DOGE updates + Liberation Day Tariff Reactions with Ben Shapiro and Antonio Gracias

just so you know everything is archived by the White House right now so everything we say is recorded David freeberg is a jam stop you're being recorded good I I hope this is discoverable there white house I just want you to know that stupid also he did not pay his taxes in 2016 don't you really want me to start with you you want me to start you want me to put some sh the archives oh my God here let me put some sh archives for you going to be my pets I think you need to shut the up is what you need to do sorry White House I'm going to be my pants he did he also has some unpaid parking tickets from 2021 you want me to start with you let your winners [Music] ride David and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone [Music] crazy all right everybody welcome back to the number one podcast in the world with me again today Jam paaa your chairman dictator David freeberg our sulan of Science and two guests uh obviously Ben Shapiro very famous for having the number two podcast in the world how are you Ben uh I'm I'm doing I'm doing great I'm just honored to be here you know yes more work to do you could exceed all in in the rankings no we we we always judge ourselves Ben on three things in the rankings when we look at how we're doing what we see is Ben Shapiro prayer from the Bible okay the New Testament I don't think you've got it yet you you have the Old Testament but you haven't gotten the new you haven't gotten the sequel and then number three murder also with us from the White House yeah welcome to Allin where we have a live feed into the White House today my good friend Antonio graas is here he uh is taking I guess you're taking would it be safe to say a Hiatus or you're from Valor to do a little Tour of Duty uh in our government working on doge is is that the way to say it I'm still doing my day job too man this is this is this is a 7-Day a week 68 hour day job because I'm uh I'm trying to do both I've got some great partners are covering for me and that my firm has been tremendous and in um in allowing me to do this but no I'm still trying to do both was it public prior to this week Antonio that you were doing this role did you announce it anywhere was I didn't announce it were no that the New York Times had read a story about um me going to say you know which is s New York time style not not right but I was I had been there yeah I was out Woodland Maryland 40% correct yeah close enough close enough for hand grenades close enough I'm sure they had no agenda Antonio how does it how does it work so when you volunteered do is it that you and Elon and Steve just kind of figure out let's put a senior person at every part of the administration where there's real opportunity why did you end up at SSA versus someplace else interesting question and by the way it's great to see you guys man thanks for having me on I can use your last you're like you're really making me laugh thank you good to see thank you um suit looks great by the way yeah oh thank Youk when do you have to return it the rental is to at the end of the week okay um so yeah know what happened was I had actually volunteered to go to the VA because that's kind of as you guys know close to my heart and um Elon said to me look great you can do that next but we go to essay first and and see what's going on there because it's you know the biggest we have and and see what you find in fraud Wass and abuse and so of course I said sure I'll do that and I ended up out in Woodland Maryland with the good people at the SSA the soci administration and that that's where I started that's how that's how all this started for me and so do you Antonio go in there with a doge engineer as your kind of sidekick per se or you just go there solo and you show up and like like what happens day one when you walk in into the place what do you do so I brought with me um two great professionals uh you know John and and pton from uh from Valor um one of them an engineer the other one I'd say a finance ninja both these guys are ninjas and there was already a team there actually that was working with some great engineers and one senior person uh Scott cter who's from actually worked at Lone p and start his own fund and then had come here as a volunteer as well so they were already doing some work actually particularly on on the enumeration part of the part of the system so that the system that you have numbers the whole cleaning up the database the numbers they had already started that project when I got there and what is the mandate as given to you you know as part of Doge fraad waste and abuse I mean exactly what you know what the what Bill Clinton talked about what Barack Obama talked about what all presidents but maybe President Biden talked about uh going back in time it was go figure out how to save some money man the system is going bankrupt it's going to be bankrupt 2037 the country overall as you guys know and talked about many times is on its way toward bankruptcy want do something and go go figure out we can save money and go find the fraud and that's what we did you know let's get to it you uh spoke at a rally uh I think it was on Sunday and you pulled up a chart here is that chart maybe you could explain to the American people here what this chart shows yeah so if if I might just step back and tell you how I got it because I think it's important you know we map the way we work you guys know we're very operational Balor I've worked with all you guys various times and what we do is we map the entire system from beginning to end so we we map the system from enumeration so I get your number all the way to the end went to the offices and saw the office offices operate and in that process um one of our Engineers Pon I mentioned he found U the data so we're looking at all the data numeration how it works what you know what's going on the typical stuff you'd look at and he found this data uh called enumeration Beyond entry right so that is the that's and it it had this giant Ram to it you can see their Baseline was kind of you know 3 400,000 people all the way up 2.1 million people and that just jumped out at us and we're like what's that and so we dug into it and that's how this started and so what that's showing is social security numbers that were issued to non-american Citizens or non-citizens am I correct that that's the number we're looking at so these are noncitizens getting Security numbers and for people who don't know just like a little bit of background on the Social Security System we do this this is not abnormal for us to give Social Security numbers this is part of the process uh that the government does the Social Security number was created in 1936 for citizens to track their earnings and in the '90s we started giving them to non-citizens who were authorized to work in the US so that we could collect taxes from them and so if you're not a citizen and you're a green card holder which some people in this program I think have been you have to have a Social Security number in order to work and you pay into Social Security and Medicare uh just like you as Citizens and then eventually I think you would qualify for those over some period of time you can also get a Social Security number if you're a legal immigrant into the United States on a Visa so for example when I first came to the United States 25 years ago on a TN Visa I was able to get my Social Security number because I had a valid visa to be in the United States okay yeah so we have social security numbers being given to non-citizens that is not controversial but there's something controversial about this chart Antonio tell us what that is so I I think you look at the chart you'll see there's it starts to like called 300,000 or so this is during the covid period yeah coming right out of it so we the 21 coming right out of Co right so if you go back even a couple years in 19 you'll see that um it's about 400,000 yeah exactly right there so um what happened was this program was designed for so people you're talking about you know people that got visas this is at numeration Beyond entries this after you're in um there are some people in here that have h-1bs screen cards Etc and the way we thought about this was that's the Baseline number that's the 3 to 400,000 a year you see and that should be happened that's like you know there are programs for Afghans example the translators that came in after the war right the people who brought it they would be in these kinds of programs and so the Baseline number and by the program goes back this particular program goes back all the way to 17 and had legitimate use which was the kind of people we talking about people that we want to let in um like The CARE program I'll make an example which are the Afghans they would be in this number and so what what jumped out of this wasn't that this is here because it has legitimate use it's that it's the growth why did it grow this fast and what happened that that's what we dug into have you figured that out yet is it because of like a covid overhang the the one criticism I did see of the chart that I wanted to bring up with you is hey people want to see the 10 years 20 years before this what would we see if we we were Look Backwards a little bit and do you have some theories and is the covid overhang Theory valid or is this just Biden opened the Border as we saw you know especially like in maybe it was that third year of his term the 2023 year and this is the overhang of the 2023 surge what are your theories well the answer is no categor no because the program really started it it started in 2017 so they probably worked on it before that right a few takes a few years to put these things into place they worked at it my guess is you know back during the B Administration it actually became active in 17 you see a few numbers in 18 and it starts to get a little bigger in 19 and 20 right so that that's how we get this Baseline number of 1920 that's where we're using that data here um so you there isn't I can't go back 20 years it doesn't exist and then when we dug into it what we found was the vast majority of the growth uh was related to Asylum programs and PE Le and people that came in on on ntas this noticed to appear into the country either at the border at the airports mostly at the border and then we dug further into it excuse me dug further into it we found that there were this is about 5.4 million people total there were about 1.2 million people that the status was marked as unknown and about 1.2 million people that were marked as general parole and they should have markings of you know what the program is they're under because if you if you claim Asylum you're supposed to claim like a real fear I'm going to be tortured by my country you know something's bad is going to happen me so why I can't go home what we find here is that a legitimate program was in the word I use abused it the the the requirements were like super opened so that more people come through and the example I'll give you you know I have here actually the form this the form used to be going back in time a four-page form that the officer have to fill out in the field and the person that was claiming Sol had to actually prove that they were had a really credible fear of being you know murdered tortured by their government that's something B them that's that's what SS for it turned into a form which I can't give you but I'm going to show you here you can if you zoom in on it it has four questions that's it and the four questions are super leading I'll just read the um you know the like one of the important ones here right so do you have any reason for a concern about being returned to your home country or being removed from the United States I mean could that be more leading right what they did is they open they just open the aperture on these programs dramatically so they allowed people that were illegal to the border to come in Legally and as we've dug further into it we found this took us so you guys know me man I do like I'm a very methodical lean business process mapper and we went all the way to the Border literally to Brownsville and Laredo to ask what happened we couldn't find the data on what these these unknown categories were and it turns out that when the the the folks the Border who were great by the way um they they really tried hard and they suffered a lot in this this is a bit of this is a human strategy I we talked about they were were giving people at times notices to appear this is the the NTA and what that allows you to do is come in the country and then you're you're schedule a court date which is like six years out so now you're in the country with some quasi legal status you're waiting for your court date and while you're waiting for your court date which could be six six years out is the average by the way could be longer than that you're waiting for your court date they uh you could fill out a Sil application so without even interview just an application by filing a form once application's in you can um file another form 765 to get a work authorization once you get that you get a 766 which is the authorization and we automatically send you a soci card in the mail no interview at all that that's that's the that is the majority of the growth you see in these numbers is there any ID verification along the way Antonio like do we know that there are no duplications Happening by validating that one individual is getting one social security number at any point in this process so it's a great question um no the answer is there's no real verification so you can you one of the things we found we looked at this was the the people that that some people showed IDs some people didn't and one of the things these would be IDs Antonio from their home country this would be a Venezuelan driver's license or something yeah I mean it could be a passport a driver's license but here's what really sort of tipped us off and disturbed us when we looked at the the birth cific data that was present at the border the number one birth date was was 1 and it was four times more likely to be born on 1 one than any other uh day of the year now we all know this is so they just hit enter on that part the or they had they could come they Al could come with nothing we take Biometrics of people at the border do we take like an iris scan fingerprints and all that stuff this is one of the issues I mean we do have photos of of people uh we found that 23% of the records looked at did not have fingerprints and look the the folks at the border were um overwhelmed and we're not sure why this happened I will tell you guys just to understand I went down there both border patrol and Border Protection told me they had the highest suicide rates of all time during the surge okay over 70 over 70 of these agents committed suicide in this period it's truly tragic because they knew it was going on given the fact that that all this has happened is the Trump Administration going to try to claim the social security numbers back invalidate them what would be the proper action or is it too late are they already sort of in the system and now you can't anything about it so Ben it's a great question right and the the the first question was what are they doing I mean you know like where are these people where are they how are they and we've gone through a whole process of mapping this so we mapped it through to the benefit programs we found uh in the benefit programs that every benefit