple other occasions. You may dispute the countries. You may not like the fact that it's happened, but they've given a plane as a gift to the leader of Iraq, to the then-sitting leader of Turkey, and to the then-sitting leader, I believe, of Yemen.

There are customs, I guess. Who am I to judge these customs? But that may seem excessive or untoward to us, or maybe an attempt at graft, while to them it's actually just a sign of deep respect or relationship-building.

I think we should not overjudge this thing. Let the Department of Defense do its job. It's a gift to the United States of America, and we should move on. I don't think it's a particularly big deal.

What is the big deal here is what Trump did, which I think is historic. I think the most important thing to recognize is that America has been a global hegemon since World War II. But I think we took our eye off the ball, and over the last 20 years, particularly the last 17, we have seen China slowly erode our global influence through an initiative that they were frankly very open and honest about and branded as the Belt and Road Initiative.

In Belt and Road 1.0, what China did was use the balance sheet of China to invest incredibly aggressively and thoughtfully in all these critical geographies of the world: Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Specifically in the Middle East, and specifically between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, China has invested about $200 billion over the last 15 years.

What does that do? It allows them to exert influence and economic cooperation, hard power, and soft power. In 1 week, the sitting president of the United States announced $2 trillion of investment from those countries into the United States.

What does that effectively do? I think what that effectively does is say that the Middle East is turning a page, that they are beyond these regional conflicts, that they want to thrive as a society, and that they are 100% aligned with the United States. How do you know that? Because I don't think there's another $2 trillion of deals to be done with any other country other than America.

That's number 1. Number 2, the reciprocation of how American companies are investing in that region is to the tune of several hundred billion dollars.

Now, why is that region critical? It's critical for 2 things. The first is that when you draw a 1,000-mile radius around Saudi Arabia, you touch 4 billion human beings. Four billion. Half the global population is within a 3,000-mile radius of Saudi Arabia.

If you can establish cooperation and strategic alignment with that area, it is an incredibly important thing to do. The Saudi coastline, as an example, is thousands and thousands of miles. These are all huge strategic things that we've known in the context of other conflicts and other geopolitical things that we've done for decades.

But what Trump basically did was clean the slate. He wiped the floor with all this neocon-establishment nonsense. That's what his speech did, which we can talk about in a second.

He created and forged an economic alliance that I think is going to be very difficult for any other country to undo.

That is what I saw: $2 trillion. That is an enormous bet for one country to make with another country. And I think the fact that he did that with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE speaks to a really important strategy. Friedberg, your thoughts on this trip and the growing and deepening relationship between the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and apparently Qatar as well?

I think the biggest moment was the speech that Trump gave. It underscored, I think, a really important narrative shift for me. This was a powerful embrace of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE—of their choices, their way of life, their way of being—basically showing, I would say, respect to those peoples without judgment, which I think is quite different from the leadership of the past.

I'll just highlight the mainstream media narrative: “Oh my gosh, Trump goes to Russia, Trump goes to China, he goes to North Korea, he goes to Saudi Arabia, he embraces dictators.” The narrative has been that these individuals in leadership positions in these countries are dictators, and Trump embraces dictators. He loves Xi. He loves Putin. He loves Kim Jong-un. He loves MBS.

That's a bad thing because the liberal view—and I would say largely the American view in the past—has been that there's right and there's wrong. There's our way of governing, and then there's the other way of governing, and the other way of governing is always wrong. Our form of American democracy is the only model that's right, and all the others have to be wrong.

Fundamentally, that's a colonial mindset, which is what he's highlighting in this speech. He's saying that the point of view that all others are wrong means that they should come around to our point of view—our model of democracy, our model of governing. And in the speech, he basically underscored that that's not really the case anymore.

We are no longer going to be colonizers where we enforce our view of government on the rest of the world and say, “This is the only good path.” But there are other paths, and we can respect them. We can work together so long as we aren't harming one another, so long as terrorism goes away—which he underscored in his speech has gone away.

By the way, I'm not trying to highlight or prop Trump up for the speech itself, but I do think that this underscores a shift in the political viewpoint that has now come to power in America. We are no longer going to have this moral or sociopolitical framework that says it's our way or the highway. We are now going to go to folks like Xi, like North Korea, like China, and say we can respect your way of living and your way of governing.

We can have a partnership and continue to build a world together without saying that if you don't follow our path, we're never going to be true partners. For me, the biggest thing that came out of this whole visit was that shift in narrative, which I think really is different from what we've seen in the past. It counters a lot of how the mainstream media has framed his so-called embrace of differing ways of governance.

Ben, this was obviously a Republican position as well: we're going to have a hard line on human rights and democracy. In fact, the entire Republican position in terms of globalists—Clinton, too—was, “Hey, let's embrace China, and we will lead them toward democracy.” That obviously didn't happen. They did build a vibrant economy and took 400–500 million people out of poverty into a middle class.

But here we're seeing something different. I've spent a lot of time in the region, maybe 4 or 5 trips in the last couple of years. The last couple of times I was there, there were women doing business, dancing, and music, and now there's alcohol in the kingdom in some select locations. There's a casino coming to the UAE. We're actually seeing maybe this strategy of less judgment and more engagement result in more modernization. So, what's your take on this?

I think that one of the things that's happened in the media coverage of President Trump's speech is this sort of false binary that isn't really what's going on. It was posited as neoconservatism versus isolationism, and he mentioned both of those concepts in his speech. But the reality is that I think we should be careful about how we define these terms.

What we really mean is that Wilsonian interventionism has been completely rejected by the American people and by President Trump. To pretend that President Trump is being isolationist is obviously not true. He's literally cutting trillion-dollar deals with foreign countries, traveling there, and making common bonds with them. It's the opposite of isolationism in a lot of ways.

It's a realism, right? He's a foreign-policy realist who wants to make deals where he can make deals and wants to make the best deal for America. That's the exact opposite of isolationism.

If they're doing projects, you know, in the Trump family and the plane, this is the opposite of isolationism. Right. Exactly.

And so I think that all the debates that are currently happening within the Republican ecosystem are about which version of realism we're pursuing. There's a more hawkish version of realism that suggests that you ought to be more skeptical—I think that's where I am—of what you want from these countries in addition to the money.

And then there's a more dovish realism that says, basically, as long as the deals go forward, maybe there are no strings attached. That's an interesting debate, and it depends on what levels of trust you have in various countries. Again, I think it differs from country to country.

I want to build on what you're saying and just ask a question, because I completely agree that that rejection has all of these downstream consequences. The most interesting consequence for me, but I would just like your opinion on this, is that Trump goes there, cuts all these deals, and announces all of it. There's just an incredible show of force, frankly—economic force and political alignment—and then, within 1 or 2 days, Iran caves.

We don't know what the final contours of that deal are going to look like, but that also has incredibly important implications for the safety and security not just of that region, but for everybody. I don't know what you thought about how it seemed that there was a capitulation there.

This is where, again, I remain pretty skeptical. One of the issues that we have when it comes to negotiations with Iran is that the phrase that's been used by Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the UAE with regard to Iran is that Iran has never won a war or lost a peace.

Iran is very good at negotiation. They're quite sophisticated in how they approach these issues. When President Trump says they can't have a nuclear weapon, that's all we need to know; all the rest is details. But actually, when it comes to things like negotiating a nuclear deal, the devil is in the details.

Is it going to be JCPOA Part 2, which is basically: you can enrich to civilian levels with a certain level of transparency, but you also get money, and the money can be used for terrorism, ballistic-missile development, or rebuilding your air defenses? What do those details actually look like?

Obviously, Qatar is very close with the Islamic Republic of Iran. So they have been negotiating, again, as sort of a representative of Iran in those negotiations. I'm going to hold off. Let's just say I'll be skeptical until I agree with you.

They need to be in the penalty box for some number of years because they have not earned the trust of the world that they can conform to these things and not do nefarious things once they get access to capital and funds. So, to your point, they have to earn their way out, for sure.

