You can listen to the Trump’s Big Week: Middle East Trip, China Deal, Pharma EO, “Big, Beautiful Bill” with Ben Shapiro using Speak’s shareable media player:
Trump’s Big Week: Middle East Trip, China Deal, Pharma EO, “Big, Beautiful Bill” with Ben Shapiro Podcast Episode Description
(0:00) The Besties welcome Ben Shapiro!
(1:53) A Bestie apology to Phil Hellmuth, All-In Poker Tournament
(7:58) Trump’s majorly consequential Middle East trip: Saudi, Qatar, Iran, and his vision for a “New Middle East”
(35:18) US-China deal: is the tide turning on tariffs?
(46:33) GOP divided over “Big, Beautiful Bill” due to its impact on our debt spiral
(1:18:48) Science Corner: Montana bans cell-based meat, joining Florida and others
(1:24:31) Trump’s EO on pharma prices: role of PBMs, is this too much government intervention?
Follow Ben Shapiro:
https://x.com/benshapiro
Follow the besties:
https://x.com/chamath
https://x.com/Jason
https://x.com/DavidSacks
https://x.com/friedberg
Follow on X:
https://x.com/theallinpod
Follow on Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod
Follow on TikTok:
@theallinpod
Follow on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod
Intro Music Credit:
https://rb.gy/tppkzl
https://x.com/yung_spielburg
Intro Video Credit:
https://x.com/TheZachEffect
Referenced in the show:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-secures-historic-1-2-trillion-economic-commitment-in-qatar
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-secures-historic-600-billion-investment-commitment-in-saudi-arabia
https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/05/in-riyadh-president-trump-charts-the-course-for-a-prosperous-future-in-the-middle-east
https://www.semafor.com/article/05/16/2025/qatar-commits-more-than-200-billion-in-us-investment
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/13/trump-saudi-investment-speech.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/13/trump-says-us-will-remove-all-sanctions-on-syria.html
https://www.reuters.com/world/what-have-china-united-states-agreed-geneva-2025-05-12
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/02/politics/donald-trump-dictators-kim-jong-un-vladimir-putin
https://newrepublic.com/post/185836/trump-brags-dictators-orban-debate-harris
https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/US30Y
https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2025/05/14/congress/the-titanic-johnson-predicts-houses-big-beautiful-reconciliation-bill-will-sink-in-the-senate-00348310
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/opinion/josh-hawley-dont-cut-medicaid.html
https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/05/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-announces-actions-to-put-american-patients-first-by-lowering-drug-prices-and-stopping-foreign-free-riding-on-american-pharmaceutical-innovation/
This interactive media player was created automatically by Speak. Want to generate intelligent media players yourself? Sign up for Speak!
Trump’s Big Week: Middle East Trip, China Deal, Pharma EO, “Big, Beautiful Bill” with Ben Shapiro Podcast Episode Top Keywords
Trump’s Big Week: Middle East Trip, China Deal, Pharma EO, “Big, Beautiful Bill” with Ben Shapiro Podcast Episode Summary
In this episode of the All In podcast, the hosts, including Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, and David Friedberg, are joined by Ben Shapiro to discuss a range of topics, primarily focusing on former President Trump’s recent Middle East trip. The discussion highlights Trump’s success in securing significant investments from Saudi Arabia, including a $600 billion deal, with $140 billion allocated for a defense partnership. The conversation also touches on the broader implications of these deals for U.S. foreign policy and economic strategy.
The episode delves into the potential impact of these deals on American businesses, emphasizing the importance of regulatory parity to ensure U.S. companies can compete fairly in foreign markets. The hosts discuss the challenges of maintaining economic stability and the need for strategic trade negotiations, particularly with China, to reset global trade dynamics.
A recurring theme is the necessity for the U.S. to monetize its assets and maintain technical and political supremacy to avoid becoming a second-tier country. The hosts also address domestic issues, such as the executive order signed by Trump to reduce drug prices and the ongoing political gamesmanship in Washington, which they argue hinders meaningful fiscal reform.
Actionable insights from the episode include the importance of strategic economic alliances, the need for regulatory reforms to facilitate international business, and the potential benefits of cutting unnecessary government spending to foster economic growth. The overall message is one of cautious optimism about the potential for these international deals to bolster the U.S. economy, provided they are managed effectively and strategically.
This summary was created automatically by Speak. Want to transcribe, analyze and summarize yourself? Sign up for Speak!