we looked at was being accessed by these people you know 1.3 million of them are on Medicaid right now today and by the way it's just ramping just starting just to give you a point and then out of curiosity I woke up at night like 2: in the morning I I couldn't sleep mind was R on this I sent the Andre a notes saying hey guys let's just look at the the public voter roles who we find in some in some friendly States and we looked at the voter roles and we found that thousands of them registered to vote in a handful of states and then we went further with those friendly States and found that the many of those people had actually voted it was shocking to us and if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I wouldn't believed it and so now the question we're asking ourselves is what do we do we've referred some to prosecution that's ongoing right now you know we're thinking through how to do it and the reality is they have various kinds of status and it's a very detailed analysis legally they working through right now about how to deal with it so thousands of those people registered to vote Yes in the election which is a federal crime by the way well yeah I mean the interesting thing is like the Heritage Foundation has a very good project you know it's obviously right leaning where they're studying all cases of fraud I looked at it before we're here there's only been 24 cases since 2003 of somebody who's a non-citizen trying to vote now those are people caught so this would be incredibly dramatic if it was even a thousand people oh no Jason it's more than a thousand I've I've seen it um I've seen the data myself and it's more than a thousand in just a couple of States I mean it is shockingly bad and this is the tip of the iceberg guys it's the tip of the iceberg this doesn't include the 7.8 million people that ice has that have come in illegally and know are here and all the people that came illegally we don't know are here I mean this is not a political issue I want to be really clear about this about America let's just take one step back because I just want you to repeat this so because I think it's important and we may have just run over it a little too quickly when you get a Social Security number what you're saying is there's all of these important Downstream consequences one of the downstream consequences is you could show up register to vote and that's an illegitimate action that's breaking federal law that's one but the second is that without knowing who this person is they can start to absorb resources that could have otherwise gone to an American I guess that's like a fundamental part of this so how do you how do you quantify that can you just maybe explain it a little bit more about all of the different ways in which you think now you know the United States ends up leaking services to these folks and also they could be contributing too right they could be paying taxes into the system and so I guess there's both of those possibilities and both of those have fingerprints to off so yeah good question you know look we need to figure this out this this is a a very it's massively complex you can see the map I have on the Whiteboard and our office it's huge and we're figuring it out right now but let me just tell you this and every benefit program we looked at and this is just a handful of States we found people on all the benefit programs and we found them on unemployment we found them on Medicaid so adjacent to your point the people on Medicaid unemployment they're not contributing they're taking out they're moing right there are criminals I mean look we sent this data list to the National targeting Center they and I I don't want to get too far into the data but I can tell you they found hardheads in the Target Center um of very bad people criminals and people on ter watch list that are in this group and so yeah I mean it's it's a problem we got to figure out how to deal with it and the of course there are people that are also you know have jobs and paying in the system that's you know that's that's also true all these things are true and we're trying to surf the data and figure out how to actually deal with it now Antonio one of the things about the data that you triggered which because the data is so important frankly is a lot of people started to try to find a way to nitpick and say Antonio you're cherry picking or Antonio this is not really representative and you had some pretty big names right people that have credibility Jim chos probably being one of the more prolific people a very well-known hedge fund manager but I think you try to articulate why their objections didn't make any sense I think it's important to maybe give you a few moments here to identify what they said and maybe debunk it so the the chart that they're using and you can see this I posted something on X about this it was Apples to oranges you can you could see here they took a chart that included all enumerations not the EB program the enumeration B entry program all enumerations they compared to our chart they put this so just to be clear this would have included somebody like me coming in on a tnv or somebody on an eb1 Visa yeah the so those people being our data too but just enumerated Beyond entry the data on the left uh of 2020 the big bars that includes people in the offices that includes people that got they got uh C numbers because they went to a consulate and like you probably did applied ahead of time before they came in you know those kinds of people so we need a stacked bar chart so there's some fun with numbers going on can you flip back again so your number for 24 was how much 2.1 million right yeah yeah what they did is took they took our data so this was you know look I don't want to impute Negative motiv they just maybe were confused they took our data and they comp they added the total data right this is just subsection this is EB and I'm just going to use AC okay guys this is EB only in numeration Beyond entry which is a program as I said started in 2017 and then it kind of ramped up into 19 they took our data and then they added the total Data before that right that is apples to oranges that's why it doesn't work and I I went through a whole analysis of this on X and you know the person the first person that posted the chart actually deleted it and sent me a post saying hey you know I'm deleting it because I get it you're right and apologized and ask me some questions I don't want to get into you know you guys know I don't post a lot on X I don't want to get into basic people it's not worth it the data speaks for itself there's it basically it basically became like a roar shock test where people that did not want to believe the points you were making latched on to that chart that was shown even though it was disproven and that became the narrative for a good chunk of the internet and a good chunk of for media respons yeah I mean look you guys know me you know me for a long time this is not political man this is this tell about your political background again we haven't talked about this on the show Antonio but I think it's worth letting everyone hear about your background a little bit just so folks understand where you're coming from I was a Democrat for 20 years I mean I I I you know I knocked on doors for really Clinton Iowa I was uh you know from from Illinois and look I've got lots of good friends are Democrats and when I explain this sta to them they're as shocked as I am I don't believe this I mean to say you're a Democrat is an under you were a Democrat is an understatement you were a major donor and majorly involved with the Democratic party yes Ben you you tend to call balls and Strikes on the program what are your thoughts on immigration generally and how it should work here in the US and how maybe we can resolve this and get to and Anton I want your answer to that question as well maybe some reconciliation here between the moderates Maga original you know classic GOP Democrats and and the woke lunatics like is there any way out of this and and maybe perhaps what we're seeing here with somebody like Antonio who's a lifelong Democrat who now is you know helping the government maybe there's some way with data and logic we can get through this I mean I I think that what Antonio is doing here is is so important specifically for that because it seems to me there's actually been a fairly wide consensus among the American population for a very long time what to do about immigration particularly the southern border which is number one just sto the illegal immigration at the southern border after Biden blew that out a lot of Democrats turned to president Trump specifically because of that issue and that has been the signal success of the Trump Administration among all the other successes the the numbers of the Border have just plummeted to almost zero I mean the lowest numbers in recorded history and that is an unmitigated success and then I think everybody knows that we have to sort of figure out who gets to stay and who gets to go who's already in the country and what Antonio is doing by being able to discern who is here and is net draw on the resources of the American people versus maybe who is a net taxpayer or who's actually contributing who's a criminal right there's always been this bizarre supposition in the in the political realm that there's no way on a onetoone level to figure out who is who you have to treat everybody as a class either everybody stays everybody goes and the reality is that even the way the Trump Administration is doing this by first targeting say criminal illegal aliens for for removal and then maybe moving on to people who are net drawn resources who came in falsely under claims of Asylum and now are receiving Medicaid or disability this I've made the argument for for I think my entire career actually on this that that we should be treating immigrants illegal immigrants who are in the country the same way we would treat people who are trying to get into the country which is to say are you going to benefit the United States or are you not going to benefit the United States and the counter argument was always well how exactly are you going to determine who is who and the answer I always gave was well the IRS does it with our tax returns literally every single year so why should we not be able to do that and so the kind of work Antonio is doing showing you actually can do that by tracking the social security numbers of people who came in illegally because the truth of the number of unknown getaways is actually really really compared to this it's it's a small number most of the people who are coming across the border at least during the Biden term I went down to the Border last year and and visited uh a Native American reservation that's right along the border where where the border patrol basically was not uh and and they said that what was happening is people were arriving at the border they were doing exactly what Antonio was talking about they would literally say I fear to go back to my home country they' be processed they'd be led into the country with a with a a future date to come back and that was all happening with 72 hours so being able to track those people and find out who who who should be in who shouldn't be that that's that's huge and I think that's the consensus so uh should we are you in the camp we should Deport everybody this sort of Stephen Miller Miller Deport 20 million people Ben or you and the hey let's get rid of the criminals and you know that will get us to where we need to be well I don't think it's just the criminals I mean I think you also need to go after the folks who are are here to take advantage of the welfare benefits for example who are just draw on the system um but I don't think that the number is 20 million I don't think president Trump actually thinks the number is is 20 million I don't think anybody realistically thinks the number is 20 million got it okay but they they said it over and over again all 20 million are going and it's right but they say a lot of things it's AIT it's a yes it's a political campaign and people say that sort of stuff all the time Antonio let's talk maybe about reconciliation here you spent your life as a Democrat and now you've spent I don't know six months as a republican here and helping this Administration how do we get the country to sort of get back together here and maybe reconcile on this issue because it seems like an unnecessary to Ben's point I I think the number is 80% of people believe the Border should be just shut period full stop and everything should be legal and I don't know the other 20 if they're just don't know how to take a survey I've never met anybody who said there should be an open border at at the southern border so what are your thoughts on given your inside knowledge uh and I would describe you as a Clinton Democrat fiscally conservative socially liberal correct me if I'm wrong there what are your thoughts on reconciliation here because you really do care about that your parents both immigrants my Bes is here three of the four people who host this program immigrants this is an immigrant country built by immigrants for immigrants has always been so how do we reconcile this issue and put it behind us and Jason I have asked myself this question and I I think we got to follow the truth and that's that's the point follow the truth and the truth is in the data and as as Ben said the numbers don't lie right and so people are productive we got find a way to to allow them to be productive and stay people that are are taking the system should not be allowed to stay and you know I think we I don't want to get into the policy at all because it's above my pay grade I mean the reality is for me my remit is as as Ben said it's criminals terrorists and then people mooching off the system and then you know a political question needs to be answered about what happens to the rest of those people I I don't I don't know I don't it's not my remit free I I will say this yeah I think that all my friends who are still Democrats that I have explain this data to they all say the same thing you guys are saying man this is a problem we got to figure this out and let me tell you why the bigger problem the biggest problem here and it's it's definitely is taking off the system but you got to realize we gave 13 to 15 billion a year to human traffickers that's what this system did and the money magnet that attracted these people here it wasn't like it was some crisis that you know environmental crisis the money magnet attracted these people and many of them died on the way up I mean think about what that's like think about the this a human suffering a human rights tragedy you have people who are getting sold into slavery and being abused at the border at a at a minimum every American should be against that everyone is every American is man this turned my stomach when I went to the board and I heard the stories it turned my stomach man this we are America okay we protect people like this we don't give incentives to people to pay traffickers if you pay 20,000 I heard 20,000 to 500 bucks just across the border $20,000 I mean where do someone who's coming from Central America or Africa get 20 grand to pay the pay the traffickers that are walking them across the border it's not free to walk up Mexico okay it's controlled by the cartels what happens I mean they got to pay that back how do they pay it back they're basically DED servants this is terrible this isn't what we do in this country