That's right. And I think that when you look at Saudi Arabia, one of the things that would be interesting to see is that President Trump said in his speech in Saudi Arabia that he would consider it an honor if they would join the Abraham Accords.

His signal accomplishment, obviously, during his first administration was the Abraham Accords—the notion that he continued to press forward that commerce matters more than ideological conflict. That's why the UAE and Israel, for example, now have a pretty solid relationship that's withstood a lot of the stressors created by October 7 and the ensuing war.

The question of whether Saudi Arabia actually does that is an interesting one because, if you're looking for a new region in which commerce really does take the fore, then obviously the UAE and Saudi Arabia are very close. I mean, essentially, there's no better place, I think, in the world right now, if you're trying to find a net-new place to put capital to work, than the UAE and then Saudi Arabia.

Yeah. I mean, I agree with that, and I think that obviously integrating the region across religious boundaries would be a very good thing. I think President Trump also has an interest in that. So it'll be interesting to see how things develop from here.

Again, I remain skeptical of the idea that commerce alone is going to usher in a new era. I do think that the United States, typically, when it's brokering these deals, does put its thumb on the scale in particular ways.

Those ways are not just putting money into KSA or taking money out of KSA, which, again, I'm great with that. I think it's brilliant what President Trump is doing. I know a number of businesses, obviously, that are working in Riyadh and doing wonderful work in Riyadh, and I think what MBS has done transformatively to KSA is incredible.

If what you're looking for is a broader sort of regional calm that's going to last the course of time, what you don't need is a resurgent Muslim Brotherhood, a resurgent Iran, or the rebuilding of terrorist groups that threaten both Saudi Arabia as well as Israel and other Sunni allies in the region. I think there are a couple of ways to see what President Trump is doing.

One of them is, I hope that there's a step 2, which is, okay, now Saudi Arabia, we have a great relationship with you. It would be really great if you did join the Abraham Accords, and now you have this very strong regional bloc that economically is more interdependent, which is, of course, what he pursued during his first administration.

Or is he moving in a direction—and this is also plausible—where he's basically saying, "Listen, everybody's sort of on their own. We're going to cut independent deals with each one of these nations in bilateral fashion with the United States"? I think it remains to be seen which strategy President Trump is taking: the bilateral approach to relations with each one of these countries individually, or whether he's attempting to forge more of an interdependent regional economic bloc.

Two questions for you, Ben. Rapid fire. The Abraham Accords was brought up. Will the Saudis sign it? Will MBS sign it? Trump sort of alluded, "Hey, they're going to do it in their own time." What's holding it up in your mind? And if and when they do sign it, what impact would it have on the region?

Then, number 2: your thoughts on this Qatar plane kerfuffle and the media sort of obsessing over it. Are they overindexing on it or not?

As far as the Abraham Accords, again, I think that this is a shift in tone for President Trump. The Abraham Accords were considered sort of his signal foreign policy accomplishment during term 1. And it's my belief that, if he'd been reelected in 2020, by February 2021, I think Saudi would have been in the Abraham Accords.

Obviously, one of the obstacles continues to be the war in Gaza and what actually ends up emerging there. But, ironically, one of the things that has undermined the incentive for the Saudis to join the Abraham Accords is Israel's complete devastation of all of the proxies of Iran. One of the things that was driving Saudi and Israel together was the fact that there was this really giant threat in Iran.

And now it appears—it could be at least plausibly read—that one of the reasons why President Trump is selling $150 billion worth of military hardware to KSA is to provide a defensive barrier against Iran while assuming that maybe Iran does end up going nuclear. So what happens with Iran does have serious ramifications for the possibility of the Abraham Accords, including Saudi Arabia. That seems more distant than it was a couple of years ago, and it may take more time than I think special envoy Steve Witkoff and the Trump administration would like it to be.

As far as the plane kerfuffle, on my show I said that it looks skeezy, and I will maintain that position. It doesn't have to be illegal in order for it not to look particularly good, because, of course, the other half of the deal is that once the plane is retrofitted and used by the president for a certain period of years, it then goes to the Trump presidential library. That was one of the conditions of the gifting.

And Qatar is quite famous for putting a lot of money in a lot of various pockets, ranging from the current attorney general of the United States. Pam Bondi was a foreign-registered agent for Qatar for a while, being paid by Qatar to do that sort of lobbying work. Qatar is pretty famous for putting its money in a variety of pockets.

Yeah.

By the way, just to put a number on that, Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, the QIA, the Qatar Investment Authority, has about a half trillion dollars of capital, about $50 billion of which is invested in US funds. And many of the folks in and around the circles associated with the White House obviously have QIA as an LP, or have had funds they're affiliated with that have QIA as an LP.

My point about this is that, put aside whatever moral qualms anybody has about this sort of stuff—which, again, you can argue either way—the key to me is, if you like President Trump's agenda, the biggest obstacles to President Trump's agenda are basically 2 things. One is that the economy goes south, right? That's an obstacle to any president's agenda.

That's why it's really important what he's doing in the Middle East. It's why it's important what he's been doing backing off of the tariff war in a lot of ways. It's why deregulation and passing the tax cut are important. All of that's important. And then the second thing that can really hurt any administration is corruption. Even allegations of corruption can be incredibly damaging.

For example, there was a crypto bill that was on the floor of the Senate, or was about to come onto the floor of the Senate, just last week. It ended up being killed by Democrats plus a couple of Republicans. Democrats, at least publicly, maintained that the reason they killed the crypto bill was specifically because of allegations surrounding the Trump family, TRUMP coin, the TRUMP memecoin, World Liberty Financial, and all this sort of stuff.

And so the question is: listen, as a Trump supporter who raised money for President Trump, campaigned with President Trump, and campaigned for President Trump, as a person, what I want is his agenda to be successful. If an obstacle to that agenda is the optics of a thing like taking a $400 million jet from Qatar—which does amount to the single biggest monetary gift ever given to the United States, even if you consider it to just be a gift to the United States generally, not to the Trump library personally or anything like that—is that the kind of thing that harms him in the public mind?

And if that ties into a broader narrative that his political opponents are trying to drive, that he is corrupt or the people around him are corrupt, is that a win for him? Just on a practical, efficacious level, is that a win for him? Is that a win for his agenda? Because the media coverage this week could have all been about him doing deals in these various places and bringing money back home to the United States. An unnecessary distraction. That's kind of my view of it.

And the appearance of impropriety.

Yeah, I agree.

Amongst half the country who doesn't like him—and he's now tipping into almost as unpopular as his first term—they're just going to weaponize that in the midterms, and it's going to scuttle the important agenda, DOGE. This is one of the things that I'm afraid of. This is the thing that also ties into the economic problem, right?

Right now, everybody is basically like, "Oh, who cares about this kind of stuff?" I think a lot of people are like, "Who cares about this kind of stuff? As long as the number goes up and to the right, then all this sort of stuff doesn't matter very much." If the number starts going down, then you start having all these kinds of corruption allegations rise to the surface in a new way, right?

Because that's what happens with presidents very often: what you see is there are kind of a bunch of little dents in the vehicle, and then there's a car crash, and suddenly all the dents are very evident to the naked eye. That's what I'd like for him to avoid.

What if he loses the midterms and then we start impeachment 3, 4, and 5, investigation 3, 4, and 5, and now we're back to lawfare and insanity, which nobody wants to be in?

Let's talk about another win. It was a pretty great week objectively for Trump. On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Bessent announced a trade deal with China in Geneva. The details were basically, here we go, another pause.

Tariffs will go down from 145% to 30%. Maybe that's manageable. China's cutting its tariffs for the US from 125% to 10%. And they're going to end this de minimis rule, also known as the garbage-fashion rule—Temu, Shein, all that kind of stuff, when they dropship you stuff that's under, I think, $800 or so.

The market loved the news. Don't make America dress well again. Don't do it. The market was up massively, but the Dow and the Nasdaq are basically flat to slightly negative. So we're kind of maybe cleaning up the chaos.

