All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg: E131: 2024 Fantasy President picks, debt ceiling agreement, Dollar dominance & more

Freeberg punchy now punchy office days punch drug Salty Freeberg

reminds me of a story for this weekend. Okay. We're waiting in line to go to the

Encore Beach Club to see Kaigo and Kaigo. Me and Freeberg are at the back of the line.

Everybody else has gotten through all you guys are filtering into the booth.

Kaigo is tight and Freeberg has. Can they say to take out your comments? So I put on my phone.

That's all I have my key card. Freeberg takes out a phone, his key card and a small bag of the

salt and vicar salted pistachios. Oh, he travels with them. He won't leave home without them.

So he has his little bag of pistachios and they're like, no food in the club. The guy says,

no food in the club. No. And he goes, what do you mean no food? This is in a bag. It's like,

it's just pistachios. It's just pistachios. They get in an argument back and forth.

Back and forth. He's like, I'm going to take a stand. This is outrageous. I said, Freeberg,

come on, let's just go. So we go inside. This is where he takes a stand. And then he's like,

could you believe it? They took my fucking pistachios. Like these were my pistachios.

He's tilted. He's tilted. He easily tilted. And then, and then on the way out, he's like,

if I see that guy eat these pistachios, this is a fucking curb your enthusiasm skit right here.

He's salty about them. Are those my pistachios? He's salty about those salty pistachios. That guy

was walking through the casino later eating the pistachios. I fell in love with Freeberg this

weekend. I had so much fun with this fucking guy. Oh my God. He was in the club. He was living his

best life in the club. Nick, show the bigger picture. Nick, just zoom out so you can see.

Oh, there I am. Yeah, right next to him. There's me. Look at how huge my ass looks.

God, that's a lot of s. That is a lot. No, show that ass, Nick. Look at that huge dumper. Wow.

That's incredible. And what's going on with those? Are those underwear?

Who's good at that, Jake? That's my gun. But I think it's just the t-shirt. I think it's just

the t-shirt. You obviously stopped the ozempic. No, I'm still sideways. I'm still sideways.

You put it right back on, didn't you? Nope. You stopped the ozempic and it came right back.

Vegas was so fun. I got to say, I got a shout out to those guys that run that to Lila Join.

I think that's like the best new restaurant in Vegas. That is a really great place.

A little loud. I wish it would just go like one notch lower on the volume for the old people.

Well, that's a good scene. Once you hit 50, all the clubs are too loud.

With us again on the All In Podcast, the architect himself,

crazy hair doesn't care, David Sacks. Friedberg is committing suicide in the bottom of a pool.

Apparently, he just cannot take all the adulation and insight.

That's a Leaving Las Vegas scene. Exactly. That's you leaving Vegas down 150 times,

which you could have given to DeSantis like Sacks did. And hot off of his wonderful weekend,

the afterglow of Vegas, Chamath Polyhopotamia. We went to Vegas to play cards. It was a

wonderful weekend. We had a great time. Everybody bonded. A lot of laughs were had.

Wonderful time. Wonderful time. Wonderful time.

I got into craps. I was never a craps guy, but I had one of those like-

How great was Jay Calin craps? Oh my God. I had a 40 diro run. It was incredible.

There's something about that game that is like super addicting to me.

Oh, when you just go on a 40 diro. I think craps really is one of the best

gambling games ever created. So exciting. It's so exciting. It's so exciting.

Just like hitting the hard ways and then the feature bats. The feature bats.

Feature bats. Leaky bets, no, but when they hit, they're just so fun.

Oh, when they hit, they just all the dopamine gets released. Loved it.

I spiked aces for the max bet. It was like, oh, I saw that. You put 500 on it.

Yeah. They only let me bet 500, but I bet 31 to 1 on aces. They hit it.

Table went crazy when that 15 dimes were pushed. Speaking about pushing 150 dimes,

it's actually been getting a lot of press for being the architect. I saw some stories.

Let me ask you a question. It's all fake news.

All fake news. We know that. Everybody's emailing me to try to get answers about you.

I just CC you on this, but the press has been trying to cover your role

architecting the Ron DeSantis presidential. We talked about it last week. What's to cover?

Well, the press wants to know what 150 dimeskies is.

They could look it up in the urban dictionary. I think that would be easier.

But let me ask you a question about your giving strategy or your donation strategy.

I noticed that you're donating to RFK for president and you're donating for Ron DeSantis.

Are you donating to any other presidential candidates?

And why are you betting both sides of the aisle? This is confusing to me. I thought you wanted

one side to win. I mean, I've already explained this on previous pods.

I don't know the answer. What's the...

The simplest way to understand my political giving is just to watch the all-in pod.

And I always end up describing who I'm supporting and why and which causes on the pod first.

And then I back it up. I put my money where my mouth is.

So, there's no mystery. There's no like backroom deals going on.

It's just me writing checks and supportive things I've almost always already talked about on the pod.

Okay. So, what about this question of betting both sides? So, you're betting for both teams

in a basketball series. I don't understand that.

Well, I've said that it's not competitive at this point. I've said that I would support

RFK Jr. for the Democratic Party nomination and I support DeSantis on the Republican side.

There's no contradiction. I guess if they both made it to the general,

then I'd have a real dilemma. But let's face it, they're both underdogs in their lane.

Okay. It'd be a high-class problem to have if it ended up being a DeSantis Kennedy race instead

of a Biden-Trump repeat. Well, I mean, I've played Blackjack with you. You do play multiple

hands at once. So, I guess this does track. It's not enough action for you to just play one hand.

I don't really see a contradiction there. Right now, there's a

Trump-DeSantis race going on and there's a Biden-Kennedy race going on.

Okay. Now, you hold a lot of fundraisers.

Chamath and I are actually doing an event for Bobby Kennedy soon in the next two weeks.

Got it. Let's go to you, Chamath.

Well, I think it's important to just acknowledge an uncomfortable truth and I come at it from

a person who's independent. I'm not registered Democrat or Republican, but I've donated millions

of dollars to the Democrats in the last couple of cycles. But I'm concerned about Joe Biden's mental

acuity. And recently, when you look at how the White House behaves, the thing that I'm worried

about is that there is almost like this sensation that there's a shadow government that's actually

running the country. And we didn't elect any of those people. And this is nothing to say anything

bad about Janet Yellen or Jeff Zients or anybody else. But I think it's very important to acknowledge

that other presidents have typically seen turnover in the highest ranks of government every two years

or so. And there's been incredible consistency. Now, one could say, well, that's a good thing.

The other side of it is, well, that's what allows more vibrancy in government and to make

sure that the president remains always in charge. And so I think it's very important in this moment

where we have a president who's 82 odd years old or however old he is.

We need to have the chance, the American public, to re-underwrite his mental acuity.

And I think that's a judgment that we should all be allowed to make.

And I think the fairest way to do that is to feel the candidate who can be on the debate stage with

him and who can actually just go toe to toe on the critical issues so that we as an American electorate

can decide for ourselves, where does this issue land? Is he mentally super sharp and ready to go

for another four years, in which case a lot of folks will support him? Or is this a moment where

we actually need to be very responsible at the future of the country and not create some puppet

government situation? I don't think it's funny that we have this weekend at Bernie's like meme

that goes around about him. This is the president of the United States. He's the most important

person in the world. We can't be in a situation where like, that is a 30% probability that people

joke about. So my support of Bobby Kennedy is in part because what I've heard from him, I find

intriguing, but the more important thing is somebody needs to be in the arena on the Democratic side

and put to test this mental acuity construct here and get us to an answer. Because otherwise,

I am worried that there's a bunch of folks that were not elected who are actually running the

government. And I'm not sure how much Biden actually knows or doesn't know. And I want to

know the answer to that question. I think everybody wants to know the answer and feels like Democrats

would like a different candidate. That's what the polling is showing to be put on the field here.

And there is the issue of he's had the fewest number of news conferences. We don't get to

hear from him directly, which then fuels, I think, this perception, Friedberg, that he's

in cognitive decline. And perhaps the cognitive decline has increased. Republicans love to,

on the right, love to make these images of him confused on stage. Who knows if he's actually

confused or if those are being selectively edited. But it certainly doesn't look good

when you don't put the person out there to face the music and to take hard questions.

I can't imagine he would do very well in a town hall or in an extended number of debates. And so

this is the thing that I find truly scary is if the guy can't make it through the debates,

and he can't debate RFK and 10 other people, and he can't do news conferences, and we haven't

heard directly from him or had him face some really hard questioning. He did one thing on MSNBC

or CNN, and it was so pathetically sycophantic. And it looked like it was highly edited. I kind of

liked the host who did it. I'll pull up her name in a minute. I forgot her name right now.

She's usually pretty good. She's kind of funny and she's kind of insightful, but she just

threw softball to softball. Is there an age, Sultan of Science, that we should have a cognitive

test for office in your mind? I don't have an opinion on that. You don't? On an age? I mean...

Yeah, should we have a cognitive test? A cognitive test? Should we cognitively test

the President of the United States for office? I think what Chamath is saying is that when you

hold debates and you do town halls and you do rallies, then that is a cognitive test. You'll

see you'll be able to take the cognitive measure by seeing how quick on their feet they are.

But if Biden doesn't debate anybody, we won't see it. And right now they're saying they won't

debate Kennedy. So that tells you right there that they're afraid of something.

I just want to reiterate this. This is the single most important person in the world

in the single most important job. If it breaks your brain in a moment like this

to not be partisan and think, what would you do if it was the other side?

I just think you're like an unpatriotic rube. And you're going to get tricked. I'm not saying

you, Jason. I'm saying anybody that thinks that... Oh yeah. I mean, you're a camp. I want to see him

debate. Yeah. Especially if the Ukraine war is still going on because we're that close to being

in a direct shooting war with Russia, which could lead to a nuclear war. So you need somebody...

That war seems to be contained. I'll be more worried about the relationship with China.

I don't think it's contained. I think it's escalated. I don't think it's contained. It's

escalating. And as of yesterday, there seems to be some conflagration between Kosovo and Serbia

that's kicking up. So all of a sudden we're talking about a totally different European

land war. And we have fiscal instability. We're about to talk about it today, but

the home market could implode in the United States. The commercial real estate market has

already imploded. There's all this complexity. And I think that the idea that you can't demand

the most important person in the world to be on top of their game, I just think that that's

outrageous. You expect the best player in the NBA to be elite, right? Yes, of course. Yes,

they have to get good sleep. They have to have good fitness. They're measuring every single

dimension of an NBA player's life. They measure their sleep now, their diet, their shooting

percentages, everything. And we're not doing that for the president of the United States.