right this country is about freedom and we are here to protect it we protect it around the world protected our home country and I don't think any American that I know none of them Democrats Republicans or anyone thinks this is good it's not good it's bad for America and it's evil Behavior we shouldn't send it we shouldn't we shouldn't give people a reason to do it we should find legal ways people come in the country and do you believe that there is a Democratic party motive to increase voter base for the Democrats behind all of this as has been proclaimed by some look as I go through the data and I see it's all about the data okay David and I know you you you you you love the data when you just in a handful of States man I'm talking about four states we looked at the voter roles we found these people thousands of them on the voter roles and we found uh many of those people had voted right in one state in particular well over a thousand voted yeah I think this was a a move to import voters but really importantly I just want to make sure because when when I talk to politicians from the Democratic party about this they say there's aspects of Human Rights doing the right thing for people in need that is motivating some of this behavior is that a lie and they actually have a different motive or do some in the party think that way but there are real kind of kind of call it a small group of Highly influential Folks at the top of the democratic party that recognize that this is going to grow the voter base and they're kind of motivating this what do you think is the construction of what sounds to some to be a conspiracy and how much of this is really like widely understood look Ben here I'll tell you what I have seen I've tell you the actual information if you look at C Administration we set all the defaults to kind of Max open no idea requirements right you get a soci scen number uh before we got here by walking in office answering you know with with with a medical record and a school ID that had your name and your date date of birth on it that's it okay we opened up we set the defaults to open on Social Security we set the defaults to open on pay paying people out and we set the collection defaults basically to zero so that's how the system looks that's I'm just reporting reporting the facts um do I think that the the average person is a democrat in the in in Illinois or you know the guys I knew I to Chicago they know this they don't know this they don't know this so were there people at the top of the system did this yeah people created this policy the former administrators of the of these agencies created these policies I've seen them I've read them myself I've gone to the data myself they've seen them now this isn't everybody if you're the average person out there who's a Democrat and you see what I've seen you I believe you will you conclude what I concluded which is this isn't right these policies are wrong they're evil they're wrong we gave an incentive for people to get trafficked that's terrible I just don't I just don't think people know the reason I'm even willing to do all you guys know me I'm pretty private I'm come to your podcast because we're buddies but like man the reason I'm talking about this is is not political it's because it's a human rights issue and the human rights issue is being confused it's not it's we are incenting people to pay traffickers to come to America we were doing this right we got to find better ways to do that and I just I don't believe any American the 80% of people Jason's talking about that would say close the border that's the 80% people come together this issue man we got to take care of people Antonio can you talk about what the next big push of effort from you and your team will be is there good question some next chart I'm not trying to be reductive but is there something that you can demonstrate that is going to be equivalently as powerful as this first chart which then helps us start to move these gears towards doing the logical and right thing I think the right thing is to figure out who's who right who are the criminals who are the terrorists yeah number one and number two who's mooching off the system and then number three the people that are working that Jason's talking about U you know what we do with them that's the right answer I would add a fourth because I think that there's probably no more electric issue than this idea of voting impropriety and I think it is become so brazenly partisan that everybody has suspended logic if it turned out if it turns out that there was a manipulated effort in 2020 and there is even a thread of legitimacy to Trump's claims you would never be able to see the light of day because so many Americans just turn their turn off right and that's because of the rhetoric that they've been fed this is a really important thing that I would just offer to you is that if it is true that these people illegally voted I think it's a Thunderclap and I think it opens wide the aperture on voting illegality and voting reform and I think that irrespective of who you are you should want to make sure that people who are not allowed to vote are not voting just to put it simply yeah wow what an incredible I mean it's amazing I can't I I can't uh I can't get an airplane in America without ID but I can go vote in some states without ID I think that's crazy I totally crazy that is and we're down to like Ben you know the number it's 15 states now are the ones that don't have voter idas so this is becoming like a very obvious issue and a loopover for us to close I think the best next thing for you to do is actually publish this list of people who voted get it to the Heritage Foundation and put sunlight on it the truth shall make you free and sunlight is the best disinfectant because I think the whole issue is absurd because if you look at the votes in the swing States it would take a 100 thousand it would take tens of thousands and it's illegal I I've spoken to the person at the Heritage Foundation who does this they found like 2400 cases over 40 or 50 years the number of people voting illegally is minuscule in order to swing even but one state you would need coordin hold on let me finish you would need a coordinated effort I'm just giving you data chamama I am not partis there are tens of thousands of vot that would need to be manipulated in each of these markets it's impossible here well there's the keyw here's what I would ask you to consider sure your results are only as good as your prompts your results are only as good as your prompts say it in plain English what do you mean I suspect that if you put three or four of the smartest data scientists in the world they would get to a very different answer than the answer that has been arrived to I don't know whether that'll validate or invalidate the claim yeah but the quality of the people that are able to interrogate this data is directly correlated to the output that is created well listen we all want the data clean Ben I'll maybe I'll let you you kind of answer the question from your perspective do you think there is any chance that a swing state could be swung by you know this strategy and in addition to that Trump is a populist all these people and his biggest gains were with people from South America Mexicans Etc in this last election so and noncollege educated so if you were going to plot this incredible strategy it seems like the Democratic strategy of importing a bunch of Voters is the stupidest possible strategy because the Republican party has won those people well I don't think that it would be a great short-term strategy because of the the problems that you mentioned in terms of the the size of the voting gaps even in close swing States although obviously you have outlier cases like Florida in 2000 where the entire state is being decided by hundreds of votes and there you actually could see a state actually shift on that basis it's a rarity but it does happen and and in some cases decides a presidential election uh when when you're talking however about the long-term play I think the question that needs to be asked is if you are importing a bunch of people who are more dependent than average on the American government for example or who are not interested in assimilating to free market values for example or Free Speech values uh or or who come in and then many of these people are going to get married many of these people are going to have kids they're going to marry American citizens they're going to have children who are American and then they stay now you're talking about actually generating a change in the voting population and that isn't a right-wing Point that's a point that was made by Roy toera all the way back in 2004 when he was a Democrat and he was making the case essentially there was a demographic wave that was going to shift the electorate in the United States in the direction of Democrats permanently now the point that you're making is that even as a long-term strategy that might be a bad play because it may be that these populations shift over time that doesn't mean that that's not the intent in the moment meaning wrong could could have gotten it wrong they could made a very bad strategic decision Antonio I think we have to drop you off here any closing comments you want to make and I just want to thank you I know you've got other things you could be doing in your life but just on behalf of the American people who I speak for here on the program we want to thank you all Americans for your service to this country and I know that you are balls and Strikes and you're going to let the data speak so I just want to thank you I would close this on this conversation which is go look at California Look at California okay Richard Nixon Ronald Reagan came California Ronald Reagan signed amnesty and you know some 40 years later it is now of solidly blue State and I think U some us on this program I know you Jason are Refugee from California because of that because of some of those policies and I want to be I want you to be careful about this because it is it is actually the tip of the iceberg man we we have a very small sample of data in a couple of States it's the tip of the iceberg and so I don't know what the unintended conse will be long term but I can tell you what already happened in America where an amnesty program actually turned a very large State you know from one one party another and I want to leave you guys this thought this is not political I'm not doing it there's no political motivation in my my mind this is about America it's about securing the American democracy and we will shine light onto the data when we can we prefer these people to prosecution and we're going to keep looking we'll keep going and the data will lead us and the truth will lead us and it'll eventually come out in the sunlight you're right but we're going to follow the truth that's our primary motive that that is that is our operating parameter and what we're going to do right on all right thank you Antonio gra and Contin success and love to talk to you in 30 days when you have your next findings you're a you're a refugee from California too aren't you yes yeah we took off in 2020 during during covid we took off my company took off we we all got the hell out I I was born in California so I spent 30 uh 36 years there before before I moved uh and yeah they they certainly did a good job of wrecking that state I mean I did the same thing you went to oh I don't know where you I'm in Florida yeah my company's in Tennessee I'm in Florida yeah got it yeah I mean it's just you can't rais kids in California and you just think about the crime and taxes and what you're getting for your dollar it doesn't make any sense I mean I don't White House is off the zoom boys now we can start to really open it up okay now we can open up the okay what do you guys think about what you just saw B I'll let you go first as our guest yeah I I I wish the entire Trump administration were rolled out as well as Antonio just rolled that out is is what I would say totally you know I think that that is high levels of competence and expertise and a meticulous message that that is data first and difficult for anybody to deny I think that the success of the Trump administrations the success that they've had are taking the 80 side of 8020 issues and I think that the success of President Trump in 2024 was that he oddly became the Normy candidate he was the guy who was returns normaly candidacy and in the face of of Biden and the bizarreness of of herness of Harris and you know I think that as we see many of Trump's policies rolled out the ones that are rolled out the way that Antonio is rolling it out are incredibly well received by the American population because they're seeing serious people doing serious work that needs to be done and the ones that are not rolled out that way I think are going to be a little more unpopular with the American people and that that's kind of I want president Trump to succeed at a lot of these agenda items and I don't want his his good agenda items getting essentially railroaded and and Run Over By by the by the bad rolled out of other agenda items so you think thoughtful is good and well thought out constructed and communicated what what um when you talk about this being done right what do you think being done wrong it could be done better I guess would be a generous way of saying it what what could they communicate better I mean not to jump into the the pile of rakes that is the the tariff plan but I think that the I think that the way that the tariff plan was rolled out is about as bad a roll out as you could do um you know the reason I say that is not just because of my disagreements on the actual policy I'll either be right or I'll be wrong on that but the way that it was rolled out with with very with with essentially kind of a surprise announcement um I don't mind a surprise announcement if what is then rolled out is not replete with with with sort of contradictory justifications um you know statistics that that are labeled one thing but really are not that thing uh and and so it just it opens itself up to all sorts of critiques from every possible side of the if you want to make the argument make the full make the full scale wellth thought aru argument and then we can argue over whether it's true or not but there's there's four or five different claims that are being simultaneously made about the tariffs one they're going to raise revenue two they're going to reshore three that you are going to somehow retrigger the world trading system some of these are mutually exclusive if you're going to if you're going to reshore you're not going to raise as much revenue for example right those two things are are mutually exclusive and they're both being trotted out at the same exact time if you're going to put out a giant chart that the president holds up that shows tariff rates plus unspecified you know variable uh then what I'd like to know is what the actual tariff rate is a as opposed to what the calculation seems to be which was the trade deficit with a country divided into the Imports to that Country and that that has nothing to do with the Tariff rate I mean just technically speaking it has literally nothing to do with the Tariff rate and so what that means is now you're boxed in logically if president Trump wants to do a reciprocal tariff reduction for example how do you do that because he actually has used a stat a statistic for the tariffs that have nothing to do with the Tariff