He shook the globe, the economic globe, Friedberg. And now maybe, as I think a lot of people are predicting, he found an exit ramp. Maybe that was the plan all along. Maybe it's 4D chess. Maybe he's reacting to the market. Maybe all that doesn't matter. But here we are.

Dave Friedberg, when we look back on this whole trade war, Trump tariff turmoil, what are we going to look back on this a year from now and think? Was it just a distraction, or is it actually going to create $1 trillion in tariff revenue and we're going to get rid of taxes for 150 people who make under $150,000? What's going to happen with this when we look back on it a year or 2 from now?

Well, I don't know where the tariff deals are going to end up, so we don't know yet, right?

Yeah, I'm asking for a guess, right?

Yeah. And so I don't know. I don't know. Like I said, I think one of the biggest things that needs to happen, which is being discussed in these trade deals, is regulatory parity, such that US companies can participate evenly in foreign markets.

I have highlighted a few examples of why it's challenging for US companies to set up and do business in the local jurisdictions for a lot of our trade partners across multiple industries.

I think that's being heavily negotiated. So that doesn't make the headlines. That's not the top of the news. Everyone talks about the tariff number, the tariff number, the tariff number. But at the end of the day, access to foreign markets for U.S. companies is what matters. You can even think about a good example for us: a lot of the fines that happen to U.S. tech companies in the EU. There are just billions and billions of dollars of fines being paid out by our companies. That's another form of taxation.

The fact that China won't allow U.S. tech companies to operate, but we allow Chinese tech companies to operate here—that regulatory parity is the biggest thing that I think needs to be identified in these deals before we have a real sense of it all, because this again could be a real economic growth driver for American businesses, and that could have a real effect on our GDP. So that's the biggest thing I'm looking for versus just the tariff number: parity and access to global markets for U.S. companies.

I don't think we know, and those are the details of the deals that are going to take several months. Normally, these are multiyear trade negotiations with big trade teams that go back and forth over several years to figure these deals out. So, to create maximal leverage and accelerate outcomes, it seems like a lot of this trade hype got everyone to the negotiating table. Now the hard work's being done to figure out the details of these deals, and hopefully we end up in a better place for American businesses because of it.

Chamath, I know where you stand on this. He creates that big pothole crater, everybody gets excited, it creates a lot of attention, and then maybe the real negotiation starts. So, a year from now, when we look back on this, what would success look like for the Trump administration in Chamath Palihapitiya's mind and assessment?

I think this goes back to what I said at the beginning. I think tariffs have the potential to be the on-ramp to our version of Belt and Road. And I think that that is an incredible jiu-jitsu move of what was an exceptionally well-executed and methodical program by the Chinese government to cement hard and soft power all around the world while the United States wasn't looking and was obsessed with cheap garbage that they could buy at Target.

This should be a wake-up call to us. We don't need all this cheap nonsense. We can live with fewer things. Those things could be of higher quality. They may be of higher price. But more importantly, we need to make sure that we're cementing bilateral deals with as many countries in the world and building the next phase of Pax Americana, of American hegemony. We need to do it.

So, the fact that we are negotiating with China, I think, is very good. I think that they are a necessary partner of ours. But we can't take our eye off the ball. The tariffs were a way of ripping the Band-Aid off all this globalist free-trade nonsense, and now we need to reset this in a methodical, calm way.

Now, some markets we're not going to get right, and in some industries we have some very complicated thinking to do. As an example, which we'll get to later, the pharma EO is very complicated and very nuanced. But this is the hard and necessary work. So my perspective is this is the beginning of Belt and Road 2.0.

I think we started with a real bang in the Middle East, and I just encourage the administration to go and finish the job and get as many bilateral deals done as possible and reset how important the United States is as a partner. We always knew it, but we allowed that hard influence and hard power to get frittered away with all kinds of nonsensical, idealistic thinking that was just wasteful.

And it was also globalists who wanted to make money, right? It's easier to make cheap stuff over there and then sell it here. I think that was short-term and nonstrategic thinking by many of those companies. I think we've created dynamics that we can change. We can change the incentives for how consumers consume in the United States. And I think it's worth thinking about how to do that.

All right. Well, here is the Polymarket on tariffs generating greater than $250 billion in 2025 that we set—or Polymarket set. Basically, no chance that that's going to happen. So, we'll see. I think everybody's coming to the table on reciprocity.

I don't even know how you're going to settle this, Jason, because what does it mean? Will tariffs generate? I think it's a really interesting bet, but the real question is on the measurement. There is not going to be some number that OMB or somebody else puts out that says it generated X.

Well, I think Lutnick was saying he was tracking that, but we'll see. The relationship with China and this sort of changing concept of consumerism: do you think that's a possibility for America, or do Americans just want cheap stuff on Amazon and an unlimited number of Amazon boxes in their recycle bin?

I'm not sure that's how consumers have ever thought about this sort of stuff. I remember when I was younger, there was a lot of talk about made-in-America cars and “buy, buy, buy made in America,” and that just failed because it turns out that American cars just weren't as good as the stuff that you could get elsewhere. And it turns out that Americans are both producers and consumers.

It's easy to say, “Don't buy cheap crap from China.” But it turns out a lot of stuff that actually is not all that cheap also was manufactured in China. Hopefully now it'll be manufactured in Vietnam, or manufactured in India, or in other third-party countries. The idea that we're going to be reshoring all that stuff to the United States—we're not going to be making T-shirts in the United States. That's not a thing.

But I do think that right now, my read is that it's too early to tell. This reminds me of the old Yiddish joke where the couple isn't getting along, so they go to the rabbi and they say, “What do we do, Rabbi?” He says, “I want you to bring a chicken into your house.” They bring the chicken into their house, and it still isn't working. They go back to the rabbi, and he says, “I want you to bring a cow into your house.”

They bring a cow into their house, and they say, “It still isn't working, Rabbi. It's just terrible.” They go back to the rabbi, and he says, “I want you to bring 2 goats into your house.” They do that and come back. The husband says, “This is awful. I can't handle it.” He says, “Take everything out of your house.”

They take all the things out of their house, and they're like, “Oh my God, this is just fantastic.” That's basically what Trump did here, right? You put the chicken and the cow and the 2 goats in the house. I still think you left the chicken, right? And so it's going to be a question as to how much impact the chicken has.

Meaning, the 10% tariff rate that we still have on the rest of the world is more than quintuple what it was at the very beginning of this process. I mean, the average tariff rate—and not to use a number that David doesn't like—but the average tariff rate right now is higher than it's been anytime since the 1930s. Is that going to have some carryover effect? Walmart is already suggesting they're going to have to start increasing their prices.

So, I don't think that we're out of the woods. And I do think that the biggest threat with regard to this stuff is less the tariffs than the feeling of uncertainty for investors as to what comes next. And that's where the pharmaceutical EO starts to come in, or the negotiations over the tax bill. What actually makes it in, what doesn't make it in?

When it comes to the stuff that makes investors sanguine, I think one of the reasons why investors are sanguine about Saudi Arabia is because Saudi Arabia is a kingdom. And that kingdom is very wealthy. And that very wealthy kingdom doesn't have to worry about the next election. They don't have to worry about the next policy that they have to throw out there for public consumption.

For President Trump, because of the rapid shifts in policy, if the feeling you come away with is that we're now back on a solid path, that this was all a tactic and we're hunky-dory, great. You're going to see the markets go up, you're going to see more investment, and all the rest.

Basically, more Scott Bessent, and fire Peter Navarro into the ocean via catapult—that would be my advice to the Trump administration.

Reasonable, actionable suggestion, Ben. A very reasonable action.

Well, predictability. You know, we were sitting here a couple weeks ago, and as I was mentioning, I know a lot of e-commerce folks, and they were saying, “Layoffs coming. We don't have predictability.” And the really hard part is, how do you invest in a business?