By the way, the MSNBC host who got the one interview I've seen with Biden in years was

Stephanie Ruhle, R-U-H-L-E from 11th Hour. Well, they give him the questions. That's how she gets

the interview. Have you seen that like Biden has these cue cards when he goes with the podium?

And literally it's got the questions and it says who to call on. So they script the whole thing.

That's a stack deck. That's a stack deck. But Trump did that as well. If you remember,

like you did that. In fairness, you did the same thing. Nobody gave him the questions.

No, no, no. You did the same thing with DeSantis. He said at PR, the McEnany lady,

she had a huge binder and she would flip to the talk. My point is that's okay.

We never did the same thing with DeSantis. What are you talking about?

Didn't you pick the first five speakers? The first five questions were people you knew.

You said that. He didn't stack the deck. Jason, come on. Stop.

We didn't have a script. You picked the first five speakers. My point. That is not a press

conference. That's an introductory event. That's the one announcing. Okay, fine. Whatever. Same

thing. No, it's not. No, no, no. We're talking about a White House press conference and he goes

up to the podium and secretly when they zoom in on the camera, they're seeing that literally

he knows who to call on and what the question is going to be. So in other words, the media

is cooperating with the Biden administration. For access.

For access and they're giving him the questions.

All right. Anyway, let's move on. I think it's very important to just acknowledge that.

You're trying to normalize it by comparing it to a completely different kind of event.

I am saying that is something. They never did that with Trump. They never give

Trump the questions. Are you kidding? Trump loves to mix it up. I mean, that's why he's winning.

That's how you know he's still mentally fit. I mean, a mentally unfit Trump would be a

scary proposition. You may or may not like his personality or temperament, but no one is accusing

him of being senile. No, he's sharp. Or having dementia. I think it's important to get on the

record. I don't think we are saying that he is unfit to be president. I think at least what I'm

saying is we have a right to underwrite the president every four years. And on this dimension,

this is the biggest issue that I see with Biden. And I'm concerned in the lack of turnover

in the White House. And I want to know that he is actually in charge day to day and making

the decisions versus a shadow government. That's all I want to know. And I want to see him live on

the debate stage so that he can validate that he is firmly on the controls.

100% of Americans want this. The only people who don't want it is people who are in power

who are part of his group. That's not 100%. There's a meaningful percentage.

I'm talking about Americans who will vote. They all want to see him debate. I don't know anybody

who doesn't want to see a vibrant debate. So I think this is something the Democratic Party

needs to... The Democratic Party needs to rethink their stance on this. Put him out there, put him

on the field, up or down, left or right. He has to debate at least three, four debates in the

primaries, earn a slot. It'll do real damage to the Democrats if Bobby Kennedy gets a ton of steam

and they ignore him. I'll give you a different example of how Bobby's being roadblock,

which is when you go to 538.com and you look at, you know, Nate does a great job of pulling up

all of the polling that happens from all of the polling agencies. There are many instances where

the Democratic fields won't even include him when they ask him questions. And so there is definitely

a concerted effort here. And I think it's not that I don't want Joe Biden to win. I think he's...

He could be fantastic. Again, I voted for him. And I think that if he's mentally sharp and his

hands are on the controls... What are the chances you think he's sharp, Chama? No, I'm saying,

I don't know and I want to know for myself. I'm asking you to predict. What do you think the

chances are? I don't know. I'm just using logic here. I think that could be pretty good, actually.

You know, there's a lot of... Like if you look at Buffett, he's 92. He's sharp as a tack. Munger's

96. He's sharp as a tack. I think that if you live reasonably well, and Biden's got some great

things working for him. He's been a T-Total his whole life. So all the things that would have

caught up with you in your 80s, Biden has avoided. So from a health perspective, he has the best

chance of being on top of his game. Can he be physically frail? I don't care about that.

You know, that happens to everybody. So I think it's important to disambiguate those two.

And so it is very easy to tell when you're standing on a debate stage,

hell, you can sit on the debate stage. I don't care. But I want you to be able to explain what you

think in a way that's cogent and coherent and you walk away thinking, I feel safer with him

with his hands on the controls here. Sacks, what do you think? What do you think the chances are

he's sharp as a tack? He's not in cognitive decline. He's not sharp as a tack. We know that.

The question is whether he can serve at all. Should people have to take a cognitive test?

Do you think that would be a good improvement? Well, look, I think the debate's the cognitive

test. What about for the Senate and stuff like that? Because it does seem like people are...

The voters are the cognitive test. The problem is when the media is cooperating with the candidate

by not asking them tough questions or even worth sharing the questions with them

to give voters a false impression of how strong they are. I mean, look, the media's job is to be

fundamentally antagonistic with the people in power, not to cooperate with them.

Here's something super intriguing that happened this week.

Jamie Dimon has hinted at running for office. Bill Ackman made a case for him

to run for president in 2024. This is getting a lot of steam,

all of a sudden. People are talking about it on CNBC and it's trending on Twitter.

On Wednesday, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon made some comments about potentially running for

office in the future. Quote, I love my country and maybe one day I'll serve my country in one

capacity or another. He's 67 years old. He didn't know that. Bill Ackman tweeted his support for

Dimon running as a dem against Biden. Ackman put out a number of compelling points.

Dimon is one of the world's most respected business leaders. That's true.

Politically centrist, pro-business, pro-free enterprise. All true.

Supportive of well-designed social programs and rational tax policies that can help the

less fortunate, smart, thoughtful, pragmatic. Notice how to bring opposing parties together,

highly respected by right, left, and center. I think that's also true.

Superbly managed JPMorgan through every crisis. Quote,

no bullshit, straight talking, charismatic leader with an enormous grasp of the world's issues

and how to address them. Tramot, I'll just ask it to you plainly. If you had three choices or

four choices, Trump, DeSantis, Biden, and the Jedi, Jamie Dimon. Stack rank those for us, rank them.

Who do you got? Who do you vote for? Those are your four choices.

Probably Jamie Dimon, one. Okay. DeSantis, two. Okay. And Trump and Biden, it's a bit of a tie.

Bit of a tie. Garbage, garbage. Okay.

Not garbage, garbage. Don't say that, but it's a bit of a tie.

I mean, it's two people that nobody wants to vote for, it seems, wants to run.

I personally believe that the era of septuagenarians and octuagenarians should come to an end in

terms of their ability to run this country. I want that transition. Now, Jamie is 67, so,

but he's still much younger than these two other guys. And again, I go back to-

Yours is a lot. It's a lot. And vitality, energy, this matters.

And I think that he is a very competent economic rational actor. So it would be interesting to

see. I mean, look, the reality is, if I had to be really honest with you, I think that what we

should do is keep chipping away at the establishment and how they pick candidates. It's going to be a

slow process. But I think in 10 or 15 years, the real thing that we should all do is if there's

enough citizen journalism, that we should really just change the constitution so that we can allow

people that have been here for 25 plus years that have paid all their taxes, that have followed

all the rules to run for president. And then we could actually just, we could vote Elon in and

just have him clean it up the way he's cleaning up everything else. Honestly, why not just do that?

I mean, who would not want that?

Saks, let me ask you to stack rank and then we'll get to the

change in the constitution issue, which is, that is a hell, Mary. How would you rank those four?

I think that we have run out of topics to talk about if Bill Ackman's latest political brain fart

is a major topic of conversation. Brain fart. I think this is inspired. You guys put Trump in

office. The GOP put Trump in office. He's the outsider is outsider lunatic. And you can't even

consider Jamie Lemon. You're laughing at that and you put Trump in office. You guys put Trump in

office and you're going to do it again. I don't know what you mean. You guys listen to the GOP,

your political party. Here's the part about this conversation that sort of makes sense.

Two thirds of the country says that they are uninspired and in fact fatigued by the idea of

having a repeat of the same choice that four years ago. Everybody wants a different choice.

So I get this like fantasy basketball drafting thing that we're trying to do here. Okay.

The reason why I call it a brain fart and I look, Bill's a really smart guy. I'm not dragging him.

But in order to win the presidency, you have to get the nomination of a major party.

And the problem with all this like fantasy drafting is that you're trying to draft people

who are anathema to the party that you're trying to get them the nomination from. And

Trump was able to get the nomination of the Republican Party.

Jamie Dimon would have to get the nomination of the Democratic Party. That's not going to

happen. And it does remind me of Bloomberg. Remember, Bloomberg spent $100 million on his

campaign. He came in late. Yeah. He spent a lot of money and he made it to the first question of

the first debate. And remember what happened? Elizabeth Warren said that this is a billionaire

who talks about... He didn't fight. He laid down. He rolled over. She like ended him with

one question, one debate. So my point is that you got to be able to get the nomination of a

major party. And actually, I think neither party could nominate a banker right now. I mean, if you

saw what happened around the whole banking crisis that I think still going on in slow motion,

I mean, the amount of animosity both towards the banks that went under and the idea of,

you know, potentially bailing them out. And then also the animosity towards

J.P. Morgan when it actually bought First Republic. I mean, both parties have such a strong

populist wing in them right now that I think you could never get the head of the number one bank

in the U.S. to be their candidate. You're completely wrong, I think, in this case, respectfully.

I mean, he could run as an independent as well. And although, you know, you like to think or it

seems like you're proposing that things are going to be as they always were, Trump shows a wild card

and then people forget Ross Perot. You know, he got 19% of the popular vote. He hit 20 million

votes to Bush's 40 million and Clinton's 44. It is not unprecedented. And we are in a really

struggling time. You started this off by saying that Democrats should draft Jamie Dimon. Now

you're saying you should run as an independent. I'm fine if you were independent.

Why would he run as an independent? There's no movement to draft the top banker in the country.

Like, where do you see this ground? There's no movement to put a reality star like Trump in.

Okay, that was the wild card of all wild cards. He ran in one of the two major parties and he

hit a nerve. I know that's my point. So that's what you've got to do. Tell me about Ross Perot.