rate and are actually just trade deficits so the only way to actually Rectify that statistic is to have Madagascar buy a bunch of American product for example in order to get their their quote unquote tariff rate down you know that that sort of stuff seems badly calibrated even if you like the policy for example all right yeah unless unless from a poker point of view they spent many months declaring they're going to do tariffs and everyone thought they were bluffing and said everyone said there's no way you're going to do tariffs it's like someone in poker is saying I'm gonna play every hand I get I'm going to be crazy you don't believe them and they actually have to do it in order to get the negotiating leverage that they need to be able to negotiate trade deals ultimately and they have to look a little crazy maybe I mean that so you're that's your position freeberg in the 4D chess or trying to rationalize one kind of rational reason for why a lot of smart people would end up putting that board up that poster board up where to your point Ben they said that these are kind of the the tariffs that are being levied Upon Our Country when in fact it is simply the math of imports minus exports divided by Imports that's what the number was and and and it was and it was maxed out at that number or 10% and that's what they did so they did that basically as a way in my opinion it looks like and I'm just trying to take a read on this that um they're using this as a way to anchor for negotiations going forward to make the case we are declaratively crazily off the fraking ship going to do whatever the heck we want to do here in this Administration now everyone takes them seriously now everyone shows up to the negotiating table and now they can actually negotiate and then announce a series of win after win after win and say we got this set of countries to capitulate today this is the deal we worked out it's a totally unique deal this set of deals we worked out today this set of deals we worked out today and basically getting all the trade representatives to the table by making the case that they're actually willing to go all the way to the wall on stuff so I that's the only way I can kind of rationalize this roll out Ben that's what it feels like to me for months they've been very declarative we are going to do tariffs bessent said it to us on our interview letnik said it to us on our interview and no one took them seriously I did I did by the way I I will say that I took them totally seriously so much so that I called my financial adviser after the State of the Union Address and told them to uh [ __ ] my my stock and bond ratio in my portfolio because I figured that something like this was going to happen I think you went heavy treasuries yes I I I I went light stocks I'll say that and and and the reason for that is because again I think that the thing about President Trump is that you he he may not you know be serious in every single thing that he says but he is very clear that when he says a thing over and over and over there is no hidden motivation and this is the part that I always have trouble with with sort of the the 40 chess reads on President Trump there's almost never a hidden motivation he pretty much just says the thing that he thinks right it's one of the things that makes him so popular and authentic is that there isn't a 40 chest game being played If he if he says that he wants a thing to happen it's because he actually wants the thing to happen now the thing about President Trump is he's also a realist so if a bunch of bad headlines hit him he may then change his mind and decide that he wants to drive a truck directly through the center of the tariffs because the prices are going up too much on for example semiconductors so one of the big exemptions from these tariffs is in fact in the area of semiconductors again there you see a sort of couple of different justifications that are that are mutually exclusive that are fighting each other one of them is the idea we need to resore semiconductor production because it's a national security asset and the other is it's we need to raise revenue on semiconductors so he Exempted them which kind of you know kind of Boles up the logic and I I think that the the there are a couple of tells that that isn't what's it may listen I think it may end up being the thing you're saying I think the most likely result of these tariffs is that within the next few weeks the headlines are not good president Trump starts driving trucks through the center of the tariffs and then he starts getting wins from various parties outside that allow him to find an off-ramp on some of these tariffs you know a company in in Belgium says they're going to build a factory in the United States he has them to the White House they have a big ceremony and then he says and as a result of this we're now lowering the tariffs in sort of the same way he did with with Colombia when he said not the university the the country when he said he was going to hit them with tariffs unless you accept these these illegal immigrants and and then they did so that very well might be the offer I don't think that's what's going on right now I think what's going on right now is the strategy that lutnick has repeated expressed which is that they actually kind of like the tariffs they actually think that this is good economic policy and that between 1880 and 1910 was an amazing time in American history and and so they do you agree um I I think that that is a bad read on economic history because there are a lot of confounds there that are being ignored uh among those confounds would be the fact that actually Industrial Revolution yes so a few just name a few in the industrial revolution extraordinar high levels of immigration by the way during that period so you had an incredibly cheap labor base that was actually coming in into the United States at that time massive expansion of the American population no income tax capital a newly discovered continent right like like like truly like many many compounds right and by the way less International Trade generally so tariffs aren't going to have the same sort of impact on Global Supply chains as they would now where every product that you buy has gone through 10 different countries in 10 different ways and so so no I don't I don't think that that is a comp um but that doesn't mean that that lutnick doesn't think that it's a comp for example and and I think that the when when it comes to you know the roll out again a methodical roll out I I I totally get the crazy man Theory and I think that sometimes president Trump does that I'm hoping that that's what he's doing but a good example of an off-ramp he could have taken if that's the thing he's trying to do so yesterday in anticipation of this Israel which had very very low tariffs on United States Goods anyway announced they'd removed all tariffs on American Goods right there were no tariffs on American Goods anymore and the administration that afternoon listed their tariff rate at 33% and then hit them with a 17% tariff for a country that win and just use them as an example of a great partner exactly exactly didn't didn't Canada do the same didn't Canada drop tariffs like the the morning of they were on CNBC and they said we're totally willing to go to zero and then the anchors correctly on CNBC were like well then why haven't you done that already to Ben's Point Israel did do that and but I think your theory Ben is like absolutely correct if you make this analogy to what he did with overturning ro8 it is the same exact thing he told us over and over again I'm going to put two maybe three people on the Supreme Court I'm going to overturn it and then afterwards he kind of wiped his hands through it and was like listen it's up to you guys I had nothing to do with it he will tell you what he's going to do he told you he was going to do these tariffs he's done them uh and I do think there's something embedded in what you said Ben which is I think he likes everybody to come to Mara Lago or to come to the White House and he loves doing deals he's addicted to it he wrote a book The Art of the deal he loves people coming to him hanging out and shth maybe you could give us your perspective crazy man the crazy grandpa uh or this is a negotiating tactic everybody has to come through him or lutnick believes it as he said very clearly I'm going to add a trillion dollars in taxes here what what do you think is going on here because if when I went through all the top people on the internet all our group of friends uh who are deeply in finance I can't find anybody deeply in finance who's not in the administr who thinks this is well executed or a good idea what's your thought let me start by saying a couple things to use the Donald rumfelt quote I do agree with Ben tremendously that this was a known known we mentioned this last episode Donald Trump has been speaking about tariffs for 40 plus years yep so this is not a new thing and I think that he tried this in Trump one but to your guys's point it didn't really go well because he didn't have the the team around him that had his back and so it was inevitable that he would have tried it in Trump to he said it and he's been able to do it so if you weren't planning for it whoever was vested in this outcome you really needed to be focused on this it was a known known and so there was a little dereliction of Duty if you were caught off guard I think that's one the second is and I we've said this all year since January one on this pod we started it even with the with that poly Market bet that I made which is the Trump Administration does not care about the stock market and by the way this the trade actually closed out so congrats to all these people that won $650,000 on let me just explain poly Market put a betting Market suggested by chaai haa they are partners of ours Magnificent Seven shrinks below 30% of S&P 500 in 2025 this was free money this was like the stock Market giving out free money but why did this happen this happened because it was very clear to me early on that the rhetoric had shifted to say we care about Maga we care about people that have working class and middleclass jobs none of those folks are deeply invested in the asset economy the way maybe some of us are and so it was directionally clear and by the way Scott bessent what a cold ass quote yesterday the equity Market selloff is a MAG seven problem not a Maga problem so there again putting all of this into the realm of this is a known known so I think it's pretty clear one Trump has had a 40-year view on tariffs they're going to go through with this and they're going to see it through I don't think you're going to see this Grand capitulation two they are okay with the volatility in the equity markets and then three which is the other thing that we've been talking about a lot is where does this move our practical financing cost what is this right we've talked about this we have trillion dollars we need to finance in the next 9 months so the singular goal in my opinion of the White House has been move the tenure as aggressively and as quickly as possible and look what they've done as of yesterday it's unbelievable what's happened in the tenure you know you were kissing 4% and we talked about this if it had gone in the other direction guys 30 or 40 bases points and it touched 5% you're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars of extra money that would not have been found that would have had to be printed right and now this is hundreds of billions of dollars that we will save so if we cut rates If the Fed Cuts rates that's all predicated this doesn't matter anymore no this is this is fed doesn't control the back end of the curve on the treasury the treasury markets the government sells treasuries governments will option 10 years the auctions will clear at around 4% it is an enormous like as an American what we should all be thinking is irrespective of what you think you know or what you think you like about tariffs we should all have a moment where we exhale because the long end of the curve is giving us a respit in a storm and we should be incredibly thankful because know what I'm referring to chop is you said yesterday Jerome pal you're on the clock so maybe you could explain what you meant by that okay so this is that's a different part of the curve I understand it's a different thing but I'm just trying to put these two things together because those are the two things were saying this action took will enable now okay so let's play the ball where it lies okay the Wall Street Smart money thought this was a 250 billion event they were wrong this is part of why the stock market has reacted so violently today this is a $750 billion to trillion dollar event okay this is a big moment in the market so what does it create it creates the risk of a recession how do you minimize that risk that is all about how easy it is for the average person to be able to borrow money where is that dictated that is more dictated by the fed and how they price the front end of the curve so what we need to have happen now is while Scott is out financing $6 trillion do on the back end we now need to get Jerome pow to cut the front end and if you do it aggressively enough you can introd produce liquidity in a moment where small and mediumsized businesses can go and get financed to weather the storm Jam I want to add on to your point just so you guys know there's roughly 12 to6 trillion dollars of private corporate debt in America so this is debt held by small businesses medium businesses Partnerships that have on average call it a 15% operating margin so they're going to be under pressure if there is some recessionary risk to make sure they have access to Capital and if you remember the interview that bessent gave to us a couple weeks ago he was very clear that one of his mandates is to enable the Rel leveraging of the financial system meaning he wants to give Banks the ability to issue more debt to introduce more capital and more liquidity into the markets by taking away some of the regulatory restrictions that have made it more difficult for the banks to issue credit to business owners to individuals so if they are successful in their deregulatory efforts it will introduce more liquidity into the market coupled with deregulatory work that they're making in the other parts of the administration as this is their declaration not mine their intention is to make sure that that Capital flows into building businesses building new businesses underwriting new jobs creating more employment that's the theory that they're trying to execute obviously it's part of this three-legged stool but if it doesn't all work the stool Falls over okay chamath give us an example here and I'm trying to get you to paint the entire picture here because the Tariff cudgel is not making sense it's not all good news right so let's let's paint the let's so I'll give a very specific example A friend of ours runs a 100 plus year company I'm just going to say it in generic terms so that I don't betray his confidence but problem and this is a business that's been built over 100 years owned by an American family in Incredible family and they make products that we all know and love and what did this action do so in their example they're in a very difficult position because they have as David said a very tight operating margin because they have to compete ferociously against China and they've done everything possible to maintain their capabilities in