You're running Daily Wire. It's a 9-figure business. You want to hire people. You need to have advertisers. Many of the advertisers you probably have are somehow related to consumption in America. What's the first thing they're going to pause? They're going to pause advertising, right? Why am I advertising this mattress, and why am I marketing Eight Sleep, the best mattress in the world? I happen to be an investor, so I'm a little biased. But why am I going to market Eight Sleep if I can't get it to the country or if the price is too high? It causes all these downstream issues.

I guess during all of this, now, talking about shaking the globe and the economy here, Republicans are working hard on the big, beautiful bill.

It’s big and it’s beautiful. Ben, I don’t know if you want to get into your dueling Trumps, but it’s big and beautiful. So big, so beautiful. Many people are saying—and many haters, Nancy Pelosi, nasty woman. She bet on Walmart. Bad bet.

The GOP’s plan is to push this bill via reconciliation so they can avoid the Senate filibuster with 51 votes instead of 60. The Trump bill would extend the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act through 2034. That’s the big piece here: these tax cuts. There’s also a bunch of campaign stuff, like no taxes on tips or overtime—things that Trump promised, in some cases to swing states like Nevada—that they’re trying to get in there.

There’s an increase in universities’ endowment tax, and the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit that analyzes tax policy, estimates the tax cuts would reduce revenues by $4.1 trillion over 10 years. That’s $400 billion a year. The bill also aims to cut $1.5 trillion in spending over the next decade. Some Republicans think this is weak and are pushing for $2 trillion in cuts or more. Notable cuts include stricter SNAP rules, tighter Medicaid caps, and removing taxpayer benefits from illegals.

Gosh, Friedberg, I understand from our group chat that you did a deep dive here, and I think you’re responsible in many ways for bringing the issue of our national debt to the forefront, particularly with this administration and DOGE, which we give you a lot of credit for. As a single-issue voter on this, are you worried about the budget now? We’re 100-plus days into Trump. Do you think he has any chance of cutting the deficit?

I’ll talk about the House tax bill, which I think is, to use your term, JCal, an absolute disgrace. If you’re an American, you should feel shame that your elected officials are proposing this bill—that this is the bill that gets passed, that we vaporize this much money, that we put ourselves this much further in debt, and that we do not treat this situation as the fiscal emergency that it is.

The bill ultimately yields no real change in the annual deficit. The annual deficit could climb to $2.5 trillion being added to the federal debt load every single year going forward. In fact, if you look at the Treasury yields, the 30-year is now kissing 5%. The United States has $37 trillion of debt. At 5%, we’re paying close to $2 trillion a year just in interest on our debt as this debt gets refinanced.

The interest rates are going up because of the probability that the U.S. will default on its debt payments, which is what you’re buying when you buy U.S. Treasuries. You’re getting the U.S. government to pay you some number of dollars with interest over time, and the market is now demanding that that interest rate be as high as 5% because of this fiscal situation that the United States finds itself in.

We are now burning an additional $2.5 trillion a year, adding to our debt load. We are in a fiscal crisis, and we’re not willing to admit it. I’ve said this from day 1: DOGE can only do so much. Clearly, that’s the case, where they’re now talking about less than $300 billion a year in potential annual savings from DOGE action. At the end of the day, Congress needs to take action, and this bill from Congress doesn’t take much action.

I will tell you that, if you look across the board, all of these programs are still being proposed to be run at a cost that is well in excess of their pre-COVID levels. I would set 2 guiding principles if I were the benevolent dictator of the United States of America. My guiding principle number 1 would be that any program that we intend to continue should have its budget level cut to pre-COVID, 2019, levels. If we did that, by the way, we would be in a much better fiscal situation.

The second would be that we add no new programs at the moment. There’s a whole bunch of new stuff thrown into this bill, as well as increasing the cost, with a few cuts here and there. I’ll highlight a couple that I think are worth noting. There’s a cut in the SNAP program, which is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—that’s food stamps—and I talked about this with Brooke Rollins in the interview I did a few weeks ago.

We talked a little bit about how this SNAP program has absolutely exploded in size, from $60 billion a year in 2019 to $120 billion a year today. In this budget proposal, they’re actually cutting it back by about $30 billion, to $90 billion. So it’s still 50% higher than it was pre-COVID. There are a lot of stories we could go through about what happened during COVID that caused this thing to blow up the way it did, but political wrangling pulled money out of the government into people’s pockets, and that is persisting today.

I’m a big believer in cutting taxes. Obviously, I’m probably more libertarian than anyone else on this show or that we’ve ever had on this show. But at the end of the day, you can’t just say, “Hey, let’s cut taxes and spend more than we’re making.” It doesn’t make sense.

A lot of this stuff is going to be exploitable. The tips and overtime exclusions are a way to pander to people to get votes, and now you’re keeping your promises on those votes. I think, at the end of the day, the tips and overtime rule could invite a lot of gamesmanship and loopholes that will be created, and people will wake up and be like, “Uh-oh.”

For example, if I’m an independent contractor, I’ll enter into a contract with someone that says, “Here’s the service I’m providing you for $50, and then there’s an optional tip you can give me at the end, and I will pay no taxes on that tip.” I can give you 100 other examples of how this will create an inordinate number of crazy, insane loopholes.

The interest on the debt, at $1.9 trillion a year, equates to 7% of GDP. That means 7¢ of every dollar that moves in every transaction in this country is being used to pay down interest on money we overspent in the past. It has become an absolute crisis.

I think there are a few folks who should be shouted out on this: Senator Rand Paul and Senator Ron Johnson, who both highlighted how ridiculously underwhelming the spending cuts are in this bill. I think we’ve got a lot of work to do. I’m deeply disappointed. I’m scared, and I hope that this all gets fixed up in reconciliation. That’s rule 1.

Rule 2 is that all existing programs have to go back to pre-COVID levels. You do those 2 things, and we’re in a great place.

Yeah. And just to put some numbers and some charts behind it, here is the debt going back to the Clinton era. Clinton obviously balanced the budget, so you get this nice flatness there. Clinton added $392 billion in 8 years. It’s barely noticeable on the chart—$40 billion to $50 billion a year. Bush: $5.4 trillion over 4 years, about $1.3 trillion a year. Obama: $1 trillion a year. Then we get to Trump 1.0: $2 trillion a year. Suddenly, we decided we would double it. Biden, same thing: they added almost exactly the same amount.

Yeah, think about this: we’re on track to do the same. It’s not the total dollar amount; it’s the percentage of GDP that you’re adding. Right now, at $2.5 trillion a year of deficit, we’re talking about a deficit-to-GDP ratio of about 8%.

This is like Argentina. This is insane. The fact that we don’t treat this like a fiscal emergency, and everyone goes up and touts, “Oh, we’re going to make $60 billion in cuts in Medicaid”—that’s out of $820 billion of annual spending. “We’re making $30 billion in cuts in SNAP”—that’s still 50% higher spending in total than we had in 2019, a few years ago, when we didn’t have that much of a problem.

This has become such a reset of expectations, and I worry again that we went into this in a very optimistic way, thinking that this administration was going to treat things differently. We had DOGE. We had alignment on the importance of the budget. Bessent has highlighted it, and then it’s kind of back to gamesmanship in D.C.

All these representatives from Congress show up and try to get money for their constituents in a way that is not sustainable. We’re not going to be able to keep this up, and we’re not really having the hard and tough conversations we need to be having. Every year, everyone wants to get elected by keeping programs and keeping money flowing that their constituents elected them to do. They want to add new programs so they can go on CNBC and say, “Look at this cool new program I stood up. It’s great. This is going to create the future of America.” Meanwhile, there’s no future of America because we’re burning $2.5 trillion a year.

So would you call this the Bessent-wants-the-3-3-3 plan? You’d call this the 3-3-8 plan? I don’t know if there’s a 3, but it’s definitely the 8. This is 8, almost 9. Yeah, 9.

I think all of this is right. The reality is that the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is extraordinary already. It’s only going up from here. We have to acknowledge that the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate are incredibly narrow.