Tell me about Ross Perot and how did he hit 20 million votes and isn't the world much different

right now because of media, because of people going direct? We're talking, I mean,

Tramoth just proposed Elon. If you're proposing Elon, you're saying people can go. I'm proposing

a constitutional agreement so that competent people can be included. If you've lived here for

25 years or 30 years, you've created hundreds of thousands of jobs and paid tens of billions of

taxes. The idea that you are less fit than half these politicians to run for president is insane.

Okay, well, that's a different question. What do you think about that? Do you think we should

change the constitution and allow non-nationals to run for president? Don't stop saying non-nationals.

It's people that weren't necessarily born here, but if you've lived your whole life,

you're the majority of your life and you've built value for America and helped it win,

all of a sudden, you're less capable of being president. That's absolutely not true.

Oh, I didn't say it was. I'm describing what the constitution is. Somebody who's not born.

This was called the Schwarzenegger Amendment because when he was governor of California,

there were people who wanted him to run for president. But look, it's too hard to change

the constitution. It's a very difficult process. So do I think that's going to happen? No.

Would you be in favor of that? And under what circumstances? Do you think that,

it's about saying we should change that. He's emphatic. We should change it in fact.

So what do you think? It's not a pressing issue for me. I'd rather have a balanced

budget amendment. I'd rather the president have a line item veto to control spending.

If you want to blow up the government and cut it down to size and impose the ideals of liberalism,

true liberalism, free speech, well-controlled borders, but good immigration, etc., etc.

I feel like there are lots of people who could do that.

And the only difference is they were accidentally not born here, except they've created more value

in America than most Americans that were born here. I think the term would actually be foreign

born national would be the most accurate term. Or a national now, but they were born foreign.

Whatever dumb term you want to use. I'm just using the ones in the Constitution,

the government uses. Sorry, Chamath, for using accurate terms. I'll try to use less accurate

terms in the future. So back to Jamie Dimon. Nobody here is questioning whether he is a

supremely competent executive. He's confident. Fully grant that he's done an amazing job

taking J.P. Morgan. It was ready. The biggest. He's made it even bigger. How is that possible?

Whether that's a good thing. In the face of them saying we got to stop the banks from getting bigger.

He's still really bigger. Yeah, whether that's a good thing for the country ultimately is a

different question. No one questions his competence and his expertise. But again,

I see no groundswell for him in either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party,

or even as an independent, because again, it doesn't fit the populist mood of the country right now.

Agreed. So that's your pragmatic path to victory. But let me ask you about competence then,

because maybe I could frame the question and get a better answer out of you.

That's what I thought I was answering when you said who'd be a more competent person.

You guys interpret my questions however you like. You interpret it in terms of competence.

Saks interpreted the question pragmatically to getting into office. But let's ask Saks the

question and I'll ask you pragmatically unless Saks the question of competence. In terms of

competence, I gave you like four people. Is he the most competent person to run the country right

now? No. You think DeSantis is more competent than him? I think that of all the major candidates

who actually have a realistic shot. DeSantis is the most supremely competent as an executive.

He's run the state of Florida. He did it during COVID, which was a major crisis.

We all saw what happened. All of our friends were leaving California because California had

lockdown. Schools were closed. We had the worst learning loss of any state. Small businesses

were going under. Our toddlers had to wear these stupid pointless cloth masks to school and they

finally reopened. Hold on. So DeSantis kept Florida open. They had a great economy. It's

number one in job creation investment. People moving there. He balanced the budget and that's

why he was able to grow his majority from under one percent when he first got elected to 20 points.

So you believe he would be more qualified than Jamie Diamond? Because he's actually been tested

in a political realm. Got it. So you think that is the better test? I disagree. And I think probably

the number one thing you have to do to be effective politically is to be able to understand when the

media, the mainstream media and all their fake experts are wrong. Because that's why the country

is in such a mess. We keep listening to all these fake experts who are wrong about everything,

including COVID. Did Trump do a good job as president in your mind? He listened to the

fake experts. He had Fauci in there. So you don't think Trump did a good job as president?

On COVID, he listened to Fauci too much. Okay, because Trump was an outsider and you seem to

think he did a good job as president and a lot of Republicans do. So that's my point. He was an

outsider. You love putting words in our mouth and characterizing what I believe in ways that I never

quite said. Okay, I'm just asking you. I think that Trump did a number of good things in office.

For example, he kept us out of foreign wars. And I think the economy was pretty good until COVID.

But yeah, he had no political experience. I would say there were like two big Achilles

heels. One was we had huge deficits and debt during Trump. And the other was once COVID happened,

he listened to Fauci. And Fauci was driving the train during COVID. And hold on, gave us the

lockdowns. And then Trump never fired Fauci. And on Trump's last day in office, he gave him a

f***ing medal. Insane. Insane. And just so everybody remembers, June 16, 2015,

Ben Carson and businessman Donald Trump tied in fourth place with 5%. So things can change.

And now Trump is swinging wildly at DeSantis saying that DeSantis was worse than Cuomo on COVID.

Okay, I really do not want to re-litigate that. That's the last thing I want to re-litigate is

COVID. Man, we got bigger fish to fry. But DeSantis, I think, has been doing really well

over the last week because Trump has been making all these wild attacks on him.

And DeSantis has been responding. So now they're really punching at each other. It's really

interesting. Let's pivot to the debt ceiling real quick here. The House voted overwhelmingly to pass

the debt ceiling agreement 314 to 117. It's in the hands of the Senate. It could be passed by the

time you're listening to this. Some Republicans think spending didn't go far enough. No shocker

there. But Speaker McCarthy called it a first step. Projected the bill would reduce budget

deficits by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. Some highlights, non-defense spending flat in 2024

at $704 billion, only increases 1% in 2025, and aims to limit federal budget growth to 1% for

the next six years. For since $30 billion in unspent COVID relief money, that seems logical,

fully funds medical care for veterans. That seems like a good idea. Reallocates $20 billion from the

IRS over the next two years to put towards non-defense programs. That's that crazy idea to

hire 80,000 or something IRS agents. Pauses on student loan repayments will now end in August.

We've talked about that on the show. Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness Plan will be settled

in the Supreme Court. Some stats on U.S. debt. Put up two charts here and then I'll get

Friedberg's position because he's very passionate about this. U.S. annual surplus for deficits

through end of year 2022. You see those great years? I think those are the democratic.com

Clinton years. You did ran it up. Well done, Clinton. U.S. national debt end of year 2022.

My lord, $32 billion, getting close to $32 trillion. U.S. annual federal spending

up and around $6 trillion a year and tax revenue by deficit here. There you have it.

Go to the red chart. This is our national debt. This is an upside down hockey stick.

So this is what's concerning about it is we're going to be exponential on this thing.

The problem with this, just to reframe it once again for the 100,000th time.

Wait a second. Wait, this red chart, isn't this Friedberg's losses in Vegas this weekend?

No, that's our collective losses in Vegas this weekend.

I think we did the math. This group was accounted for 10 bips of Vegas's blackjack revenue for the

year. So good job, everyone. Good job. Everybody in Vegas has now

completed their Q3 quarter targets early. So the problem obviously with mounting

debt is the interest payments on the debt cause you to take out more debt and there's a tipping

point where it becomes insurmountable. And there are many people sounding the alarm that

we may be entering that point that in order to fund the interest obligations on the debt,

we need to take out more debt and then there's more interest payments and therefore there's more

debt and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And so this chart I'm sharing here is actually from

the federal government's GAO, the government accountability office, which acts almost like

an independent accounting and forecasting body trying to provide some outlook on the fiscal

condition of the federal government. And this is an analysis I think they put out a few weeks ago

showing that as of the fiscal year 22, 8% of the overall federal budget was going towards

interest spending. By fiscal year 25, it'll be 26% and then net interest spending will need to grow

to half of the budget. But if you go to the other... Sorry, why don't you say that? Why don't you say

the years? Because it's important to know what years they're talking about. 2051, 2096 is what

they're showing. This is a long window, yeah. I get it, but let me show you this chart. Just

pull up the first chart. So this is our federal government's interest payments per year. And

so this is how much the government pays on interest for the debt. By the way, most of the

debt is getting refinanced now at the higher interest rates because a lot of this debt was

sitting in Zerp era since 2008. But as the debt has to get refinanced and more debt is taken on

to fund the interest payment obligations, the interest payment actually starts to mount

more significantly. And that's what we've seen in the last two fiscal years in particular.

Now, when you take this chart and you overlay how much we spend on defense... So here's

defense spending. We are, I think as of this month or last month, now spending more,

the federal government is spending more on interest payments on the federal debt than

they are on national defense. Whether we believe we are spending money on national defense in a

smart way or in an accountable way or whether these are good strategic priorities and good

strategic decisions, the fact remains that at some point here, our ability to actually fund

the programs that we want to fund, whether they're social security, Medicare or defense,

the major cost outlays for the federal government, it's going to get further hindered and continually

more hindered by the fact that these interest payments are climbing so significantly. And

if you go to the third chart, I think it kind of provides the final point, which is social security.

And we're very quickly seeing interest payments mount to the point of where social security

spending lays. And when that happens, obviously, as you guys know, everyone talks about that as

being the golden program, the right and the left, the Democrats and the Republicans simply will not

touch social security from a policy perspective, from a getting elected perspective, but the

economic and arithmetic reality is running up against them, which is that the interest payments on

the debt are starting to threaten our ability to fund social security and Medicare. There's

many more charts we could pull up to highlight this. The Republicans in announcing the debt deal

this week made a lot of proclamations about it being a win and showed how we were able to reduce

spending by $2 trillion. I think the statement they made, the deal cuts $2.1 trillion in spending

over the six year life of the bill and $1.5 trillion in statutory mandated savings

over the next two years. $2.1 trillion over six years. Remember, we're talking about a $7

trillion per year budget. So that's $42 trillion over those six years. We're cutting $2 trillion

of $42 trillion. So it's a 5% impact. It's a start. It's a start, but what leverage do they have now?