America hire American workers in the Heartland but still compete against China it's tough and this action today swings them from profitability to a potential yearly loss in a meaningful order of magnitude like hundreds of millions of dollars so Jason that's the other side of this tariff coin so we have to find a way of finding those examples and as Ben said excluding them somehow or giving them reprieve because that wasn't the intention I think of what Trump was trying to do yesterday that's an example of a company that should be winning and should continue to win and fight the good fight against China and try to continue to employ thousands of Americans but this thing because they had some capacity in some other countries not China by the way got it blows the thing up and so now you have to fix those things all right Ben let me get you involved here I'm going to play you a quick clip from Rand Paul and I want to get your feedback on executive power and then on terrorists themselves and if it's a good idea or a bad idea play the clip what's the rationale for getting behind this well one we should not live under emergency rule the Constitution said taxes are raised by Congress most specifically taxes originate in the house and come to the Senate so I'm against emergency rule we are richer because of trade with Canada and so is Canada whenever you trade with somebody when an individual buys somebody else's product it's mutually beneficial or you wouldn't buy it if the trade is voluntary it's always beneficial there is no Canada versus the US the consumer wins when the price is the lowest price tariffs raise prices and they're a bad idea for the economy Ben your thoughts on the two issues is trade good for consumers this is what you know I think is on top of everybody's mind that yeah the whole Trump presidency and he won in large part due to inflation and Biden economics and that he was going to reduce inflation and I think a lot of people believe inflation's about to come roaring back your thoughts on the two issues well I mean obviously on a macroeconomic level I totally agree with senator Paul when it comes to the powers of of the presidency I think that it's pretty extraordinary that we should be able to use the trade deficit as a National Emergency sufficient to put down what effectively amounts to a $700 billion tax increase on the American people if you're talking about them paying the price of of the tariffs on on the other end and Congress you know I think that if things get bad enough there a bunch of you know streams obviously here that cross one of the big things here is that Congress is up for re-elect in a year and a half and if the Republicans lose Congress in year and a half then whatever tricks president Trump is is trying to pull in terms of being able to rejigger the rate at which we are paying back our our national debt all that stuff goes by the wayside because if Democrats win Congress pretty much everything comes to a crashing Hall and there are a lot of Republicans who are in swing districts or in say R plus five R plus 10 districts who are suddenly going to feel feel pretty vulnerable a recession takes everybody with it it takes secretary bessent it takes the president it takes J Vance takes everybody with it recessions tend to crush the president who is in power at the time regardless what their long-term plan is when they say short-term pay for long-term gain again I think that there are a few factors here that I would like to see played out for example if there is an inflationary effect to the tariffs in terms in terms of price does that mean that Jerome pal is going to eject additional liquidity into the markets by by decreasing interest rates it's hard to see how I mean he's holding the interest rates steady right now without decreasing the interest rates despite president Trump basically blasting him publicly since before he was even the president formally he just the president President elect that time so again it's hard for me to see how all of this squares into what looks like a a really well-calibrated policy and and then beyond that in the long term tricks that we play with regard to the rate of interest paying back our national debt are not going to be sufficient to pay back our national debt unless we have robust economic growth and so a lot has to be bet on the robust economic growth out out earning essentially the the levels of debt that we are are currently racking up and while I love what doge is doing the systemic drivers of our national debt are not actually being touched at this point by Doge I mean it's it's the it's the means tested welfare programs that are really the systemic long-term drivers of our national debt and Military I think would be number two yeah milit milit military as a percentage of of the of the GDP or as a percentage of the budget has been you know relatively stable and in some cases decreasing since since the end of the Iraq War true but that but that that when when it comes to the means tested welfare programs those continue to grow as a percentage of the budget and over time are increasingly unfunded yeah as our population ages and the population grows freeberg putting aside executive power in the midterms which yeah that that would change everything what are your thoughts on just inflation and tariffs and the chance that this comes back and explodes in the administration's lab well I think there are three consequences not necessarily related to inflation that are just worth spending time on one of which I don't think gets talked about enough the first is just the challenge of tariffs in general and I shared this clip with you guys over the group chat yesterday from Ronald Reagan talking oh it's so funny I have it chewed up I actually edit it let's do that let's play this clip and get your reaction and today many economic analysts and historians argue that high tariff legislation passed back in that period called the smooth Holly tariff greatly deepened the depression and prevented economic recovery you see at first when someone says let's impose tariffs on Foreign imports it looks like they're doing the Patriotic Thing by protecting American products and jobs and sometimes for a short while it works but only for a short time what eventually occurs is first homegrown Industries start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs they stop competing and stop making the Innovative management and technological changes they need to succeed in world markets and then while all this is going on something even worse occurs people stop buying then the worst happens markets shrink and collapse businesses and industries shut down and millions of people lose their jobs the memory of all this occurring back in the 30s made me determined when I came to Washington to spare the American people the protectionist legislation that destroys Prosperity so let me just say three things that I think are going to be important consequences one of which doesn't get talked about much at all the first is the important point about the decline in competitiveness that arises when you use protectionist tactics like import tariffs so ultimately in order to be competitive in the market you need to have a free market to test how good you are relative to your competitors and if you use tariffs or other taxes or other government intervening systems to distort the natural forces of markets meaning there's a buyer and a seller there may be multiple Sellers and ultimately the buyer will choose the best seller then you're creating a disincentive for American Enterprise to be more competitive we lost manufacturing because we weren't competitive in manufacturing putting a tariff on other manufactur ing countries does not make Americans more competitive it basically gives American businesses a crutch David so let's talk about manufacturing so if I'm using a traditional assembly line with low efficiency systems I'm going to be more expensive to make a device than a Chinese Factory that's built with a lot of automation high efficiency systems Etc and so if I'm saying well to buy the Chinese product you got to pay twice as much because there's a tariff now the American company does not have an incentive to invest in autom or building better technology or adopting new technology to make themselves competitive in the marketplace so that's the challenge with tariffs long term is that they distort Economic Consequences that arise in a traditional free market system the second consequence I think is important is under this gu and in the near term the effect of some of these tariffs is going to be the loss of revenue for a significant chunk of the American businesses in particular I'll use one example people may not remember this because it wasn't that big of a thing but between 2016 and 2020 during the last Trump Administration there was a continued kind of tariff and trade escalation between Trump and China and during that time China stopped buying American a exports and China is the biggest buyer of American agricultural products as a result the Trump administration had to issue two support payment checks to Farmers that totaled $28 billion in 2018 and 2019 just because of that China stepping out of the buying Market American farmers represent a large amount of the voting block for the Republican party and so my I think that the second consequence is going to be that there is going to need to be financial support which means increased government spending if we intend to keep the tariffs in place and the global market stops buying American exports that's the second Consequence the third consequence which is the one I am most worried about which I think about a lot is China had the state council meeting a couple days ago and in that state council meeting they announced a series of measures and a series of steps that they would be willing to take an IP infringement in the case of retaliatory tariff escalation in a trade War what that means is that China May step up and say you know what we are disregarding all of the IP rights held by IP rights holders around the world and they could steal IP more openly more brazenly and because they have a lower cost of manufacturing they have a larger manufacturing base a lower cost of power they could basically take the only thing that much of American Enterprise relies on which is our IP rights and say we're just going to well people might say oh they already do that they already do that they do it to an extent but imagine if China just made copies of Microsoft Word and started selling it around the world for $5 yeah I mean they did that internally for some period of time then they started to respect it internally but they've never done it great point and shipping Disney films overseas that's right and so now imagine if they started taking all of American manufacturing drawings blueprints designs and they have all this manufacturing capacity and they sold everything at 10 cents on the dollar to all of the global markets that the US is now cutting trade ties with because of the the Tariff escalation and China says we don't care about your IP rights anymore we don't care because you've cut us off the rest of the world needs someone that will sell to them I will also say China One thing that's not talked about which I'll add in seems to have developed three nanometer semiconductor manufacturing technology which is going to go into production in Q3 of 2025 and will end up being in full production 2026 this will move the base from Taiwan potentially into China they are developing lithography systems they are developing Advanced semiconduct Manufacturing Systems and they will effectively have everything from energy to the minerals to the manufacturing capacity to support and service all and the software now all of technology and so we are in a really disadvantaged position if China does choose in this moment to disregard the IP rights of American businesses so they they have the ability to to swing back at us chamat you who wrap us up here and yeah I'll take the other side of all of this yeah I'll start with again there's no point prognosticating when they're just telling you what they intend to do Nick you want to play the clip I could see in the next few years that we are going to have to have some kind of a grand e global economic reordering is something on on the equivalent of a new Bretton Woods or if you want to go back like a a treat something back to the steel agreements or the Treaty of Versailles I mean what what is that just a kind of like refresher what are we talking about we're talking about commercial relations between at the time 44 countries right this is a big statement I don't think that these kinds of things are said casually at a Manhattan Institute cocktail hour and I think that people understand if you're kind of like steeped in the history of it how important these kinds of statements are so I think take this similarly to how I take Trump's rhetoric on tariffs and I'm spending some time trying to Now understand how are the scenarios that could play out because I think David is right if you assume the status quo meaning what are the risks but what they're saying is we're going to question this we're actually going to go here and just totally rewrite that if that happens as part of this all bets are off in my opinion I don't think any of us know with any certainty what a new economic framework would look like and if Scott is basically prepping himself to say hey put me in coach I'm ready I would take that seriously Ben what should be let's talk about onshoring and bringing these jobs bringing these factories back to America it seems to me a bit crazy that we're going to make fast fashion and people's Coachella aware and their anchor you know USBC cables here pharmaceutical sure we need that for strategic purposes we obviously need military and chips but outside of that is there some rationale here when we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime and everybody wants to come here you know to immigrate to this country to doing these tariffs and trying to create jobs here that we don't necessarily need we have too much employment right now in the market and not enough bodies to fill all the open job wrecks what are your thought I mean I think one of the things that's really fascinating is the the kind of difference in messaging that you hear between the treasury secretary Howard lutnick and the Commerce Secretary and the president I mean they're all messaging kind of different things I think secretary bent is making the strongest case for for what's being done with this sort of long-term what's what is reordering look like and and even there I'm I'm still lacking Clarity on what a reordered World Trade relationship actually what is the end of the rainbow there what does that actually look like when all is said and done so that I can kind of grasp exactly what that what he wants that to look like um I think that you know secretary letnik seems to actually just like tariffs and president Trump seems to have a picture in his head when it comes to factories that that we're going to you know Revitalize the steel mills that we're going to be we we're going to be doing the kinds of jobs that we did back in the 1950s there sort of a Nostalgia that that that President Trump has in sort of his own mind about these sorts of jobs that by the way nobody in Modern Life actually wants to work at if if you were to work at a Ford factory in 1953 in an non-air conditioned Factory riveting for a living you would