For every Ron Johnson who’s saying the right things, you have a Josh Hawley who’s saying the wrong things in Missouri and writing full-scale op-eds in The New York Times about how not a buck should be cut from Medicaid under any circumstances. This does run headlong up against a reality, which is that one of Trump’s signal changes from the old Republican Party was not just a change, in terms of foreign policy, toward more realism and less interventionism, but really a change away from the Paul Ryan Tea Party Republican Party as well. Whatever you think about Paul Ryan on a lot of other issues.

Paul Ryan was on your side of this, David, when it came to actually trying to fix the fiscal problems with the United States. I'm old enough to remember the Tea Party, when we were out protesting literally in the streets about government overspending as a response to Obamacare. That's gone completely by the wayside.

When you're looking at Republicans today arguing over whether to zero out waste, fraud, and abuse, the problem is not, in the end, waste, fraud, and abuse. The problem is the programs themselves as they are currently structured. Unless you're willing to make serious systemic changes to things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, you're not going to solve any of these problems. And here's the sad reality: nobody is willing to do that.

Just as we were saying earlier, maybe Americans are addicted to cheap goods from abroad. Americans are certainly 100% addicted to government sustenance. They are absolutely addicted to this. All net taxes in this country are paid by the top quintile. All of them. Because below the top quintile, you're getting as much back from the government, or more, than you are paying into the system. And we are also gaming out to the future, paying away our kids' fiscal future because of all of this.

So when people ask me what's going to happen, the answer is we're going to either wildly inflate our currency, or we're going to go into massive austerity measures 5 to 10 years from now. There's not going to be a third choice. Maybe politicians keep kicking it down the road. Maybe that's what this is. But even the kind of cuts that are being talked about by some of the people in Congress whom I like are not going to be enough to actually put us back on the right fiscal road.

Even if Republicans do what they're talking about with regard to work requirements, for example, on Medicaid, they're saying there should be an 80-hour-a-month work requirement if you're able-bodied. That's crazy. That's 20 hours a week, 4 hours a weekday, for a month, to get your Medicaid if you're an able-bodied person in the United States of working age. That sort of stuff is not sustainable. But nobody's actually going to take that on.

The question for President Trump is going to be whether he is willing to actually go to the barricades and not just make the case that the tax cuts have to be maintained, because they absolutely do, but also that Republicans need to get on board with some of these cuts. You're going to have a lot of pushback from the purplish Republicans—from the Joshes in Missouri, from the Mike Lawlers in New York, and all of the people who are afraid they're going to lose their seats if there are any cuts.

That's right. And existential cuts. I mean, it is like an existential crisis that no one's willing to stand up and highlight just how critical this emergency is. $2.5 trillion of deficit spending on a $28 trillion GDP. Tell me when in history that's actually worked out at the end of the day, except when you're in some war and you're going to end up taking over some country and getting all their resources.

As you mentioned, this actually has knock-on effects with regard to things like de-dollarization. Why are you investing in the American dollar if you believe it's in trouble?

That's right. That's why this is the debt death spiral that we find ourselves in. People stop owning Treasuries when they start to question whether, 30 years from now, the U.S. government is going to meet its debt obligations. Even the smallest marginal question of that drives interest rates up 1% or 2%. Suddenly, your 30-year Treasury yields at 6% or 7%.

Then your interest rates climb, and then your deficit spending climbs, and that's how it becomes a spiral. So now the debt goes up even more than it did the year before, and then the next year it goes up even more per year than it did the year before. That's why it's called a debt death spiral.

I will say that one of the things I've heard from a lot of members of the Cabinet whom I've met with over the last couple of months is, "We've got all these new sources of revenue." I had an interview with Doug Burgum; he talked about unlocking America's assets. We've got this balance sheet with lots of assets. We're going to do land leases and all sorts of other things.

We met with Lutnick; he's going to sell the Trump Gold Card, the immigration card. We met with Bessent; he's got these ideas. Everyone's got a great theory on how we're going to grow GDP and actually grow government revenue. But until those dollars start to flow in, we have to get our fiscal house in order. We have to cut spending. When those dollars start to flow in, then you can start to spend. But you can't spend ahead, because otherwise the cost of the debt and the economic uncertainty are going to limit our ability to execute on the back end, on that revenue generation.

I'm very worried that no one's paying enough attention to this. I feel very passionate, having seen this bill, that we're just not on the right track. It's really frustrating.

Let me pull up a tax chart here, Nick, from the chat, and get Chamath's comments on this bar chart here—just who's paying taxes. As you can see, the top 1%, which I think is this panel here, and the top 5% are paying the majority of the taxes in the country.

Is there any way to increase revenue? Is there any way for politicians to say, "Hey, let's cut military spending"? That hasn't come up yet as a concept, but maybe cut a little bit of military spending and maybe put in some modest austerity measures before, as Ben's pointing out, we get to Spain and Greece. I don't know, what was that, 10 years ago, when Portugal had to do intense things?

Your home country, Chamath, of Italy, with austerity measures—Americans, I don't think we've ever had to face austerity measures, certainly not in our lifetime. Income taxes: can we get more revenue in, or is that unrealistic? And then, cutting military spending on the margins—do you see this as a major issue?

It's easy to catastrophize. I think that is easy because I think there's enough data there. The harder thing, if you're going to make a directional bet, is to try to find the nuance.

So what is the nuance? The nuance is, you can point to all of these countries, but what is singularly different between all of those countries and the United States of America? Is that a question? It's rhetorical.

The difference is we are the shining city on a hill, and every other country is not. As much as we want to believe that there's equality, there isn't. There's a hierarchy, and America is the most important country in the world. Period. Full stop. End of story.

What does that give us the ability to do? It gives us very different parameters with which to solve this problem. It gives us, I think, the parameter of time, and it gives us the parameter of acceptance from a lot of other foreign governments. Why? Because they need America to also succeed.

There's this very funny quote: "When you owe the bank $1 million, it's your problem. But when you owe the bank $1 billion, it's their problem." This is true here. And I think that we have to recognize that the right thing to do is obviously what Ben and Dave are saying. I don't disagree with that. But if you panic, I think you're going to start a cascade that is unnecessary.

And by moving to a place where you're all of a sudden trying to cut entitlements incredibly aggressively, I don't think that sets the stage for a thriving American population that then allows this problem to actually be solved. So what is my proposal? I do think we have to monetize the balance sheet of America. I do think we own probably $100 trillion to $150 trillion of assets. All of us as citizens, we own that.

And do explain what those assets are to the people listening, because they may not know.

The largest landowner in the United States is the United States of America. The ability to allow you to drill is given by the United States of America. The United States also gives you the ability to do many things.

By the way, Chamath, I'll just give you the numbers from my interview with Burgum. The federal government owns 500 million acres of land, and it has control over 3.2 billion acres in the Outer Continental Shelf, which is the land under the ocean around North America. The resource availability in that land, under the water and on the mainland, is in the immeasurable trillions of dollars of value. The business model, Burgum stated in the interview I did with him, is land leases and royalties. Enter into private partnerships and then participate in the value.

I've talked to Doug about this, so I agree with him. We're talking about a balance sheet. Again, I said $100 trillion. You could probably make the case that it's $200 trillion or $300 trillion, but let's just use $100 trillion. My point is that our balance sheet is much larger than our debt obligations.

Number 2, we owe $33 trillion. It's as much their problem as our problem. And number 3, every country that owns debt does so in part because they need America to be successful so that they themselves can be successful.

So I think if you look at all of these interdependencies, the right thing to do is we need to monetize the balance sheet of America much more aggressively than we've looked at before. And 2, what Dave and Ben said we must do, which is we need to draw a firm line and say, "No new spending." I completely agree with that idea.

But I think if you do both of those 2 things at once, you have meaningful inflows that can fund a lot of the tax cuts that people want to propose. It'll also allow us to show that we have some level of discipline by not overspending in all of these other random pork-barrel projects.