And I think that- Isn't it good to say that there was consensus, Freeberg, that they actually

did decide to make cuts? And that feels to me, and we did predict here that they would get this

done. That feels to me like this is some amount of progress, right? I mean, do you feel good about

it or indifferent, Freeberg? I think you guys know, I think that we have to tackle the structural

problem of revenue, spending, interest rates. Those are very big numbers that are challenging

each other. Chipping away at the spending doesn't quite get us there. And it doesn't seem like there's

a clear path here. Even the argument that RFK Jr. made when he came on our show, that cutting

military spending would have an impact. I mean, you guys see military spending is already starting

to get overtaken by the interest payment spending. So does that really move the needle? I think it's

going to be an economic reality that all programs are going to need to be cut back in order to fund

the debt obligations or we're going to see massive inflation, not massive inflation.

My question was, do you feel like this was a good step or a good signal that maybe

the government is and our representatives are getting the message that they need to make some

cuts at some point? I don't think that there's any way to provide the necessary fiscal security

for the federal government without bipartisan unitary support around the objective,

which is to get to a balanced budget and to reduce the overall debt and interest payment

obligations. And if you can't start from that point, it's this push and pull over what programs

get cut, but I want more money being spent. I want to have a pipeline. I want to have this all that

stuff. Okay, so you're not super enthused by this. I thought it was a positive step, Chamath.

You have talked about refinancing the debt, putting the $100-year trillion coin or whatever,

we wind up doing refinancing this on a long arc, 50-year, 100-year arc.

What does this debt ceiling reconciliation or whatever we're going to call it,

that they came to some sort of agreement here signal to you? You predicted they would get

through this pretty easily, so. Yeah.

Boring. Nothing burger. Nothing burger.

Move on. Nothing to see here.

So, Chamath, let me ask you a question. Would you buy a 100-year bond from the federal government?

If I was a foreign government, yes.

What interest would you need to get paid on that to take that on?

Probably one to two percent.

One to two percent for 100 years?

Yeah. So, it would be downside protection. You just feel like this is a secure place to put

some amount of money.

This is how any country with a turbulent currency would make this decision. And you could actually

get close to zero. I think that when we had Zerp, you probably could have charged a negative

interest rate because you would have effectively been charging countries, third world developing

countries, even first world countries that just wanted a protective mechanism against their

currency volatility. They would have probably paid you. Just like today, you can get BOJ debt.

That's negative yielding. So, it's no longer negative, but it's still probably in the realm of

one, one and a half percent. It's nothing. If you just do the math, it's nothing. And

this is why I don't understand why everybody just gets there underwear and a bunch here.

Non-gender underpants?

Put the red chart up there.

It's a nothing. It's a nothing. It's a nothing.

It's a hockey stick, nothing.

Means nothing. I think you guys...

What you see here is an accelerating problem.

Yeah, cut revenue.

The debt is getting bigger and bigger at the same time that foreign governments and investors

in general don't want to fund our debt. So, therefore, interest rates will rise. Our interest

costs will keep going up.

That's not why interest rates are going up.

Well, if they're going up because the Fed is raising rates because of inflation, but at the

same time that's happening, foreign governments are not as interested in having dollar reserves

and U.S. treasuries.

Said who? That's demonstrated by what?

You look at the foreign reserves of these countries, of these sovereigns, they are much

less interested in holding U.S. treasuries, starting with China, starting with China and

all the BRICS countries.

Foreign reserves are up. These guys are banking U.S. dollars like nobody's business.

I don't think so. I think it's been going down since 2008. I'll find you a chart.

Yeah, maybe from 2008, I don't know, from the great financial crisis at the absolute depths.

But what I'm saying is that in general, the anchor currency for governments and central

banks will likely be in the future, the United States dollar. And we get back to the circular

argument, which is, I don't think it's possible for politicians to cut expenses.

So I am just an advocate for cutting revenue, because I do think it's the simplest way

to force people. Because the next time they go through these machinations and all this theater

around a debt ceiling, they'll just have less revenue to play with. And it'll just become a

harder and harder and harder problem. Meanwhile, I do think that you have to take the ball where it

lies and take these $24 or $30 trillion and refinance it well out into the future and make

a bet on US exceptionalism and US GDP. And if you don't want to believe it, don't be here.

Move to some other country where you think it's so much better and go do it there.

But what if the market's not there? What if the buyers are not there and you're wrong?

Sure. I mean, an asteroid could hit the earth in the next day. We could talk about all kinds of

long-tail consequences, but you have to be able to probably weight these things and then spend

your time thinking about the things that are more probabilistic and be able to compartmentalize the

anxiety of the less probabilistic things. So I think that could there be a scenario where there

is no interest? Sure. Is there one? No, because you see every day the government's in the market

doing auctions and there is a robust demand for United States government debt. And until there

isn't, this argument is specious. And all I would tell you is just keep trying, put out more, try

a 45-year-old bond and see how it feels like. Try a 50-year-old. You don't have to do 100 if

it makes you too anxious. That's fine. Let me just ask you, at some point, if the market isn't there,

the buyers are not there. But let's just go through the analysis because I know that you think it's

a zero chance, but if it's as low probability, do you agree that the severity is high, that the

significance of that being the case? Again, I am not going to give an iota of breath to a long tail

five-sigma outcome. It is a waste of time because it occupies, and I'll tell you why I don't do it,

it occupies my mind share, which takes away from me figuring out how to make money and win on the

field today. So I have, you know, I wake in a 24-hour day, okay, just to give you a sense of it, I

sleep for eight, you know, I'm eating for another one or two, all this bullshit. I have four or five

hours a day of useful thinking time and I try to think of the belly of the probable.

And I try to compartmentalize these dumb long tail sigma events because it distracts me from

making money and winning. I actually try to think about long tail sigma events that could make me

money. This isn't one of them. So I just don't spend time thinking about it. And I could be totally

wrong, I could be totally wrong, but it's worked for me so far and I'm going to stick to what works.

Guys, Sacks has been on Google for five minutes. He's got something for you tomorrow. Go ahead.

You should stick to the investing strategy that works for you. I'd like to talk about

the status of US treasuries. So if you look here, this is total foreign treasury holdings as

percent of marketable treasury securities. So it's gone down from the mid fifties to the low

thirties since 2008, 2009. As a percentage. So foreign governments don't want our treasuries

as much as they used to starting with China. They are diversifying into other currencies and gold.

And there are a bunch of good reasons for that. By the way, this comes from a blog,

which is really interesting. It's a crypto guy named Arthur Hayes. And this is actually a pretty

interesting piece called Exit Liquidity. Hayes writes interesting pieces on the banking system

and de-dollarization. He's got a little bit of a doomer thesis with respect to the US dollar.

You know, obviously he's pro-Bitcoin. His views are sort of similar to topologies.

But in any event, I think one of the points he makes that's really interesting is that

if you're to zoom out 30,000 feet and think about the regime that we had

during, let's call it the unipolar moment, where China and the United States were strong

trading partners and we had this close relationship with them. The way the global economy worked is

that China would sell goods to the United States. They would have huge trade surpluses.

And then they would take those dollars and they'd use some of them to buy raw materials

like energy. That was called the petrodollar. And then they would take other dollars, their

surplus. And instead of repatriating at home, they would have to then convert that money into

RMB and brought it home. They didn't do that. That actually would have increased the value

of their currency, thereby making their exports less attractive. This is why they're accused of

currency manipulation. They took their surplus dollars and bought US assets, mainly US treasuries.

So we had this trading relationship with China that I think everyone understands

the physical world side of that trading relationship where you had US manufacturing

jobs, got exports at China. They basically made everything. A lot of cheap goods came into the

US. They had a trade surplus. What I think people don't understand is that a huge part of that

trade surplus was used to finance US deficits and debt. And so you had this like cozy relationship

between US elites, US politicians and China, where they got to rack up these huge deficits,

the government got to spend a lot of money and China would fund it very cheaply. But now that's

all ended. That's stopped because we're basically starting to decouple from China. So China doesn't

want to do its business in dollars if they don't have to. Obviously for the products they sell

at the US, they'll take dollars. But they're already trying to do as many transactions as they can

buying oil, for example, or energy in RMB. I don't want to dispute this chart because this

chart is true, but it's a small part of how the entire puzzle works. And so this is a Bitcoin

maximalist who cherry picks a few data points to try to make a point. But if you look at the IMF data,

and I put it to you in the group chat, you can't just look at US Treasury securities. You have to

look at actual absolute dollar reserves. And when you look at that over time, it hasn't fluctuated

that much. And so for all the dopes that don't understand how this shit works, it's not just

securities, it's actually also money. And the actual amount of US dollar money hasn't changed

that much. Gone between 60 and 70% since 1999 in this chart. And so I just find this argument,

again, one of these long sigma arguments that are anxiety riddled, and I just don't want to

waste my time thinking about it because it'll distract me from winning on the field today.

You got to be able to block things out if you want to be a capital allocator, I agree.

But an interesting discussion nonetheless. I don't think these things are just noise. I think

you're seeing a trend. I mean, look how many headlines there are about the BRICS countries

getting together and starting to transact in currencies other than dollars.

Yeah, you know what? Those are very cherry-picked as well. And you said before you don't trust

the press. So you trust the press on these headlines all of a sudden? I don't think that

that's actually... I don't think anyone's disputing the fact that China and Saudi Arabia and China and

Brazil are doing energy transactions in R&B. I think it's very tiny. They're putting all their

money to venture capital in the West, private equity in the West, real estate in the West,

the Middle East. That's where they're focusing their energy.

There's a different issue. Look, no one is disputing the fact that China and the BRICS

countries more generally are trying to create a trading block that is not dependent on the US dollar.

I think it's... And they're gradually...

That's not saber-rattling. It's like... I think they're trying to just

let the US know, like, hey, we have other options here and I think it's China just trying to...

It's China on their heels, trying to make deals with other folks.

It's China pursuing their self-interest, which is not to be dependent on a dollar that's been

weaponized and controlled by the US politically. You can be sure that Saudi, UAE, and the entire

voting block in the Middle East are shipping their money West, not East.

I think you have a very accurate assessment of what China wants, but it doesn't mean it's

going to happen. And I think you have to make a bet. Well, do you think it's going to happen or not?

That is not going to happen. And I've said this before, is China is in a demographic time bomb

and that will dominate everything else. That is a country that is imploding.

And they're anti-capitalist. They're anti-capitalism.

No, no, no. I'm going to say that they are capitalists. I'm not going to make these judgments,

but I'm going to tell you, practically speaking, is they are demographically imploding.