should be quite unhappy and and you should be very happy that actually there are machines that do that now and and you hear this kind of talk sometimes bandied about not just with regard to offshoring both with regards to technology and machines I mean I I've talked to I remember a few years back in 2018 I talked with Tucker Carlson on my program and he literally said that he would outlaw self-driving cars because it would it would get rid of white trucker jobs you know Blue Collar trucker jobs in in Ohio and Michigan and when I said well that sounds kind of Lte he said well the Lites had a point and and you know then suggested that on the basis safety he would ban it and I remember asking him but those those self-driving cars will presumably be more safe than than humans driving said safer yeah yeah and what he actually said was well you know I you asked me on what grounds I would ban it not not whether that was true or not but yeah you know I I think that that that is I think I think this is the danger that particularly Tech runs when we're talking about these sorts of things is is to believe that the the Animus for trade relationships around the world or the the anti-competitive nature of many of the the activities that are being taken are relegated solely to sort of the foreign sphere I think that you could easily see that turn on quote unquote job loss that is caused by AI or job loss that is caused by technological gain I mean the truth is that if you're talking about job loss in the manufacturing sector in the United States the vast majority of job loss in the manufacturing sector is not due to offshoring it's due to technological advancements manufacturing productivity in the United States is actually dramatically risen since the since the 1980 okay so let's play conspiracy theorists for a second because okay you're right Ben like you want that Clarity I want want that Clarity freeberg wants it jcal everybody wants it but if this moment if it's a catalyst to your point where everybody is forced into the room and Trump leads a a grand bargain across the 50 or 60 most important trading partners in the world what does that look like like it's it's almost like okay we're reestablishing something that's akin to the United Nations and what the United Nations was meant to be post World War II but that institution has to failed so this new thing exists purely on economic lines and cooperation I don't know I I struggle actually to your point to kind of imagine what are the outcomes but there's so many unbelievable outcomes in that scenario if they were able to get the top 50 commercial mertile countries together in a room and say let's Hammer something up I mean I totally agree with that I think one of my questions however is the if you take a look at at some of the the examples that that Scott is using there when he talks about the Bretton Woods agreement if you're going to talk about you know what ni did in debasing the dollar Versa if you're talking I mean Versa at least would be a better example in the sense that you didn't have a global Hedon at the time if you're talking about the BR wood system literally the rest of the world effectively did not exist in the post World War II era so what is everybody going to bet on they have to bet on the American dollar there's no other choice by the time that Nixon decides to go off the gold standard essentially he has to rely on the organization of the Petro Dollar in order to make sure that people don't dissociate from the United States what is the thing that's going to draw people to the United States as opposed to looking to a comp in competitor like a that's a great question so what is that thing what do you think that that's a great to mind yeah I mean AI is the only possibility which is why I think the AI regime inside the Trump Administration is so deeply important I also think this is why I'm warning about you know the possibility that the sort of anti-free Market forces that that are related to tariffs aren't just related to tariffs in some quarters this is where populism can kind of run out of control and start to actually turn against some of its Tech masters in some of these cases and so one one of the things that I'm very concerned about is if I was talking Danielle Smith who's the premier of Alberta the other day and she was talking about the fact that Canada like she's she's very conservative Alberta tends to be a more conservative area of Canada and she was talking about how if Mark Carney were to become Prime Minister of Canada instead of Pierre POV that he actually is eager for the Terra War because it allows him to reorient toward China and away from the United States and and there are countries that absolutely would love to do that I mean there there's a case to be made that the EU would love an easy offramp with Russia and China and use this as an excuse as as a way of reorienting back toward Russian oil for example and then Chinese markets because that Chinese market inputs right I mean you have lower input costs which makes life better for Citizens and citizens like cheap things they like cheap oil in their cars and they like cheap cars they'll be bringing by cars into Europe and and the thing that I'm worried about is when when I look at the for forget about Europe and forget about Canada for a second the the the tariffs that that kind of shocked me when I looked at that list were all the tariffs on the Southeast Asian countries right all of those countries where where where production has been shifting out of China to places like for example Vietnam or Cambodia the the production has been shifting to those places specifically because companies know the United States yeah because the United States is going after China well now why exactly would you manufacture in Vietnam when Vietnam is going to be with a 46% tariff rate on the basis that we have a 90 it's more than that Ben it's like they've made those Investments over the last five or six years and so you have tens and hundreds of you know millions of dollars billions of dollars of sunk cost now what do you do in that moment these were specifically designed Ben to be a diversification strategy Japan was paying their companies to build factories outside of China and apple was doing India Vietnam to build airpods and laptops and even the iPhone being made outside of China that diversification strategy did you did you watch the did you watch the presser yesterday the the worst part for me I only had one moment where I was like oh gosh he stopped on Sri Lanka and he goes Sri Lanka good old Sri Lanka 88% amazing Sri Lankan but Sri Lanka very tough on us very was like acting go ahead Ben you can do yours you can do your dueling about a great Trump okay and that's the reason why Ben Shapiro's podcast number two to all in now because of the Ben Shapiro Trump impersonation Ben Shapiro Great American have you been to the white house uh I have actually yeah invited in this or are you still Trump or Trumper it was a nasty never Trump now he's Pro Trump exactly I had the same exact trajectory as JD Vans except I didn't end up Vice President of the United States um but you know the I think that you know the again one when we talk about the roll out the the fact that for example the meme online right now and I know we all kind of live in me moral that the meme is the president and JD Vance lecturing a penguin because on that chart is the herd Islands have you even apologized for eating all that mackerel no no wait what are you guys talking about there's an island there's an island that got a 10% tariff but there's nothing on the island except Penguins yeah it's a St this is where I start come on then have you even apologized okay you got no cards there no cards this penguin has no cards it's just you have no cards to play okay stop stop you've got a great tuxedo at least you show in a okay good stuff um oh my God by the way I think that Ben's framing of this thank you for that because that was really helpful to me you're right like if if we try to reconvene a new Bret and woods we have to have an anchor asset so it's a really great question what is that anchor asset it has to be AI but then you know underneath that AI thing we have these two very complicated problems one is a meaningful energy problem I've been talking about this now incessantly we don't have enough electrons we just don't and then the second is what freeberg mentioned before which is that we have a very delicate technological supply chain to make the underlying silicon we need for these things neither are trivial these are not things that can be easily solved yeah the AI supply chain is electricity we're going from one terawatt to two China's going from three to eight over the same time period just to be clear so they're accelerating the second is rare earth materials that we don't mine for we've outsourced Mining and Doug bergham told me an interesting stat he's our Secretary of the Interior he said we only graduate 200 people a year in the United States with degrees in mining oh God beginning in the 90s when globalization took off we basically stopped mining in this country and moved everything to all the places because we had this nimbyism we didn't want to have mining in our backyard the third obviously is the manufacturing of semiconductors which we don't do the components to do the manufacturing so there's a company called asml which everyone that works in Tech knows about they have these Advanced lithography systems to make the semiconductors they don't sell to China so now China's got their own homegrown systems the worst thing we don't yeah we don't make any of that in house so we we don't mine we don't have enough power we don't have the materials and we don't make lithography and we don't have any Fabs I said this before but one of the biggest National Security threats that we created out of nowhere was when the Wall Street Journal was allowed to do a detailed article on asml and one of the craziest and scariest stats is that there is a person literally one person that can operate these machines that are trained by asml and then forward deployed and there was a woman that was profiled and I thought this is a national security risk you should not be Ting who this woman is she's going to be kidnapped ran Hall exactly at the end of the day what the US has is the way we've got 70 billion parameters and we call that an AI model that 70 billion parameters if someone gets a copy of it they've got an AI model so how much of an advantage do we really have and the other thing that we had meanwhile China's got the whole supply chain and now they're making their own models and the thing that we had was our trade relationships with all the places that had all of these things that we actually needed right this is super high functioning yes it was it was quite high functioning and and then and then beyond that you also have the problem of what happens if there's just less demand for for dollars on the world stage I mean the exit of the dollar as the world's Global Reserve currency is going to have some pretty nasty spillover effects and and it's going to require the government to start sucking in more dollars from the American population in order to pay off all of these these debts that we racking up so I mean all these things T like you could see a world where we magic our way out of this but this is what I've been saying to jcal dollarization is what ends up happening I mean this is what the stable coins I think is set up to counter people are now saying hey we're going to have there's two stable coins acts that are going around here one of them doesn't require like know your customer anti-money laundering terrorism stuff which is you know tethers according to many reports bread and butter and then the other one is to domesticate all this business give it to Circle give it to stripe give it to American companies and force them to buy a certain percentage of treasuries and allow them to give interest which the stable coin bills are now debating if they should give that so I don't know if you guys are watching that but that would be way to keep a buyer for you know our currency there's an analog to this that I think is important like when you look at the debt to GDP of Japan one of the critical questions is how can you have a functioning economy at 250 260% debt to GDP right and we're at sort of like teens right 120 something whatever and one of the critical advantages that they have is that they export a lot of incredible Goods abroad but they have an incredibly deep domestic pool of buyers for their own Japanese bonds and so there's this permanent bid that exists because the net buyer can be a Japanese person on the margins and they're always there and it's not necessarily a person it's an insurance company it's a pension fund Etc the thing that US dollar stable coins does is it starts to replicate one of those advantages which again if you think about having a release valve for the US economy and if we needed to all of a sudden scream to 200% debt to GDP the real question is where's the incremental net buyer of the US Bond and it could be the person that has to back the stable coin which would then say the people in charge of the crypto strategy we won't name names no if anybody knows anybody that legislation needs to be incredibly permissive because to your guys's point we would want the bid to us treasuries to exist and be as ferocious as possible right yeah but I don't think you should give let tether do it until they do anest until they do a proper audit and they stop doing money laundering terrorism and all the crazy stuff I'm not going all the way there but what Circle does is I think quite structured and you know Circle that's I mean I think that's circles usdc that's their pitch and I think the Trump family now just launched their own stable coin this week so you're going to see 10 stable coins that is a great way to you know create competition and um I still think it's a really it's it's it's the right question that this Administration has a responsibility to articulate what is it that makes America the Lynch pin of the global economy of the western democracy of the world is we enter this new era with this Rising power in China and I'm not sure that there's Clarity today what do you think it is I'll do you think it's both of you guys what do you guys think I mean it's pretty clear what it is the reason we keep winning and the reason China keeps stumbling is because we have rabid entrepreneurship and an investment and crazy investment infrastructure the fact that we will bet on entrepreneurs and allow them to become billionaires or allow them to flame out and start again tomorrow that entrepreneurial Spirit of America is what needs to be preserved that's what created SpaceX that's what created Circle we just talked about stripe we need the American exceptionalism and it has to be backed by recruiting AKA immigration of brilliant people like Sachs like freeberg like chamath who were not born in this country you can't do it just based on Ben chapiro and jcal you need to be looking around the world for the smartest people and then plugging them into the entrepreneurial system here that's the magic that's the golden America David what do you think it is that's a very good I mean I think that's credible I honestly don't know if I can be dismissive of China like jcal says they keep stumbling and blah blah blah I I think that's absolutely wrong there's a very good interview um what are those guys names