And I think it allows us to set a path toward this 3-3-3 plan. Just to be clear to everybody, Scott Bessent's 3-3-3 plan, which is also Dalio's plan, is 3% inflation, 3% GDP growth, and a 3% deficit-to-GDP percentage. If we do that, that's a renaissance in the United States mathematically. Okay, we can quibble about the politics, but it would be an economic and mathematical renaissance.

So that's what I would do if this is the best plan that Jason Smith and Mike Crapo can get done between the House and the Senate. If this is the best plan, I urge the United States government to figure out how to start aggressively and quickly monetizing our balance sheet.

I'll just respond to 2 things.

Hold on. Before you do that, let me just ask 1 question. What land are we talking about here, Friedberg? And the oil, I guess, or the minerals that are under the ocean floor?

Everything.

Everything? Well, what else is there under the ocean floor? That's sort of the question people are asking.

Rare earths, zinc.

So who's going to buy lithium? Who is the customer? I think that's what we're all wondering: this land in the United States, and for what purpose?

The private companies that would then use those resources to manufacture critical requirements for the United States and other countries that want them. So, for example, the U.S. is now the largest exporter of methane. We have 4 pipelines that go to this facility that I visited with Doug in the interview I did with him in Louisiana.

They liquefy that natural gas, which is methane, and put it on ships. Those ships go to India, Taiwan, and Japan. So U.S. companies are selling liquefied natural gas that we're pulling out of the ground to those countries, which they then use to heat their homes and power electricity production.

We don't necessarily need to go back today and say, “Hey, let's cut entitlement programs deeply.” We should certainly make entitlement programs more efficient. All we have to do is take all the other programs and reset them to COVID or pre-COVID levels and get rid of all the new programs.

What's wrong? So we all agree on the new programs.

No, my wife texts me. She's sitting there, and she does things to tilt me, and she says this in the most serious moment: “My wife and I fought last week.”

You got in a fight last night?

We got in a fight last night, and I just sent her a very quick text that said, “I'm really sorry about last night.” And she says, “I've moved on.”

Just from the fight?

No, she moved on. That's the question.

Did you send her that text while I was talking about the deficit, flying back from D.C.?

Oh my God, this fight.

Oh my God.

So I saw you. You were talking to the waitress, and the way you look at the waitress—serious—was way more serious than that.

Way more serious than that.

And it's like when you're in a coffeehouse or a coffee shop in Europe, and there's this European couple speaking some language you don't understand. At some point, the more you hang out with us, there will be a moment when you will observe me and Nat fighting. It will be a multihour affair. It is not initiated by me. It is not how long I want to keep it going.

It does end with passionate making love from 12:30 to 12:36 a.m.—a full 6 minutes of chaos. Honestly, right now, 6 minutes feels like a long time. And then we all go downstairs and eat the leftover manigot. It's an incredible tradition in Italy: we fight for 3 hours, make love for 4 minutes, and then eat.

Get this thing back on the rails. I want to ask you an important question, Dave, if I may.

Are you, as a man of science who believes in global warming and cares about the environment, concerned? Is it a great idea—is what a lot of people are thinking here—for us to rip everything out of the continental shelf in Alaska and sell all this incredible land we have, preserved with nature and trees, to foreign governments and people who own our debt? Is this a great idea? Do you have concerns about this versus austerity and maybe not buying as many bombs?

Here's the economic argument. Energy demand, heating demand, and power demand are growing globally with or without the United States. Does the United States, which produces that energy cleaner than anyone else, want to participate and benefit from that energy demand? Or do we want to leave it to other countries that are going to do it in a dirtier way?

What do I mean by that? Natural gas is methane. I'll just give you the natural gas story real quick. We pull it out of the ground. We figured out a technique for putting pressure into the ground. That pressure forces the methane to come up through the rocks, and then we capture that methane and liquefy it, reducing it down by about 800 times in size. So now it's liquid; it's negative 160°C, and we can transport it.

Methane, when it burns to create electricity, puts 60% less carbon into the atmosphere than burning oil or coal. So the first argument is that methane is a cleaner way of producing electricity than oil or coal, which would be the alternatives. However, when methane leaks, it's 80 times more heat-trapping than CO₂. So you have to make sure that your methane production and your methane extraction systems are tight and aren't leaking methane. That makes it cleaner.

We have regulation in America, and other countries don't. Other countries don't do as good a job. That power is going to be generated, and someone's going to make that energy somewhere. So if it is a cleaner power source, and we can make it cleaner and do it better, then it's certainly the case that the United States should be, as we are today, an LNG, or liquefied natural gas, or liquid methane exporter.

So can I build on this? Can Americans grow up? I mean, these are industries that have to exist. Have the courage to have some hierarchy and some priorities, please. We are talking about a potential debt spiral on the 1 hand, we're talking about cutting entitlements on the other, and people want to run around and basically say, “Don't do anything.” Well, don't do anything is not an option. So, yeah, monetize the assets.

Okay, you may not like the way that Trump says it when he says, “Drill, baby, drill,” but the actual outcome is the same. We need to monetize. We need to generate revenue in the United States as quickly as possible. We need to do the things that maintain technical supremacy. We need to do the things that maintain political supremacy. If we don't, we will be a 2nd- or 3rd-tier country. Why does anybody in America want that? If you're an American citizen that wants that, go to another country.

Ben, as we're saying here, do you think maybe we do solar, or maybe clean gas here—“Drill, baby, drill”? Probably some people in the audience are thinking, “Why don't you rich guys pay 1% more taxes and cut the military 5%, and then a little bit of austerity measures on the margin sound like a better strategy?” How would you respond to that argument that many people in the audience are probably thinking right now?

If the numbers added up, that might be plausible, but the numbers just don't add up. The idea that if you just incrementally increase the top tax bracket, that's going to pay off the massive national debt that we have racked up, or the national deficit that we're racking up every year—the numbers don't add up in any way like that.

When you take a look at energy production, the same thing is true. Solar is not going to be making up for LNG anytime soon. That's for sure true globally. And when it comes to America's role in the world, which is the biggest thing here, cutting the military budget always sounds sexy, but the reality is that undergirding things like, for example, the big deals that President Trump is cutting in Saudi Arabia and the UAE is the giant American air base that we have in Qatar and the ability of the United States to provide the defense mechanisms for those countries.

Let's be very clear about what's going on in the Middle East. If the United States did not exist, there's a solid shot that the Saudi monarchy, the Qatari emirate, and the UAE would not exist in their current form, and you would have something like the Muslim Brotherhood running many of those nations. The reality is that always backing American soft power is the threat of American hard power.

This is for sure true when you look at things like what's going on in Taiwan. I mean, one of the ways that we—you guys know much more about this than I do—have been talking about getting out of the possible debt spiral is massive increases in productivity due to AI. Well, if China outcompetes us in AI, or if China were to take Taiwan right now, that would basically crush the hope of that.

The reason that China is not doing that right now is, number 1, we actually are building up American naval assets. President Trump is working on that. But number 2, we are rapidly scaling with regard to our own energy production. You have to be an energy-intensive nation in order to produce AI, and the United States has to play this game. If we're not playing this game, we're losing.

I mean, China is outproducing us on energy by leaps and bounds right now. Leaps and bounds.

My simple request for Americans is: don't be mathematically illiterate, and let's all grow up together. Come on.

Yeah, yeah. And I'll just say, to go back a couple of comments to Chamath's point: number 1, monetize our assets. Totally agree. There are opportunities. We have to do it in a clean way. We follow the law. We follow the EPA's rules to make sure that these methods and systems that we use are not endangering species or the planet, or whatever other kinds of acts are important. But I'm not sure that the ramp-up is going to make up for the deficit.

I think that's really important. It's great to say that at a high level. There's a north star there: we can monetize our assets. But as you build out the annual plan over the next 10 to 15 years, first of all, political cycles are going to affect this. If the Democrats come back into power in this next election cycle, they'll put a blockade on this stuff. It's not going to be persistent.