They do not have enough people. The country will be halved by the death rate and the lack of birth

rate by 2,300. So in another 70 odd years, that is a problem that is going away. And that is just

mathematical. And if you just, again, you just have to take a deep breath, look at the data,

and just extrapolate, and you see this is not a problem. China is not a problem.

China has real problems. There's no question about it. They've got demographic problems.

They've got problems in the banking system. They've got a real estate bubble.

Start up problems.

There are questions about whether the leadership now is turning away from

the capitalism that got them to this point. So there's no question that China has problems.

But you want to talk about trends. There is a major trend in the world right now where,

again, the BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China,

South Africa, and you can put Saudi Arabia in that bucket, and a lot of other countries,

they are looking to diversify off of the dollar. I'm not saying that the dollar is going to stop

being the world's reserve currency, because I agree with you that there's no ready replacement at

hand. But they are trying to do as many transactions as they can off of the dollar,

and they do not want to hold treasuries like they did 10 or 15 years ago.

I don't see data that confirms that.

They're trying to do as many transactions off the dollar.

That's a very loaded statement. I don't think that's true.

Yeah, I don't know if that statement's true.

What are you talking about? This is like major news.

No, they tried to do one trade.

China and Saudi, and China and Brazil.

No, Saudi and China talked about it, and they didn't do it.

They talked about it.

Yeah, I would like to see data on that, not just a couple of headlines,

because I think everybody wants to...

Nobody disputes this. What are you talking about?

Give us the data points.

The Brazil thing happened, but I think it was a small trade, David.

Yeah, that's exactly true.

You first were saying it didn't happen, and now you're saying that it was small.

No, no, I'm saying the Saudi Arabia-China thing did not happen.

Your statement was they're trying to do as many transactions as possible off the dollar.

I don't think they're trying to do as many transactions off the dollar.

I have never seen any actual data points.

You don't know. You're just making shit up.

No, of course they want to get off the dollar.

Of course they want to get off the dollar if they can't.

No, no, I think Jason's saying you're right what they want to do,

but what they are doing.

China is what he's debating.

They're trying.

The Middle East is sending their money west.

I don't think they're trying to send it east.

I don't think that's a good...

Hold on a second. You're right that Saudi Arabia is investing in the U.S.

They're, I'd say, highly diversified.

That's a little different than what China is doing.

Yes, we're in agreement.

China wants to get people off the U.S. dollar.

China's in decline. China's got big issues.

We all agree on that.

The Middle East has a lot of cash.

I think if they're going to decide what to do with it,

they'll appease China to have a solid relationship to ship oil there,

but I think...

China's a normal customer now.

China's a normal customer.

And their hearts are in the west.

That's where they're going to take China's money.

There's been a giant local realignment.

Haven't you noticed?

I think the realignment is...

The Chinese just negotiated...

The Middle East becoming westernized and being accepted in the west

and moving towards an investor in the west in technology.

That's actually the trend.

The Chinese just negotiated or approached Ma between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Did you notice that?

That's a fine idea of political.

I'm just talking about where they're putting their chips.

Yeah, but these things are all connected.

Where are they putting their chips?

I think what you've explained, and I think we're in agreement,

they'll sell their oil to China.

Then what do they do with the bag?

They take that same bag and they want to put it towards the west.

It's even worse.

Again, the thing is, even if you settle a trade in the Yuan,

I think you guys keep forgetting this key thing,

which is the Yuan is pegged to the US dollar.

So it is a proxy dollar.

So if you really want to decouple,

you first have to let this currency free float.

They have no desire to let them do that,

especially in a moment where they're economically imploding internally.

So again, you go back to the circular argument

where everything goes back to the dollar.

So yes, they're saber-rattling sacks.

I acknowledge what you're saying.

I think you're totally right that they would love

a free floating currency.

The Chinese would love it.

Chinese, and they want that free floating currency

to not be pegged to the dollar.

But right now, they have kept it pegged to the dollar.

So even if they do it.

I don't know, I just googled that and it says not.

It says, I just pegged to the dollar.

I just googled, is Yuan pegged to USD?

And it says, the Chinese Yuan is not pegged to the US dollar.

It was pegged from 94 to 2005.

But in 2005, China made its currency a floating exchange currency.

It is not a floating currency.

Yeah, and then do you trust, yeah, who's right?

Well, I think it's highly manipulated.

I agree with that.

But I don't think it's pegged.

It's not a floating currency.

It is not a free floating currency.

China controls the exchange rate between themselves

and the US dollar.

Let's move on.

I think we've covered this.

It'd be actually one thing that might be interesting to talk about.

You're just in denial of reality.

You have no basis for declaring that things like,

the moves that China is making with Brazil and Saudi Arabia,

you're just declaring that to be fake news.

Nobody's saying fake news.

We're saying it's happening, but it's probably minor.

And it's probably more to describe your saber-rattling.

Probably.

What's your basis for believing that?

Because we have no evidence to prove that it's occurring.

We just have a couple of headlines and some small...

I mean, where is it?

I mean, all we're seeing is the money in Saudi Arabia is

they're selling oil to China, correct.

They're doing deals there.

And then they're taking that money,

and then they want to invest it in the West.

Who are you talking about?

The other thing to keep in mind is that the Saudi real

is pegged as well to the US dollar.

And that's been there since, I think, the mid-80s.

So China is a very opaque manipulated currency market

where they keep the dollar yuan spread quite fixed.

On the other side, Saudi has kept the same peg,

3.75 to the dollar since the mid-80s.

So again, it all just goes back to the US dollar.

It's all proxies for the dollar.

So there's some symbolic value, I suppose,

in trading in yuan.

But everything goes back to the dollar,

because that's what it's measured in.

So I suppose...

This is not symbolic.

What's happening is deeply geopolitical.

You've got a couple of things going on.

One is that the US has now instituted sanctions

on over 40 countries.

Moreover, the whole world saw that in the case of Russia,

we froze their foreign reserves

and basically seized the property of their oligarch.

So if you're an oligarch in the Middle East,

do you think you want to keep all of your money

on all of your reserves in dollars?

You understand that the dollar's been weaponized

as a political instrument in the United States.

That's just a fact.

So you're going to look to diversify.

You're going to look to put your money in gold.

You're going to look to put your money

in other currencies.

Is there, like I said, a currency at hand

that's ready to be a replacement for the US dollar?

No.

And it can't be the yuan.

They don't have an open capital account.

So who would it be?

Where would you diversify?

You were the CIO.

Where would you diversify?

Well, what I would do if I were the secretary

of the Treasury of China is I would say that,

okay, for the exports of the US,

we're going to keep getting dollars

and we'll do something with those dollars.

But for everybody else,

we're going to try and do as many transactions

in R&B as possible.

But what about the sellers of oil to China?

What would they do?

They get R&B.

Those are exactly the trades that we're talking about.

You tell them to hold R&B over US and Euro.

China is seeking to pay Saudi Arabia and Brazil.

We understand that.

If you're the CIO, you actually don't understand it.

Let me explain.

I really understand it.

What I'm asking you is, would you ask the question,

would you as CIO of Saudi or UAE,

would you want to keep R&B,

would you want to keep Euros or US dollars?

Where would you want to keep your money?

And the question is, if they sell that,

would they want to keep it in R&B?

I don't think they want to keep the one.

Honestly, to answer your question,

I want to put it in gold.

That's where I would put it.

I would, I put it in gold.

Here's what China is proposing.

Okay.

They're saying to Saudi Arabia and Brazil,

we're going to pay you for your oil in R&B.

And then you are going to take the R&B

and you can buy our products.

Because again, we make everything.

We're the factory of the world.

And if you still have a surplus after that,

you can settle that surplus in gold,

because Beijing has a very liquid,

you know, gold exchange market.

They're giving them Amazon gift cards.

That's what they're proposing.

Here's your gift cards, yeah.

Spend in our factories.

It's not gift cards.

Two data points on the sacks that I just read.

It's in this Barron's article that I included.

Nick, you may just want to link to it in the show notes,

which I thought was pretty good.

Swift, which is sort of like the international payments backbone.

The share of Yuan transactions briefly rose above 3% in 2022.

That was the peak and it's now off 26% down to about 2.2%.

So actually the share of Yuan transactions

has actually been shrinking in the last year.

And then the second is that what this article states,

which is interesting is that all the belt and road loans

that China gave into all these developing countries in Africa,

the Africans were like, we don't want this Yuan.

And so they just dollar swapped.

And so now the BRI loans are all serviced in US dollars as well.

So all the trillions of dollars China spent.

I'm just saying that again, I'm not judging into this.

Well, they're their own alternative Swift.

We weaponized Swift as well.

Yeah, but Swift is still 98% of the world of how it works.

All I'm saying is, I just like to keep things simple.

I think the US dollars here for a while, I think the debts suck.

I would love to have no deficits.

But I also think these numbers are roughly like,

we're playing plus or minus on the margin,

two to 300 basis points.

We talked about that last week.

And so I want to keep my brain open to the simple obvious things like,

you know, selling.

That's what it's come to is CPG for you, Tramot.

You're like, yeah, it's a down market.

I'm a big CPG guy now.

Yeah.

That's where Tramot's focused.

Why don't you pull Freeberg into this debate?

I have one more point to make.

That's what I was about to do.

I'm Dr. Doom.

Go ahead, Dr. Doom.

So I think I'm in Dr. Doom.

I'm just Dr. Reality, or at least I try to be.

I don't know.

Like there was a deal, you know, China had a big visit with Brazil in March.

We talked about it briefly.

I shared a couple of these articles that covered the transactions.

They signed $10 billion of trade agreements and cooperative agreements,

all of which were meant to settle in Yuan.

Brazil has kind of made the statement that they're going to start to settle in local currency.

And, you know, they're doing this multilateral trade program globally

with partners where they're going to trade and transact in local currencies.

They're not set to the dollar.

They're not fixed to the dollar.

And I think that's just part of a general movement.

I don't think it's about, hey, we got to get off the dollar as soon as possible.

But I think it's about we could diversify.

And there are other stable economies around the world.

They might be having, you know, demographic issues or various economic issues.

But gosh, man, don't we all?

Europe, China, the US, everyone's got debt problems, demographic problems,

over leverage problems, growth problems.

And fundamentally, I don't think that there's as safe a haven as there has been historically.

And as a result, I think a lot of these governments and a lot of the business leaders

in these countries are very much open to doing transactions in multiple currencies.