from the Brookings institution that do that podcast then you might know these guys the three guys might is touch is that who you're talking about or that's a different podcast I'm not sure it's not in the top 100 I don't know yeah it's not in the top they talked about China and they talked about actually the rise in China where they 30X GDP per capita and call it 30 years because they allowed entrepreneurs are you talking about Good Fellas Good Fellas sounds right yeah St that's right Good Fellows Good Fellows yeah I think that was it they had good talk on a good talk no no it's Waldorf and Statler I think that's their Nam waldor and styler those the ho in Good Fellows MCM Ferguson Nick find a picture of Waldorf and styler for freedberg to Jo oh they're so great they're so great so anyway they made the point that because China allowed the entrepreneurism of the individuals to let the market Run free and have this throttle when they let the people run free they let entrepreneurism Thrive and then sometimes they pull the throttle back jcal and did that and they crash the whole thing now they've pushed it Forward again and that's what drives the growth and the Improvement in productivity and this extraordinary abundance in energy in mining and now in manufacturing and it's I think going to lead to a Great era of prosperity for China it's pretty clear with or without the conflict with the US they've dramatically improved the conditions in that country over the last 30 years in a really profound historic way so I I don't I'm not going to be dismissive and say that they're stumbling let's give it to B and then I'll tell you what I'm dismissive so so first of all I think that China does face some serious real serious structural problems ranging from demographics to debt um and and I also think that yeah and I also think that if you take a look at sort of the history of economic fascism which is what they're attempting to do which is sort of cap you know using capitalist methodologies in order to prop up a a very tyrannical government that will in a c exactly and and so for a short per period of time that seems like that will work and then and then the problem is you can find yourself in a blind alley fairly quickly and right now ai is not a blind alley but we also don't know exactly Which Way AI is going to develop in the most profitable way I mean the amount of money that's been poured into AI has not yet been justified by the amount of of complet net on the on return on the on the actual investment obviously and so if you don't this this is the benefit of the American Market is that you have everybody chasing everything all the time and one of those things is going to hit the the benefit of the Chinese market is you have everyone chasing one thing all the time if that's the thing that actually hits they'll do amazing but it's possible that they completely miss it but the problem is I think and this is where you get back to the political in the United States and the and the necessity of avoiding a recession is that to me the scariest thing that that is happening in inside the Trump Administration is not something that's bad when President Trump was inaugurated there was one picture that spoke of the in that that that kind of summed up the inauguration was President Trump there with Tim Cook and with the and with um and with Zuck and with Elon and with all the billionaires behind him all the all the tech Bros right behind him if there is a recession what comes next is not going to be salutory to Innovation to investment to technology to anything remotely like that and so the idea of short-term pain it better be really really shortterm the American people do not have patience for this and if the and if if if it goes sideways then what you're going to get is a populist revolt on the left and a populist revolt on the right that is going to take down everybody who is even remotely connected with this idea of free market capitalism and so I I think that one of the dangers in in sort of attempting to manipulate the economy this way is that we're saying okay we're going to we're going to try these kind of methodologies of government control in which we rejigger the world economy in this way and that way and then we'll magic our way out of it with with stable coin and AI maybe or maybe the best way to do this would actually be to allow the thing to thrive that has always thrived In America which is lower the regulations let people innovate let people fail let people succeed get the hell out of the way and yes actually do the things that you need to do in cutting government debt by doing the hard things and and the only way you're going to able to do all those things is through continued succcess not paying to get to some long-term gain it's got to be entrepreneurship and there are some subfactors of it in order to have a vibrant entrepreneurial Community you need to have immigration that's why I asked Trump on this thing on this program can we get green cards can we get people who have degrees here especially coming out of Stanford to stay in the country he said yes he'd staple them on the degrees great the next thing is getting leaan out and ending the wrath of Lina Khan we need m&a because when you have m&a the the companies get bigger the fact that YouTube and Android and AdSense were purchased by Google made it into the massive success it is on a global basis today and the fact that meta was able to buy things she may not like it when these companies get too powerful but what Jack ma what happened to Jack ma is the reason freeberg that I don't believe a dictator will ever compete with our C country if we stay entrepreneurial and not socialist socialism is a culde sec as you're saying Ben and it might work for a short period of time but then someone like Xi Jinping is going to do what dictators do which is implode he saw Jack ma get popular he sent them to get re-educated and do some painting and he took up oil painting he got rid of every educational company and pull up the chart of Chinese investment Nick if you have it boom it just got smashed and this is what dictators do they do what Putin did he invades Ukraine his economy goes off the rails and this is what xiin Ping do always imp me a step ladder to get off your soap box so I can ask Ben a question Ben when you said that in a recession definitely not that's exactly right how come I have a passion for something you guys have to give me a hard time you go on your passionate rantt signaling eightball what do you do you just shake it and some stupid some stupid statement Ben AG American exceptionalism M Ben and I that's it I'm leaving the the program Ben and I are let me rant against dictators for a minute my Kudos go ahead Ben okay you should just go rant about the Trump Administration and get your cabinet position go ahead Ben when you talk about in a recession they go after tech companies what can you just explain that more just explain that I'm not sure I understood that totally okay so so there there there's a recession and president Trump just the way that people tend to think of politics is is not on a granular level they tend to see it on sort of a pixelated level because most people don't engage with politics on a granular level they see a s painting they don't see all the dots they just see Sunday in the park with George right and so when it comes to a recession the image that's going to come to mind for the Trump Administration is that this is an Administration that is extremely friendly to business particularly when it comes to Tech and so whoever is standing next to president Trump if there if there is a serious recession gets nuked gets caught in the Fallout and if that happens then you will see a resurgent left led by a Bernie Sanders wing of the democratic party not a sort of technocratic Obama esque you know as recline abundance liberalism wi you're going to get a a urgent Bernie Bernie ISM on the left that basically says these rich people screwed you in order to get ahead you can feel it because you're feeling the recession they're still Rich you're still poor and and so what you really need is a complete rejiggering of the American economy along the lines of fairness and you're going to see something similar happen on the right by the way so my friend man ketti who is the the former editor of the the Washington Free Beacon I believe he he has a great point about presidential elections he makes the point that candidates don't become president unless they they run against their own party uh that that it is in order to actually capture the imagination of the American people you almost always have to run inside your own party against your own parties you saw this most obviously with President Trump but this was clearly true with Barack Obama it it was true to a certain extent uh with with George W bush even who ran a compassionate conservative campaign against the sort of hard-hearted Gingrich Dole Republicans it's Clinton Clint Clinton for sure did this so I I think it's a great point because then you have to start thinking okay look at the we're turning the right side of the aisle now let's say that you have a politician on the right side of the aisle what does he run against in the TR because Trump has obviously taken command tremendous command of the Republican base and the Republican party what is there to run against well if there's an economic downturn do you think that they're going to run against Trump being not capitalist enough or do they think they're going to run against Trump being too capitalist too friendly exactly and that's how you get a populist Uprising on the right and what you end up with is a horseshoe Theory politics where both parties are in favor of right both parties are in favor of Lena Khan and by the way this is not a rarity I mean I I think I think I think that president is is an amazingly brilliant guy he has also expressed kind of public support for Lena Khan from time to time right and that's inside the Republican party and on the left obviously there's tremendous support for Lena Khan so if what we're saying here is one of the things we need is not Lena Khan we should be very careful not to step on the rake and and then the thing that hits you in the face is Lena Khan right yeah right and this is why I said my contrarian bet for this year was this rise in uh socialist policy and the response to some of the actions the administration might take but how do we avoid making the bottom half of society feel included in all this wealth generation Etc like what what is the plan here is it Universal Health Care is it lowering their taxes I mean the administration says no taxes for people under 150k we have to give something to the working man and woman of this country the people who feel that they can't get rich who can't get to the middle class does anybody here have a suggestion for that I mean I do I actually do have a suggestion and it's it's actually shockingly easy president Trump has a has a visceral connection to blue collar workers in this country clearly has a visceral connection he should stop preaching that blue collar workers are getting screwed and start preaching that they're succeeding because it's actually true truth okay yes yes I mean I think that the the the FIB the politicians always make Bank on is the idea that for example the middle class in America is completely dissolved that is not statistically true the middle class has turned into the upper middle class okay and and actually all Americans I say this on my show all the time people have this again this sort of eyed view of the 1950s which again was a historical outlier because the rest of the world didn't exist it been destroyed but they also have this bizarre idea that that you were better off to be 30 years old in 1980 than you are to be 30 years old in 2025 and all I can say is in 1980 the only dude with a cell phone was Gordon Gecko and he was a shoe box and he was holding it to his head okay the reality is that everything in your life is better in 2025 on a material economic level than it was in 1980 and the the lie that politicians tell in order to gain power is they say you're you're getting screwed somebody is screwing you I can unscrew the screwing and and so there's there's this constant sort of Race To The Bottom in terms of this rhetoric and what you end up with is in the end what can I promise you that that I can then blame somebody else for not having fulfilled the promise president Trump I think could avoid that because of this unique connection that he has with bluecollar people where he could say listen we're all on the same side here right what we're doing here is innovation I thought the most important line that I heard from president Trump during his his victory speech the night that he won was he when he said to Elon and it was kind of a throw line when he said we love our Geniuses he said we love our Geniuses and I thought yes that's the thing we need celebrate success celebrate entrepreneur and this could be you and and not and we're going to have hiring programs you as Mark andreon has talked about we need to have hiring programs that are that are specifically designed to find the best people not just abroad but also in the United States who might be under service in in rural areas of the country or in Blue Collar areas of the country find the next JD Vans find the next guy who really needs you know that that hand up like all those things can be done a rising tide will lift all [ __ ] but this is the problem with the short-term pain plan Americans have a long memory and when it comes to politics I think this happened with the Biden Administration uh poit people their relationship with politicians is sort of like a married couple and and Good married couples you know they kind of talk through the the minor problems that they're having in their marriage and then and then things you know continue to maintain and grow and get better bad married couples what happens is that they sort of ignore that the kind of minor annoyances for years at a time and then something bad happens and the bottom just goes right out and the this is the thing that I'm afraid of for the Trump Administration everybody's willing to ignore the things that are kind of mildly annoying like penguins at the White House or whatever uh up until the point where there's a serious recession at that point everybody kind of looks around and goes why are we even doing this I think that's exactly what happened with Biden with the Afghanistan withdrawal for example making a mistep is the is the it's why I'm being critical of the tariffs it's not because I want Trump to lose it's because I want Trump to win right I think he's doing too many important things like the stuff that Antonio there too many important things happening to to take to roll the dice on a strategy isn't even being articulated if you're going to make the case for a long-term gain I need to know what the long-term gain is so I can make the case to the American public as to why they should endure the short-term pain you know you're having surgery because after the surgery you're going to feel better but if I say you're having surgery it's going to be some short-term pain you say okay how am I going to feel after the surgery and say well I don't know you know maybe could maybe who knows then why am I having surgery we have so many job openings we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime as you said consumers today can get and live an incredible lifestyle that the