So again, we have to fix the spending problem. And this idea that we have to cut entitlements to fix the spending problem—I don't even think that's step one. I think step one is don't add new programs. Step two, go back to COVID-level spending. Step three is you can address the entitlements and all the other spending. Step four is you execute as quickly as you can on monetizing America's assets. But I'm not sure that the ramp-up is going to be fast enough to make up for the deficit.

One quick comment here also that I think is important is that the American people are going to have to get used to the idea that we can't just spend every dollar that comes in. If you take a look at the Spanish Empire in the 16th century, it was a dominant power in Europe. Then they discover all the gold in the New World, and suddenly they are easily the richest power on earth because of the amount of money that's coming in. They immediately start spending all of it and expending all of that capital in order to build up and do different projects, and pretty soon they're bankrupt and routinely defaulting on their debt.

I mean, there's not a correlation between your asset base and your inability to go bankrupt. We all know very rich people who go bankrupt because they outspend their asset base. In the United States, we can expand our asset base for sure, and we should do that, of course. But if we don't wean ourselves from the addiction to spending, particularly on social programs, because that's what's going to bankrupt us, then all we will do if we increase our asset base is say, "Hey, look how much more money we now get to spend because it's there."

Just so you know, Chamath did hit the brakes before he hit that situation. He bumped the brakes.

Yeah, I torched a couple billion, but I learned a couple lessons.

He almost flipped the car.

Not really, but I think I just want to pick up on what Ben and Dave said. This is a great opportunity for us to grow up as a society collectively and to have some priorities. The problem that we have right now is we allow all kinds of fringe bellyaching, and we don't have a good sense-making mechanism to prioritize that bellyaching. Everything seems like a Category 5 hurricane, and everything is not a Category 5 hurricane. How we respond should be proportionate. We need to react proportionally to the actual challenge at hand.

And I think what Ben just said, differently, is that this is a Category 5 issue. How we spend and our revenues are completely, completely broken. So we need a new way of addressing it. The people who would have issues with how that's solved need to have the maturity to actually point to what the alternative is, because there is no way to quickly raise several trillion dollars without selling land, giving land leases, and taking royalties for drilling. They should say explicitly, "I would rather the country go into a debt spiral and go bankrupt." Okay, then just say that.

Yeah, I mean, to the point of taxes, even if you raise taxes 20% on the rich, it's going to impact 300. We're talking about the pimple. It's the pimple on the dog's ass, people. Yeah, we have to stop the spending train. Hey, let's talk about—do we want to go farm, or do we want to go science corner? I don't want to have you miss your science corner there, Friedberg.

Well, my science corner today is just a rant against the governors who are signing laws banning cellular meat. I'll hit on it real quick.

This is your take 2 on this because you've done this once, this rant, correct?

Governor DeSantis did this in Florida. Since then, Alabama, Mississippi, and Indiana have done it.

What's your issue with cellular meat, sir?

Governor, 3D-print a little. It tasted like a little pepperoni. Yeah, like a little pepperoni.

This week, Montana's Governor Greg Gianforte signed a law, House Bill 401, banning cellular meat. That bill goes into effect on October 1. You guys can laugh all you want, but if it were in a market in which you were an investor—in innovation or technology, for example—and they said, "We ban AI in our state," how would you guys react? What sort of opinion or commentary would you have on that?

Move out of the state. Let the state go to zero, and then come pick up the ashes later. We have 49 other states.

And I think that's really important. And now, by the way, there's a House bill being proposed to do the same thing throughout the United States. Meanwhile, China and Europe are building cellular meat systems that are rocketing ahead. They're actually economic drivers because they make the cost of food cheaper. They create new industries. There's a lot of supply chain that goes into these industries.

Whether consumers like or want to buy the product or not should be left to the consumer. It should be a free market. The market should decide, as long as they're regulated. Check for health, check for safety, as they all are today. The FDA, the USDA, and others are all involved in regulating these systems. They shouldn't be banned because, in every single state, they've said the reason we're banning them is to protect our ranchers—our cattle ranchers. In all these cases, they're saying economic protectionism.

No, but that's—I take this very different view. I mean, these are—okay, let's ban Uber to protect the cab drivers.

We just hit 90. Why are we talking crazy?

I don't like the benevolent-dictatorship model of running a country. Each of these 50 states has the ability to make decisions. Some are good, some are bad, and some are neutral. If they want to make fundamentally bad decisions for themselves, let them. If they want to make fundamentally good decisions for themselves, let them. At the end of the day, those populations in those places are making those decisions. I don't see it as a big deal.

Yeah, and I think the reason is that most of the consumers—95% of them—don't give a shit about the product. Whereas Uber and others were different. Many people did care about the product, but fundamentally it unlocks economic opportunities that they don't see today. I think that's what's really frustrating about this: a small cohort has created regulatory-capture mechanisms by getting these laws passed in these states. This is the ranching industry.

Can I say something as somebody who's tried this? That meat sucks ass. If the meat was delicious, just be honest with you.

No, this is my point. I've not even had it. I don't give a shit about it. No, let me make my point. If this product was exceptionally delicious, it would be widely consumed all over America, and this would never come to pass because there were taxi drivers in Montana, but the reality was Uber was better in Montana. There were taxi drivers in Florida, but Uber was better in Florida. My point is that when the product is so good, it allows adoption and it quells the naysayers at the fringes.

Okay, then let me point something out to you. When the product is a little bit more meh, I get it. But what if someone banned Uber before it had a chance to do that?

Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, I think your point there is that it's a developing technology. It's early stage, and they're stopping it from developing.

Because what would happen is, there were places that banned Uber, and what happened? They all flipped.

That's because Uber broke the law.

No, we reinterpreted regulations, even in favor of what's right for the people of America. What I'm saying is, not in the place where it was banned, but there were enough places around it where the product value could be demonstrated to government. That doesn't mean you pass a law banning it. It's regulatory capture. Who cares? If this were one of your companies, Chamath, and they were banning some pharma company or social media company that you started or got invested in, you'd be all up in arms, saying they're blocking us and keeping us from developing. We're early stage.

No, I don't cry. I'm not an investor in anything that's going to benefit from this.

Well, I don't think so, because it happens all the time. I would say get over it, grow up, figure out the markets where you can make it, and make the product excellent so that all these people in these states—

You and I have a very different point of view on regulatory capture, capitalism, and free markets.

That's a fact.

Would you eat pork that's made in a fermentation tank instead of coming from a pig, because you're Jewish?

You have to bring up pork.

No, I'm actually curious about this. Honestly, this is the only reason I'm interested in this topic at all. Not to get into obscure Jewish law, but this is an actual open question: if you grew pork in a tank and it didn't come from an actual pig, would it then become kosher? And is it considered a vegetable as opposed to meat because it's not coming from an animal, right? It's like—this stuff to me is really interesting. And hey, if it gets me to be able to eat bacon, I'm all for it. That's the only reason I'm interested in this at all. I've heard the reviews are excellent on bacon.

I have a standing order with Long Hill Wagyu. I mix it up. I do the picanha, but I do some Denver steak sometimes. I mix it up. Nice. I like the New York strip. We'll send Ben some. You eat steak, right?

Of course.

Try this place called Long Hill Wagyu. It kicks ass. It's right by me in Austin. It is incredible. And Friedberg doesn't eat meat. It's just the nature of it.

Okay, let's wrap on pharma. Trump signed an executive order to slash drug prices on Monday. This is a great week for Trump. I like everything Trump did this week. The goal is to cut prices 30% to 80% by giving the U.S. MFN status. If you don't know MFN, it stands for most favored nation status. That's a generic term in business. It means we get to pay the same price as whichever country gets the lowest price for a specific drug.

This executive order would cut out the famous middleman. He's talking about PBMs. You've heard Mark Cuban, friend of the pod, talk about that a whole bunch. Here's RFK Jr.'s quote: “Congress is controlled in so many ways by the pharmaceutical industry.” This was an issue that people talked about, but nobody wanted to do anything because it was radioactive. It's radioactive, obviously, because so many politicians are getting donations and lobbyists. What's your take on this? Obviously, Friedberg is in this business and in pharmaceuticals, so he has some great insights, I'm sure, as do you.