And that's the beginning of the end.

It's the beginning of a set of transactions that isn't about,

hey, we're all getting against the dollar.

It's over.

Let's crush the dollar.

It's like, we're just going to do trades in other currencies.

No big deal.

The beginning of the end.

Dot, dot, dot.

Dr. Du.

All right.

Shout out.

Well, just by the way, it's the end of the dominance, right?

It's the end of every trade.

You were talking about the end of the dominance

and China imploded during that same time period.

So I forgive me.

I still believe in American exceptionalism.

Here's another article from Bloomberg.

American exceptionalism wins.

Here's another article from Bloomberg.

Bricks, this is from April 24th.

All of a sudden, this guy loves the mainstream.

Bricks draws membership bids from 19 nations.

Listen, Jake, I'm fine.

If you want to say this is fake news, go for it.

Are you saying it's fake news?

No, I'm not saying it's fake news.

It's just funny how you're like, believe it's fake news.

Well, no, I need information about the world.

When they write an article about me that's completely made up,

I'm going to call it fake news.

Why are you treating like every press article is like the same?

That makes no sense.

By the way, it does make sense for the Bricks to expand.

If NATO was purely an economic organization,

that's probably what Bricks evolves into over time.

And it makes a ton of sense for them to do it.

They're creating and competing.

China's setting up an alternative to the IMF.

They've got this alternative to the IMF that they're setting up

that's not dollar denominated.

And they've got seven nations in this thing now.

And by the way, Jason, when I say the beginning of the end,

I don't mean the end of the world or the end of the US.

The US will continue to be the innovation hub of the world.

The US will continue to have freedom and civil rights

that no other country can parallel.

The US is an incredible place to live,

better than anywhere else on earth.

But the economic status of the US,

given how we have spent money

and how we continue to operate our federal government

with this extraordinary deficit and debt spiral problem,

means that other people have to be protective

of their currencies and their assets

in a way that's thoughtful.

It doesn't necessarily mean it's all over and everything.

But the dominance that the US has had economically.

You can already see this in all the trade barriers

and tariffs that are going up,

the decoupling that's going on.

Look, the United States set up a system of global free trade,

basically in 1945.

And we had a bipolar world with the Soviet and America.

But the Soviets basically opted out

because they were communists.

They had their own system,

but it wasn't a compelling part of the world economy.

Then we had the unipolar world.

So basically, for over half a century,

we had this completely open system

where there were no trade blocks in the world.

Now we are seeing the rise of trade blocks with multi-polarity.

Yes.

The US is pursuing a contradictory policy

because on the one hand, hold on, here's the contradiction.

On the one hand, we run these massive deficits and debts.

So we are a debtor nation who needs to make its debt attractive

to debt holders or our interest rates are going to keep going up.

So that's on the one hand.

On the other hand, we are doing things like weaponizing the dollar

and weaponizing Swift and imposing sanctions

and engaging in geopolitical fights

that are highly antagonistic to the nations

that are would-be holders of our debt.

So one of those two things has got to give.

Either we reduce our debt and our deficits and the need.

Remember, this is not a stable situation.

We continue to issue, what is it?

Somewhere between one and two trillion a year of new government debt.

So we have to constantly find more and more money

out in the world to support our debt

at the same time that we're weaponizing the dollar

and the financial system so that these sources of global capital

don't want to participate.

And I agree with Saks.

This is why I think that the US is a very important country

the disappointment to me is that there isn't bipartisan recognition

of this being as severe as a war.

It is the sort of thing that both parties need to get behind

and say, let's figure out a path to solving this problem.

This is the objective.

We've got to get our fiscal affairs in order.

And then all the other stuff, the social stuff, the policy stuff,

we can fight about, we can argue about later.

But we have to put some gas in the tank.

We have to be able to drive where we want to go.

And we can't drive right now.

Here's what I'll say to you, Friedberg, since you said

the beginning of the end.

Now, maybe it's a poor choice of words.

It's not the end.

You said, hold on.

Don't mischaracterize what I mean by the end.

Yeah, but don't mischaracterize what end of dollar dominance

in global trade.

Okay.

I disagree with you.

I think dollar dominance will continue for some time.

Jake, are you disputing that the world is becoming more multipolar?

Do you think we're still living in unipolarity?

No.

And nor do we need to live in unipolarity for America

to still be the champions.

We still are winning at a pace that nobody else is.

Space, energy, cars, AI.

We're probably going to win chips.

And we're going to probably win material science and batteries.

And we're obviously going to win biotech.

We're winning in every one of these categories.

We're the clear winner.

The only thing we're not the clear winner in is factories

and mass producing schlocky stuff that's sold on Amazon.

China is completely imploded and the Middle East

is taking their last 20 or 30 years of capital

and they're investing it in the West,

in space, energy, cars, AI, chips, basic materials, batteries,

all the stuff that's happening here on our shores.

We are in the most winning position we've probably ever been in as a country.

We took a bad beat.

We spent too much money.

We got a dysfunctional government.

We got culture wars.

We got a lot of bad stuff distracting us.

But the truth is, when you look at brass tacks,

when you look at innovation,

we're winning on almost every dimension.

We're just a little caught up in the fog of culture wars

and thinking that we're going to be dominant

and perfect in terms of our budget.

We do have to fix our budget.

We all agree on that.

But we are winning and China is currently stalled out.

And it's because of freedom.

It's because we support entrepreneurship

because of the basic human freedoms we have.

You two guys are Dr. Doom.

This is so stupid.

I'm hopping off.

I'm done with this.

Just strike my shit out of this episode.

You can strike whatever you want.

Is there anything else you want to talk about today

because I'm done?

This is good to be done.

I'd love to talk about NVIDIA, but I don't know if you guys...

I'm sick of being characterized as Dr. Doom, J. Cal.

It's fucking stupid.

You said it was beginning to end.

We want to have a real conversation

about real fucking matters.

Instead of your extreme...

We're but what I said.

We're but what I said.

I'm not being fucking extreme.

I'm trying to have an actual discipline conversation

about where things are going.

And it's not black and white.

It's not about, oh my god, the US is going to win

and everyone else is going to lose.

It's not a win-lose situation.

We cannot afford to continue to spend the way

we're spending with our federal government.

That's it.

I agree with that.

But I think we're still winning

on all these other dimensions.

So why are we winning?

That's not the conversation.

Why is that the conversation?

The federal government is different from US innovation.

There's a difference.

The federal government is where voters elect to tax and spend.

And voters elect people to create a system

that can legally go in and take assets and spend assets

and borrow money.

And we've done it in an extent now

that is becoming almost a runaway train.

It is a problem.

We saw the negative red chart that sacks

had you pull up several times.

That has nothing to do with US dominance

and fucking electronics and chips and biotech

and all this other sort of stuff.

We have a problem with how we spend money

at the federal level.

I agree with that.

I agree with that.

That's the conversation.

But I believe that the dominance that we have

in entrepreneurship in every one of these categories

is what will pull us out of this.

The free enterprise system is a wonderful system

that produces a lot of good prosperity for America.

Okay, that's great.

I agree with that.

And it remains to be seen if China can sustain

its remarkable economic growth

that it's had over the last few decades.

So that remains to be seen.

However, the United States is behaving

like a late-stage empire.

And that is separate from the system that got us here.

We have unsustainable fiscal deficits.

We spend way too much money that we don't have.

We have an uncontrolled southern border.

Our cities are in decline.

We've got hundreds of thousands of people

living on the streets.

Have you seen it?

We look like a third-world country.

There's three or four countries out of control.

Three or four cities, that's insane.

We are meddling in countries all over the world

engaging in wars or proxy wars.

We are behaving like a late-stage empire.

So, J. Cal, it's true that the United States

has a wonderful system.

And that's what got us here.

It got us to unipolarity.

We were the world's only superpower.

But now we're in a world in which other countries are rising too.

It's more multipolar.

Agreed.

And whether we continue, our dominance will depend

on whether we make the right decisions right now.

And right now, we are not making the right decisions.

Adding two trillion to the debt in peacetime a year makes no sense.

You're a little ran.

It's like Wiley Coyote going off the cliff

and pretending like if he just doesn't look down,

there's nothing to worry about.

I have said from the beginning,

we need to get spending under control.

But I am also incredibly enthusiastic

about how we're performing in innovation and capitalism right now.

It is off the charts how well this country is doing

on those dimensions.

Chamath, do you have any thoughts while we wrap up the segment?

No, I think we ended up conflating a bunch of issues into one.

I'll just say what I've said before,

which is that the United States is kind of the simplest, safest bet

and that these decisions are made on a relative basis.

China, unfortunately for them, has a huge demographic problem

that will diminish them economically.

And you're already starting to see it,

but it's going to get really exacerbated in the next 10 or 15 years.

That's just a mathematical reality for a country

that has literally zero immigration and no solution.

Europe is not in a very great situation.

And the only place that's really firing on all cylinders is India,

but it has a long way to go to build the infrastructure

that can really scale and make it as predictable as the United States.

Could it do it?

I think so, but it's going to take a long time.

50, 60, 100 years of investment.

So I don't know.

I just kind of try to simplify for myself.

I think the US will be fine.

I think the dollar will be fine.

I don't think it's right to spend this much,

but I think that politicians are incapable of cutting expenses,

and so I would like to cut their revenues.

That's it.

It's a great discussion, Freeberg.

I don't think you understand what the audience actually wants to hear.

This is actually the core of the of the debate that we just had.

Well, just do what Freeberg asked you,

which is just to play his clip and his words.

I'll have it right here.

I think that the Saudi China trade, if this happens,

and oil is sold in one,

is the beginning of, I think,

the end of the assumption that the US dollars are global reserve.

That's all.

That's what you said.

That was your prediction,

that you said it's the beginning of the end.

You've said it twice now.

So if you don't believe it's the beginning of the end, it's fine.

Of the US dollar as a global reserve currency.

Yes, you believe that it's the US dollar

will not be the global reserve.

You've said it twice.

Yeah.

And I just agree.

I think that we'll remain the global reserve for all lifetime.

That's all.

It's a fundamental difference.

Let's move on.

Yes.

I'm reticent to bring up the cultural wars,

but these have become prominent.

So maybe we could have a meta discussion about these.

There are three things going on.