rich didn't have in 1980 the car you can buy today can drive itself for 20 30 40K you can buy use Tesla and have this car that's better than any car made in the last 50 years so you got keep a positive then think about generation tool belt you've got all these you know plumbing jobs electrician jobs construction jobs that pay massively hourly wages that are available for people today we have too many job openings today and you never hear Trump say that to your point it's always this like everything's a disaster I'll save you when in fact you don't need saving go ahead free bir I'll answer joff's earlier question about what America can anchor to to attract the rest of the world and I think it's what's been the American story from the beginning which is ambition we pioneered the West we launched the Industrial Revolution we went to space we landed on the moon we had the Manhattan Project we unleashed the information technology Revolution with the development of the transistor the ambition is what's been kind of consumed by China in the last 20 years they've built 30,000 miles of highspeed rail in the next 15 years they're going to add more electricity production capacity than the United States times two has today there's nothing short of ambition coming out of China and it's what we're lacking all of our political gambits all of our debates are all centered around what we're trying to fix that went wrong in the past what we did wrong and what we got to do to make it right and we don't talk at all about the ambition of where we can lead the world to next China's the only one that's doing that and I think that's where we need to kind of have a bit of a important pivot on the global stage if we want to be able to kind of attract partners and also to have Americans think outside of this week where are we headed and I just I don't know I mean I don't know if you guys agree but I just feel like that's one of the the key things that we've kind of lost track of nerk put out a a study just like this is very tactical but it's part and partial of what you and Jason are talking about do you guys know that about 25% of all of our utility workers in America became eligible for retirement between 2017 and 2022 I did not no so most of the people 56% of all utility workers now have less than a decade of experience you know what that's resulted in in 2021 the average Us customer of of an electric utility experiened seven and a half hours of service interruptions and it's just growing uh I think the average plumers age 50 something we can't get people to become plumbers nurk says that 19 States now in the United States can face rolling blackouts during normal Peak conditions if these issues aren't addressed and by the way this is that's a human capital problem but if you multiply that by 10 and 20 and 30 times there was a different tweet I don't know Nick if you could find it that talked about an organization trying to find people to help build nuclear submarines did you guys see this quote where they needed 100,000 people to build nuclear subs in the United States and they could barely find like a few hundred yeah we we need to get better at this stuff I mean the good news is we're we're going to have robots to do this Ben uh you know if I run for president I'm one of the few people here on the Pod who can uh my position is going to be build three new cities with five million homes in each because you know starter homes families can't buy starter homes you ever consider running for office and if you did what would be your platform I mean it would be pretty horrifying to run for office it seems like a terrible job and I think the root age to run for presidents is now in your 70s so I have like three decades to consider it but you know if if I were going to run I I would be running on the basic idea that in this country the only thing that you are promised is is the adventure and and I'm not going to make you promises that I'm not going to lie to you I'm not going to make you promises that I can't keep about how I'm going to fix your life because the truth is I really can't all I can do is help get the obstacles out of the way so you can fix your life and you can make your life better and I can help break the institutions that have a strangle hold on on your future and and there when you're talking about electricians and plumbers the truth is that we have set up an enormous con game that is our higher education system particularly in the liberal arts subsidized by the taxpayer when most jobs that that we're talking about right here do not require a college degree there's so many things that that the Trump Administration should be doing and is doing that again that are great that they could break the strangle hold on some of these things that allow for more opportunity but I think the thing that people really you know the thing that I would say that I I really think that maybe no other politician would say and I can say because I'm not a politician is your future is re in America your future is in your hands it is not in somebody else's hands it is your responsibility it is your responsibility to go out and strive it is your responsibility to go and succeed we want you to be able to to try again if you fail but we want you to go and we want you to try ruged individualism and also and also the you know the the kind of case that that that was being made a little bit earlier about China that that basically China is saying that it can do things the one of the things that that drives me up a wall is when politicians say I created X jobs or or we created X jobs you didn't create a job okay the government does not create jobs the government can take money from people and then give it to other people but it is only entrepreneurs who can create jobs and so the the way that you fight China off is not by the power of a centralized government directing people in a particular direction the way that you fight off China is by unleashing the collective knowledge wisdom and ambition of the American people on an individual level to go out and do all of these unbelievable things and that that would be the promise that I'd make to the American people is I'll get everybody the hell out of your way so you can succeed that that would be the only thing I I promise guys we got um breaking news here it turns out the T more reciprocal tariffs have dropped look at this complaining about the docket jcal has put a 500% reciprocal to on that tariff on that purchasing dogs from a breeders is now 100% tariff freedberg oh that's pretty that's pretty stiff and chamath has put one on Laura Piana slippers yeah too many people have them 200% tariff and uh oh looks like Ben shapira got in on it having Candace Owens on your podcast is now at 200% Ben what are you doing here guys unkind wait what's the Palmer lucky one can you can you read that lucky has put a thousand this is the biggest one that just dropped th% tariff I'm working with jcal for chamath poopa chairman dictator wait I have to do you want to hear about oh would you like to do a little memory L we got so much show here I'm trying to get this out but okay by way I created a a poly Market on GDP oh annualized GDP growth in Q3 of this year being below five negative five per. negative five% yeah that's brutal check it out on Market what's the probability of that happening make your bets oh make your Bets with our partner poly Market chamath do you want to do Victory lab we're to wrap here what do you want to do well I actually think it's fun because we're going to kick off a different poly market around this because I think it's interesting so the thing that we haven't talked about is with all of the tariffs with all of the financing questions with all of the recession questions shortterm rates long-term rates the one thing that we haven't sufficiently talked about it's not really in the Press but needs to be talked about is there is a tremendous amount of corporate debt that supports these businesses today and you would say well if long-term rates go down there's no real risk but the Tariff picture actually impacts revenues right and the problem with that is that there's a lot of companies that have debt covenants tied to revenue and iida and so this is what I spoke about at the beginning of January which is the one risk that is uncontrollable is what happens to corporate debt and could we see a wave of defaults and a wave of action Nick you may want to just play the clip and we can talk about what we can do about this this was my pick for the best investment idea oh go all right here we go from what do you got let me preface this by saying that this is a pick that 92 times out of a 100 goes to absolute zero and six out of the remaining eight times you make 10 extra money and then the final two times you make anywhere between a 100 to a th extra money this is a loser trade but I would be long CDs so what am I buying I am buying insurance I'm buying Insurance using credit default swaps I'm buying what's called protection that there is no default event in 2025 I would like a little bit of an insurance policy in 2025 so that the men and the women that we have voted in have the chance to do their work in peace I think that there is a small chance of some volatility next year I hope it doesn't happen I hope that this trade loses money but if it hits it will be the best performing asset of 2025 and I just want to be clear this is not something I think will happen it's not something I want to happen but I do think that if you look back in terms of just the tonnage of dollarars you can can make and the massive risk asymmetry that it presents to you when you look at the concentration of the S&P when you look at just the total gross amount of debt that we have when you look at rate spiking all of these things say having a little Insurance may not be a bad thing it has hit Nick you can show the CDs graph so this thing for every billion dollars of risk you would have put on every billion dollars that you put on would have cost you about a million dollar and that million dollars would have made you about $7 million in about three months did you put it on I'm not going to comment on my my trades Jason oh okay but weal we talked about it off air already but if you did put it on does that mean you're taking us all to Italy this summer no what's happening here are you getting a boat for us to record from the Allin yacht no but there may be some boats for sale if this trade keeps going this way oh why is this important the CDs actually represents the structural risk in the United States private economy in the corporate economy so Nick if you just put it back on so when you see these spreads blowing out this is actually a very important warning sign and this is actually a thing that I think Scott understands well Howard understands well I think they'll translate this to the president if I have an opportunity to explain it I will but this is a really important Market to pay attention to this is what was the canary and the coal mine for the great financial crisis this was the stuff that showed us that there was a big default event happening in the mortgage side of the market but then that spilled over to the broader economy and so the Tariff picture and the recession picture will get played out in this chart and I think it's something that folks can and should probably pay tremendous attention to because I think now that this trade is in the money the question is I don't think we want this to happen that one Sigma two Sigma event where all of a sudden this trade returns a THX is really bad well you know let's keep our eye on the markets and uh as of the taping here we're down about 5% across the boards and Ben you're excellent you should come back yeah well done Ben you fit right we're in we're in Florida are you we're doing an event in Miami at the end of the month should yeah that'd be fun let's do it you want to come to Miami and hang out we've got like this nightclub we're doing a stage we got the track side of Formula One Ben's got a Ben's got a table out 11 it's got his name on Ben Shapiro to live we're going to live stop okay sorry sorry I don't know I don't know which strip club is sponsoring all in this trip but we'll figure it out that was awesome Ben thanks for doing that thanks guys that's a blast wa jcal take us out take us out this is my favorite with Ben Ben's like and you know there's security issues in Ukraine and you have security issues as well that's why you should use Lifeline man you are the master of the fcking segue I have never I thought I was good ped chapiro was like and of course we have the tariffs and that's going down but you know what won't go down if you buy gold buy your gold bullion at goldb on.org you are [ __ ] great at this is it true 100 million in revenue for daily wire is that true n figures actually last year was 2 220 oh my God 220 what's going on I saw some headline you're going bankrupt how you going bankrupt with 220 we're not going bankrupt yeah not going some restructuring actually Ben now that you saw what's happening with Newsmax I mean any thoughts to maybe brazing some capital yeah I mean it has it has let's just put it has crossed our minds yes for sure you're making 50 times the revenue of Truth social congratulations but actually what do you think when you see the this Newsmax thing trade like this I mean it's incredible yeah what is it saying do you think I mean I I think it's saying a couple of things I mean one it's saying obviously look I I think the PE ratios on on the Newsmax trade are are you know ridiculous in in the sense that it's going to revert back to something closer to normaly I think that the it was supposed to trade at 10 bucks and it came out at 14 it spoke to like 240 so it's more like GameStop than anything else there a lot of retail traders who are fans of Newsmax who bought the stock and then it leapt and I think it was today back down in the 40s something like that it'll end up being you know total market cap will probably be somewhere when it when it lands in like the two to three Bill range somewhere three to four Bill something like that um I I think what it says is that you know the the stock market in in the short term is a voting machine and in the long term it is a weighing machine and I think that uh you know when when you when you look at at stocks that have name brand recognition uh then you're going to get a lot of voting in the early going and then it's a question of whether you can keep that up so it turns into weighing right fair enough 39 million in uh quarterly Revenue so they're at1 150 $160 million a year and their valuation right now I don't have the market cap here but what did it Peak out at 304 billion or something oh no when it when it peaked it Peak above 20 bill yeah the market cap went to 170 bucks or 200 bucks 240 bucks 245s yesterday yeah or two days ago you know G something weird going on there okay uh all right well the Allin and um dailywire merger and IPL coming soon the ticker symbol is all Deli in wire all in Deli in wire the merger is complete and we'll see you all next time love you all in well done thanks guys let your winners ride Rainman David and instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love [Music] youen besties that's my dog taking your [Music] driveway oh man myit meet me we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz all this useless it's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release [Music] somehow we need to get [Music] mer going [Music]