Let me start by talking about the specifics of the EO. The really interesting thing about this EO was that there was a very detailed report published in the National Bureau of Economic Research a few years ago that studied this exact thing. The president used the term MFN, but the concept here is called international reference pricing.

There was an extremely detailed study that said, “Okay, what happens to drug prices when you use this IRP pricing mechanism?” What they showed in that study was a very interesting takeaway, which is, if you set the IRP with only 1 country, typically what happens for the United States is that the change is about minus 2%. If you do it with a basket, the actual profitability of the pharma companies would go up slightly. If you had a required comparison, meaning it had to be a like-for-like opportunity, profits fall about 20%. And if you use the U.S. bargaining framework, then profits could fall about 27.5%.

But there are a lot more nuances to it. The question would be, what does this all mean to the downstream impact on pharma? The thing to keep in mind is that we are in a very complicated situation on the R&D side of the house, and what this chart shows is clinical trial enrollments in China versus the United States. This has been happening well before the EO.

What this effectively shows is a really important point, which I'll come back to. China, a few years ago, very smartly and completely reformed the way that it does trials and the procedures. As a result, when they had this regulatory reform, they saw an explosion in the number of clinical trials. There are as many clinical trials now in China as there are in the United States, and oftentimes they're bigger. Which is to say that the amount of innovation and the surface area there is already exceeding what's happening in the West.

That's where we are. Now, why does this all matter? If you go to the next chart to tie it all together, as you saw at the beginning, international reference pricing has an impact on profits. Profits can have an impact on R&D. As we stand today, R&D, we are neck and neck with the Chinese.

What is more important to understand is that the last 10 years have been very complicated for Western pharmaceutical businesses. When you look at the average rate of return as an industry, these used to be extremely profitable businesses, but over the last decade, it's been very, very hard. In fact, I think the Deloitte study that I saw said—can you believe this?—the average ROI for broad-based pharma is 1.5% as of 2022 per year. So if you invest $1 billion, you're making back $10 million a year. You'll make $10 million, which is not enough to fight this R&D battle.

If you then further affect the profitability scale of pharma, the impact is probably that we push R&D to different places. I bring all of this up basically to say I think that what Trump did in one vein was brilliant. Why? He took a plank of the Democratic Party. If you guys think about what Bernie Sanders ran on, it was this, and he took it and he jiu-jitsued it, and now he owns it. He'll be able to take credit for it.

The Democrats are robbed of a very critical political plank that they have, which they'll have to fill in with something else. And if you saw, by the way, Ro Khanna and other folks said, “Oh, we agree with this, and we'd like to do this via some bill.” So even they had to flip and say, “Yeah, this is kind of a good idea.” Politically, it's good.

The execution of this is going to be complicated because of what I showed. We were already at this delicate balancing act of how to make sure that there could be a lot of domestic R&D that was still economically viable. The last thing I'll say is we still need to do 1 important thing, which is, I think that this EO is an important start, but it doesn't yet address the much bigger problem: There is a lot of money that goes to many other things besides drugs.

When you look at a dollar of healthcare spending, which is almost 20% of GDP, I think the number is that 30% is administrative complexity, 20% is pricing failures, which is effectively to say PBMs, failure of care coordination is 5%, overtreatment is 10%, and fraud and abuse is almost 10%. So there are a lot of other organizations in this value chain that kind of eat out of that dollar before it gets to the cents that go to pharma, and it's important to make sure we don't overlook those. The biggest ones are the PBMs.

Yeah. Ben, your thoughts on this? 9% goes to pharma. What are your thoughts, Ben, broadly speaking?

I have a general rule: If Bernie Sanders likes a policy, I don't like the policy. And so, when it comes to this particular EO, the real problem with using MFN status, as President Trump is calling it, is that if we're going to use the tariff tools that President Trump has talked about to even the playing field, it seems to me this is where you actually should put pressure on places like Canada, Mexico, or the EU for them to pay their fair share for the drugs that they are getting from the United States.

We're patenting all the drugs over here and then selling them at discount prices to all of these nationalized healthcare systems. And so if you do that with Medicaid, what you'll probably get is, number 1, a lot of these pharmaceuticals just won't be used by Medicaid. Pharma won't sell them to Medicaid. Instead, you'll have to go into the private sector, which means it's going to be more expensive in the private sector than it would have been otherwise. If you're covered by private insurance, your pharma bill is actually going to be higher than it otherwise would be.

What we should be doing is getting other countries to pay their fair share, driving up the price in those other places, and then you can actually do something that looks more like an MFN status because you're not artificially squeezing the balloon here and inflating the balloon here. The inflation side is the private healthcare insurers in the United States and private consumers in the United States.

And so if you're talking about just artificially lowering prices by basically clobbering pharma, the reality is, if you want to kill R&D, this is a great way to kill R&D. People in the United States don't have a clue as to how much money gets spent on R&D that craps out, because what you see is the big winners. It's like going to a casino and only watching the guy who's got the hot hand with the dice, right? I'm the guy with the dice who's got the hot hand, right? It's me. But you don't see the other 100 guys the casino is absolutely cleaning out.

And the reality is, the vast majority of biotech companies, pharmaceutical startup companies, and people who are trying to do this sort of stuff spend literally billions of dollars and then crap out at Phase 3 in the FDA trials.

Ben, just to build on this, because you're making an excellent point, did you guys know what the cost of the average trial was in the early ’90s? It was about $250 million. The average cost of that same trial in 2025 is $2.3 billion—10×. And effectively, what happened in that 30-year period was that 1,000 regulations became 150,000 regulations. So, to your point, one thing that we could do is, if this EO is going to continue and really be implemented in a forceful way, the other side of it is we have to find a way of decreasing the regulatory burden so that the cost of the trial isn't all administrative.

Well, isn't the issue here, Friedberg, that there's a free market for drugs outside of the United States, where they seem to negotiate really well, and that inside the United States, we don't seem to negotiate our prices for drugs as aggressively as Canada, Mexico, and European countries do?

As is the case with the cost of education and the cost of housing, the cost of drugs is largely inflated because of the federal government's role in being the primary buyer or capital provider to that market. Similar to how the U.S. government provides all the capital through the federal home loan program and all of the capital through the federal student loan program, the cost of tuition has no market check, and the cost of housing doesn't have a great market check because there's an unlimited, endless supply of capital coming from the federal government.

Similarly, through our purchases of prescription drugs, the federal government, as a buyer, doesn’t have any incentive to keep prices low. There’s no individual, shareholder, or anyone else who can say, “You know what? We’re actually not going to buy that drug because it costs too much,” or, “Hey, we need an alternative.” If every individual had to pay for their drugs, or if private insurance were the only way to get your drugs, we would have a much more dynamic marketplace.

The way that we negotiate drug prices is pretty messed up. There’s also this construct in the market: PBMs, or pharmacy benefit managers. If they got cut out of the market, it would save a lot. I’ll just give you some numbers on these PBMs. There are 3 major PBMs: CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and Optum Rx. These 3 companies make, on average, approximately $3 in operating profit per prescription claim processed. They make money on markups.

The FTC has been investigating them and has several open cases from 2017 to 2022. The estimate is that these companies generated $7.3 billion in excess profit by marking up prices on specialty generic drugs. The list goes on regarding the egregious behavior and the role they play as middlemen in the industry.

Their job, and I’ll describe it, is to manage prescription drug benefits on behalf of health insurers, large employers, Medicare Part D plans, and other payers. As an intermediary, they provide this role where they can coordinate between the health insurer, the pharmacy that dispenses the drugs, and the drug manufacturers. But they’re allowed to be owned by the payer, which is crazy.

There’s a lot of obfuscation of the true cost of the drugs. There are a lot of markups and a lot of spread-taking. If you took the PBMs out of the market, that would solve one of the problems. But at the end of the day, I’ve said this many, many times before: anytime the federal government is involved as a payer in any market-based system, it creates a distortion, and the market is no longer free or efficient.