One, we touched on the book banning.

I'm using air quotes there.

And there's been a lot of feedback that's come in since then,

just to follow up briefly on it.

Books are not exactly being banned.

It's a much more granular nuanced issue.

There was a bill 1467 that happened

that Ron DeSantis did sign.

This said that parents reasonably should get to see

what's being put into classrooms.

And as you might suspect,

this is being done at a very local level.

When you put all that control at the local level,

you will have different constituents banned books

that maybe shouldn't be.

Some of them are obvious ones that were too graphic,

that I think most parents would agree

shouldn't be in a school library.

Other ones were horror books or young adult books.

You can look at all this stuff, just search for pen,

banned books report, Pen America.

And if there are instances of books that shouldn't be banned,

being banned in instances of books that we'd all agree on,

but it is not exactly book banning,

it's letting each of the school districts

make their own decisions.

And they're not going to make perfect decisions

when you put them out in the edges.

So just to make that super clear.

I think your right to focus on the terminology here,

because this is a question of what is put in the school library.

That's it.

So that's not a ban.

A ban would be if you couldn't purchase the book for yourself,

for your kids.

Any parent can buy any book they want in Florida.

We do have an issue, I think, with the curriculum

where really important classic books are being removed

from the curriculum for political reasons,

mainly in California.

Books like To Kill a Mockingbird or Huck Finn.

That was weird.

They're being removed because they're being accused of being racist,

even though the whole point of those books is to, I think.

Call it out.

Call it out and teach kids about racism.

So there's a lot of stupid things happening from the left

in terms of removing books from the curriculum,

which I think is a much bigger deal than removing books

from a school library.

There's also things happening with like,

you know, Ian Fleming's James Bond books being rewritten,

like posthumously because they're being accused of sexism

or Roa Doll's books are being posthumously edited.

So like, books are literally being rewritten in a way

that their authors never intended.

That is positively Orwellian.

That really is forced to abandon or censorship.

That's really wrong.

Now, on this DeSantis thing, I mean, look, this is,

this is getting to the level now of being a hoax.

One of the stories going around is that there was this book

of poetry, this totally innocuous book of poetry

that was being banned in Florida.

And I wanted to find out that, yeah.

So I wanted to find out the truth of it.

Well, as it turns out, like you said, J. Cal,

this is in Miami Dade school district.

A decision was made.

This is not by DeSantis.

This is made at the level of individual schools, okay.

Which are voted on and their parents on these school boards.

So it's going to just follow the demographics

and whatever that local community is.

Right.

So basically what happened is this,

this book of poetry was literally moved

from the elementary school library

to the middle school library.

That's what happened.

But all of a sudden this was spun on social media

and by the mainstream media as if DeSantis had banned

this book of poetry.

To the point where Miami Dade school district

had to put out a tweet correcting this.

So never banned or removed.

It was just moved from one library to another.

Well, it's really, I think this is a super interesting

point, David, where you and I are in agreement.

You and I are both for freedom of speech

and we're big advocates of that.

And then there are decisions.

And you could reasonably make this decision.

Hey, let the parents decide.

Great.

When you let the parents decide,

you have to take into account that these school boards

could be hijacked by different groups of people

or they could be very small,

model cultures of, you know, little towns or cities.

Here's the list, by the way.

If anybody wants to look at this,

you could actually look at the very granular list.

Penn America keeps an index of all these.

I put the thing in the chat here and you'll see things

in left, right, everybody in between.

Some places are banning all the LGBTQ books.

Some are banning the critical race books

or books by people of color.

Other ones are banning, you know,

the James Bond novels, etc.

So it's a free for all of parents executing their rights

at a very local level.

And, you know, I guess if you want parents to have a say

in their schools, it's going to be slightly

imperfect and variable.

But it's not like some censorship going on,

but there is censorship going on, I guess in some ways.

The political question is, do you allow government bureaucrats

to dictate to parents what their kids are going to see

or have access to?

And I don't think that's viable.

I mean, look, parents could take their kids out of the school

and homeschool them if they wanted.

Yes.

So at the end of the day.

So they have that right.

So why would you deny parents the right

to determine what's in the school library?

And it does seem like all of this goes back to you.

And by the way, some of these books that have been removed

are actually really questionable.

Lord of the Flies will probably get removed

because they don't like somebody being labeled fat.

Piggy.

No.

Piggy.

Oh.

I just lost the way.

Take it easy.

No, no, no, I'm saying, right, like there are some great books

that were written in an age where, you know,

you just say things in a certain way

that aren't meant to be offensive,

but these books are very powerful.

And I don't know about you guys,

but I had a bunch of books that I read when I was younger

that had a huge impact on me.

And then the.

I don't want those books getting removed

from the curriculum.

You're right.

Lord of the Flies.

Lord of the Flies, an incredible book.

To Kill a Mockingbird.

Those are all important books that I read

as part of the curriculum.

But all we're talking about it, I think,

is this even this very minor issue of what's in the library.

Obviously the parents should get to the side.

And some of the things that have been removed

from the library are pretty out there.

Like, for example, there was one book

that was educated in the library.

Educating kids on, like, how to get a grinder date,

which they're not even supposed to be able to do, right?

Like, grinders for 18 and up.

There are other topics that, like,

suicide and harm and other ones.

When do you introduce that to a child?

Is that something that's third grade

or, you know, a suicide discussion?

When should that reasonably occur?

This is a crazy question, but I'll ask it to you guys.

I would rather Lord of the Flies be removed

from a library than edited,

because then at least there's a different place

where you can get the original book.

Oh, for sure.

The idea of editing a book is so insane.

It's so mind-controlled.

Yeah.

It's really bad.

That idea is very, very bad,

because you're reading something, thinking that

this is what the author intended,

and all of a sudden it's manipulated

by some rando false expert under some guys

that you had no decision-making in.

That's really bad.

What's really, I think, important of this discussion is

how the press frame something,

how politicians frame them,

and then how they're actually executed on the ground

can be very different.

So this has become a raw shock test

for what caused you back.

And when you actually look at just the list,

you'll see people in California,

people in Colorado banning, quote, unquote, banning,

or just not including certain books in libraries.

It's parents having age-old debates

about when do you introduce certain topics to your kids.

That's your job as a parent.

What happens in the library is going to be variable.

All right, NVIDIA is going for vertical integration.

They unveiled their GPU-CPU superchip called Grace Hopper

after the Navy Admiral, obviously.

NVIDIA Grace, GPU is a 72-arm,

New York version, V2, CPU cores, whatever that means.

The CPU can deliver up to 370 square on a spec crate 2017

in base, whatever that means.

I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with all the benchmark test these days.

Is the peak of humor on the show.

Go ahead and do that.

Listen, we're talking about Pentium chips.

I could have kept up here, but I hadn't kept up with it since the 90s.

We're talking about the Intel inside Pentium chips.

Yes, I could.

I did keep up with chip stuff.

I'm sorry to keep up with chip architecture.

Yeah, no, I mean, yeah.

When we got past Gigabit, I stopped.

I think what's really interesting here is

this is a really important moment

where like that design, that Grace Hopper design,

which is basically a massive system on chip.

It's an entire rig.

It's a GPU and CPU and memory and interconnects.

This is like them going for the jugular.

This is what's crazy in a moment like this.

Like that is basically them trying to create an absolute monopoly.

Because if you have these rigs,

and these rigs are the most capable for learning,

and you have their SDK CUDA,

which is becoming the de facto software layer now that you use

to write to their H100s or Grace Hopper when it's available,

and the A100s, that could create a level of lock-in

that I think people should be thinking about.

So if you're the hyperscalers like Amazon and Google and Microsoft,

what is your reaction to this?

If you're Facebook, what is your reaction to this?

And I think that's really important,

because if these guys continue to innovate at this scale,

you're not going to have any alternatives.

And it goes back to like what Intel looked like back in the day,

which is an absolute straight-up monopoly,

except the difference is that even when you wrote something to Intel CPUs,

you could actually run it on an AMD processor and it would work.

With no changes, but that's not necessarily the same.

So if you go from an A100 to something else,

an FPGA or some other silicon, you have to translate the model.

And so it's very important to understand that there's no extensibility here.

So like if NVIDIA continues to drive this quickly

and continues to execute like this,

it's a one-and-done, one-company monopoly in AI at the hardware layer.

And I think that that people are probably thinking about

how to blunt that competitive outcome.

But that's what I took away from that announcement from them,

which is like they are ready to go for the juggler here

in what looks like the most important market that's emerged in like the last decade.

What do you think about the valuation, Chamath,

trading at 200 times or 50 times?

I'm in your camp.

The simple thing about price-to-equity ratios

is if you take the price-to-equity ratio and you invert it,

that's your implied yield.

Price earnings, price earnings.

Price earnings, sorry.

And you invert it, that's your yield, right?

And so NVIDIA is yielding at these prices,

I think it's somewhere like two to two and a half percent,

which is less than and it's almost half of a typical two-year bond.

And so when you have a yield that that's low,

you have to see it just grow absolutely massively.

But there's this principle in capitalism,

which is in order to grow like that,

you're generating so much profit

that competitors look at it and say,

hold on, you don't deserve that much profit.

I'm going to take some of that.

Your profit is my opportunity.

Your margin is my opportunity.

I think that your margin is my opportunity is exactly what happens.

So I think what I'm waiting for Freedberg is like in the next two quarters,

if AMD, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon don't announce something substantive,

there's a very good chance that NVIDIA runs away with this.

And I think that that's very problematic.

But in that case, that price is cheap.

My bet though, it's a different version of your bet,

but we get to the same outcome,

is that I don't think that that's going to happen

because it's just too important.

And so I think that everybody other than NVIDIA wants vendor diversity, right?

You don't want to get locked into one person once at a hardware or one cloud.

You know, one SDK, you don't want that.

Nobody wants that except NVIDIA and NVIDIA shareholders.

So my bet is in the next two quarters,

you start to see some real action so that

folks start to have to balance their forecasts,

where it's not just 100% NVIDIA, but it's NVIDIA plus plus plus.

And that's sort of what I would bet,

because it just seems like logical and right.

Because otherwise, it would be pretty derelict of these hyperscalers

to just throw their hands in the air and just give the whole market to them.

And it would be derelict of AMD.

The other thing that's happening is...

And AMD is a great memory solution,

but they really don't have a deterministic AI chip.

And I think that Lisa Sue needs to act decisively here

and build something, announce something, buy something,

but she needs to be really aggressive here.

If you look at the language models,

a lot of them are taking less and less CPU, GPU to actually build them.

So this has been like a bit of a race or a competition on hugging face.

I showed the leaderboard on another episode, maybe two episodes ago,

but I've been talking to some of the people

who are doing these language models, Chamath,

and they said there's massive inefficiency.

And so...

Yeah.

And by the way, the other thing they are...

Freeberg mentions jcal is also happening,

which is like the...

Freeberg talked about the atomization of these models is happening,

I think, even faster than when you first brought that up.

Yeah.

So what took two or three million dollars last year

is now taking $200,000 just through software improvements

and code improvements.

Crazy.

And now they're thinking a number...

The other thing people are coming to is because of so much...

What's the term hallucinations that people are using?

Because of the hallucinations,

people are making narrower models that are deeper in legal

or just stack overflow, just core or just a vertical and core.

They take less GPU, but they get better results

because you've constrained the data set and that's resulting in better outcomes.

So I think this could also be where maybe people don't need as much

GPU or CPU at the same time, so many people are going after it.

So that could flip where the demand could actually decrease

because of software efficiencies

or hitting some benchmark that's reasonable enough.

What do you think, Freeberg?

Look, I think as performance improves, as cost declines,

like any economic model,

there's a pretty nonlinear relationship with demand.

So we'll find new ways to apply this technology.

I think the demand is only going to go nonlinear.

The other thing that's happening is people are starting to build,

like Mosaic ML, they're building cloud independent models.

So you can take the same model,

build it on your own proprietary personal cloud,

not educate, chat GPT-4, not educate Bard,

but deal with your own model.

And then you can move it from Azure...

Random reduction and fine-tuning seems to get to the point

that we can run these things on small machines,

cheaply, quickly, and it'll change the applications.

You're saying run inference cheaper, not run training.

Run inference, that's right.

Oh no, this is not good.

Biden just had a big fall on stage

at the U.S. Air Force Academy graduation.

Oh no, I think he'll be okay, but whoa.

It's not like he fell off the stage, he just tripped.

No, no, it doesn't look good,

but it could have broke some of them.

Well, I hope he's okay.

I hope he's okay.

Yeah.

I mean, we just had this whole talk about it.

Yeah, I mean, it's just like...

Again, I think like physical,

like these kinds of physical things are normal,

and I think people need to be much more empathetic

about that kind of stuff.

I mean, he was riding a bike over the summer last year,

I remember, and he looked great riding a bike.

FDR was in a wheelchair, so I don't care about that.

All I care about is mental acuity.

Yeah, me too.

I hope he's okay.

By the way, I want him to be well enough to run

because I'm scared of some of the other Democratic candidates

they might put up.

Say more.

You know?

Like, I don't want to get a president of Newsom

or a president of Harris.

I mean, I don't think Biden is very good,

but I think he's better than Harris or Newsom.

Biden drops out who's the lead candidate in your mind?

RFK.

Really? Wow.

I would prefer RFK to Biden,

but I think what will happen if Biden drops out is,

we'll get a flood of establishment Democrat candidates

in the race.

Newsom, maybe J.B. Fritzker, Harris for sure.

There's a lot of differences between the left and the right,

but the one similarity is that there's a large amount of voters

in both of those blocks who don't fundamentally like

these establishment candidates.

And I think that that sentiment is exactly the same.

And so, you know, you can have a pro-Trump wave on the right,

just like you could have a pro-RFK wave on the left,

and they are solidified by the same idea,

which is I think you're going to see more and more outsiders

have a chance through the nomination process to get in.

I think the Democrat Party will stop it.

I mean, they shut down Bernie Sanders.

Remember that?

It was Sanders against Hillary Clinton, and they...

Yeah, they shiv'd him.

They rigged the primary against him.

They shiv'd him.

I'll have to use that word.

Oh, I think they just labeled the episode.

No, but look, I mean, the establishment has,

and the Democratic Party has a huge influence over the outcome

because they control the superdelegates, right?

They'll never...

So, wouldn't Newsom supercharge the Republican base?

I mean, being like a coastal elite,

and what's happened with San Francisco and LA,

I think that just drives out the Trump voters in a massive way.

That...

I said like over a year ago, I thought that the...

Wow.

That 2024 would be a Newsom-DeSantis race.

I still think there's like a 10, 20% chance of that.

Wow, that would be wild.

Be wild.

In any 10%.

What about Joe Manchin?

What's the story there?

Anybody have any insights on Joe Manchin?

We had a phenomenal dinner at my house last week.

He is so charming.

Oh, wait a minute.

Okay.

So, what do you need this?

What are you talking about?

I don't know if you publicly disclose it or not.

Well, it's already happened.

We had a fabulous dinner,

and he met a lot of people here, and he's amazing.

Did Sacks come to that dinner?

And Heather's amazing.

Heather's amazing, too.

His daughter, who she ran,

I think it was Myland Pharmaceutical,

incredible executive.

Joe Manchin would jump in, yeah?

You think Tremont?

Manchin's fabulous.

If Biden wasn't in, Joe Manchin would jump in, you think?

I don't know.

I don't want to speculate on anything like that,

but I think he's an amazing American patriot.

Is that your guy, Freiberg?

Would you go Joe Manchin?

Because he wants to control spending?

I don't know, I don't know enough.

All right.

I'll tell you one of the reasons why I like

RFK Jr. is that,

I mean, there's so many issues that he is

deviating from Democratic Party orthodoxy.

He's in favor of free speech and against censorship.

He's in favor of civil liberties

and against this like massive surveillance state

that we've created.

And on foreign policy, he wants to end all the crazy wars.

And I would say that of all the candidates I've heard,

he understands the situation in Ukraine the most deeply.

Now, both Trump and DeSantis have called for a ceasefire,

and that's good.

And I think RFK would work towards a ceasefire too.

But RFK Jr. goes deeper and explains

how the whole situation in Ukraine came about.

And so he understands it very deeply.

All right, folks, there you have it.

Another episode of the All In Podcast

for the dictator, the architect, David Sacks.

And I won't comment.

No, he's a kingmaker.

No, he's a kingmaker.

Oh, sorry, kingmaker.

I like architect better, man.

Okay, kingmaker, sure.

Kingmaker.

Well, you like better.

I don't like fake news.

You like architect or kingmaker?

It's fake news, man.

It's crazy.

The whole thing was just like made up.

No, but I know.

But as a nickname, which one do you prefer?

As a nickname, what do you prefer?

Architect.

Which one do you prefer?

Or king.

Well, what do the articles say?

Kingmaker?

The article's a kingmaker.

I said architect.

I think architect is more schvengali-ish.

The article is about a call that never happened.

Fake news.

With a person you don't know.

With a person I don't know.

Right.

Okay, data side.

What nickname would you like us to use going forward?

Kingmaker or architect?

Putting aside that the whole article was made up.

Yes, putting that aside.

Architect.

Can I go with kingmaker?

I like kingmaker.

I like architect.

But it's so silly.

Mr. Secretary, please tell us which one.

Yeah, Secretary of State.

Look, I'm a mid-level donor, mid at best.

You're mid?

Mid at best.

Red, some reddits are going crazy right now.

Like Saxony Mitzi's mid.

And then influencer, I'm mid at best.

So I'm a-

Can you be Secretary of State?

I'm mid-mid.

However, it's true that there are very few

podcasters who probably donated anything.

You could be, yeah.

Henry Kissinger or Madeleine Albright.

Highest ranking, fond born, citizens to lead.

Yes, I think that you would be an exceptional

Secretary of State.

I'm just going to put that out there.

So you could be Secretary of State.

Cabinet member.

I think you would be Secretary of State.

Because you have the intellectual firepower

to actually not get bamboozled on this stuff.

You'd hold your ground.

You know who actually I think was pretty good on foreign policy,

doesn't get any credit, was Jared Kushner.

I was listening to an interview with him.

And this happened like eight months ago.

And he was describing the whole situation in Ukraine.

And he says very clearly that he and Trump understood

that bringing Ukraine into NATO was a red line

for the Russians.

And they never went there.

So they armed Ukraine, but they were very careful

to not make any statements about Ukraine coming into NATO.

He understood that that was a serious provocation.

I'll post the interview in the chat.

But it was with, I think, Gerard Baker from the Wall Street Journal.

So Jared understood the situation better than most of these foreign policy,

elite establishment types who don't understand

how their actions could be perceived as provocative by the other side.

Well, he sure secured the bag after getting out of that gig.

Two billion.

And he got the Abraham Accords done.

And now Biden's just flushed it down the toilet

because he's alienated the Saudis so much.

They've gone to the Chinese.

I mean, the fact that there's flights between Israel

and the Middle East nations now, and they seem to have a common enemy in Iran.

I don't think you understand how much Biden has alienated the Saudis.

Biden wouldn't shake the man's hand.

What was the point of that?

I'm not in favor of Biden's.

What was that?

Like a fist bump or they had a pre-negotiated fist bump?

Yeah, it's a little...

How insulting is that?

The one thing I loved about Trump

was he was willing to meet with anybody.

My idea for him policy is meet with as many people as possible,

as often as possible, and not go to war.

I would meet with Kim Jong-un, Putin,

Xi Jinping on the regular.

Every country we should be in with,

because that's how progress gets me.

Not meeting with him is...

Yeah, I mean, it's not a reward.

I think there's a part of this military-industrial complex

that believes a meeting with the president is a reward

or an endorsement of the worst things anybody's ever done.

It's not.

It's a meeting to try to make the world safer

or to try to build common ground.

And so that is not me or Jim Cramer or however you want to try to frame it.

It's intelligent.

And I'm for intelligent foreign policy,

which is talking to people.

Let's talk about some people who said yes to come to all and summit.

Let's just do a quick speaker.

No, we don't have time.

I gotta go to lunch.

I love you guys.

I love you, Bassies.

Yeah, fuck this.

I'm done with this shit.

I love you.

See you tonight.

See you tonight.

The total shitboard.

Your driveway.

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy

because they're all just useless.

It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

What?

You're a big, big, what?

You're a big, big, what?

We need to get merchies.

I'm doing all this.

I'm doing all this.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.