Trump’s Big Week: Middle East Trip, China Deal, Pharma EO, “Big, Beautiful Bill” with Ben Shapiro Podcast Episode Transcript (Unedited)
Speaker: 0
00:00
Ai, everybody. Today on the All In podcast, we’re joined by our friend Meh Shah, and we have a full docket including Trump’s trip to The Middle East, the executive order on arya benefits. We talk a little bit about mock meat being banned in Montana, and Friedberg is really upset. He drops a dyspraxia on the tax bill being supported by Republicans.
Speaker: 0
00:25
All that and more on the number one podcast
Speaker: 1
00:28
in the world. It’s an
Speaker: 0
00:29
all in podcast. Stick with us. One thing I’m trying to figure out, do daily mail stories actually end? Because I’ve scrolled up like seven times.
Speaker: 2
00:38
No, no, no.
Speaker: 3
00:39
The daily mail.
Speaker: 1
00:39
And then
Speaker: 3
00:39
the ai
Speaker: 0
00:40
they never read.
Speaker: 2
00:41
Those guys are like the methamphetamine of clicks. It’s like click crack.
Speaker: 0
00:45
Yeah. They’re like one more paragraph.
Speaker: 2
00:47
Every time I see a daily mail article, I’m like, okay, do I have fifteen minutes here? Because I’m gonna click on one. I’m gonna look at the photos, then I’m gonna go to the right rail. I’m gonna click on
Speaker: 0
00:55
nine other bar. Sai, that’s discratiade.
Speaker: 4
00:57
Yeah. When you
Speaker: 0
00:57
go on the right rail, you’re a true degenerate.
Speaker: 2
00:59
Oh, I love that.
Speaker: 1
01:00
Stay off the right rail. The carousel for hours.
Speaker: 0
01:04
Oh my god.
Speaker: 1
01:04
And they call it the carousel.
Speaker: 5
01:06
My favorite Daily Mail story. One ai, Jared and Ivanka were were over at our house, and the paparazzi were were following them around. They were like, can you give us a tour of the area? So we drove them outside for a hot second, and the paparazzi immediately captured a picture of them on the back of our golf cart, because we’re in Florida, and me and my son in the front, and the Daily Mail it was Daily Mail paparazzi.
Speaker: 5
01:25
And so the headline was Jared, Ivanka, unnamed ai, and small boy.
Speaker: 1
01:30
Nick Nick finds the Drive. Find that picture in
Speaker: 2
01:33
the ceiling.
Speaker: 1
01:34
Can you cut Nick,
Speaker: 4
01:36
find that picture immediately. Can you cut it in? The
Speaker: 1
01:53
If you wanna come
Speaker: 0
01:54
to our next event, it’s the All In Summit in Los Angeles, Fourth year for All In Summit. Go to allin.com/events to apply.
Speaker: 2
02:03
Hold on one second. Let me do the intro properly.
Speaker: 1
02:05
Yeah. I’m sorry.
Speaker: 3
02:06
Ai don’t
Speaker: 0
02:06
have to do an apology.
Speaker: 1
02:07
Ben, this is gonna be so good right now. You’re gonna feel so uncomfortable. It’s gonna be amazing. Go ahead. It’s gonna be great.
Speaker: 2
02:12
Sai, look, Ben has a heart out in an hour and forty minutes, so we’re gonna get the show started. However, Ben, I we need to take a pause. Jason will explain what happened last week. He’s gonna issue a formal apology. If that formal apology is not good enough, I will step in over to you, Jason.
Speaker: 4
02:27
Okay.
Speaker: 0
02:30
We, the members of the All In podcast, including Sharmoth Palihapitiya and myself, Jason Kalakanis, would like to formally and respectfully apologize to Poker Legend Phil Hellmuth for our previous comments about his relationship with Hollywood Actor, Timothee Chalamet and the Los Angeles celebrity community more generally. On a previous episode of this podcast, a number of inaccurate, potentially legally actionable statements were made by the host regarding mister Hellmuth.
Speaker: 0
02:53
It was strongly implied on this program that mister Hellmuth was not acquainted with mister Chalamet, and it was further suggested that he had harassed and manhandled the Oscar nominated performer during a social event in Miami, Florida. This was a flagrant misrepresentation of the facts for which we are sorry.
Speaker: 0
03:09
We here at All In are committed to journalistic responsibility and integrity, and we hope to use this time to correct the record. In fact, as a noted bon vivant and publicly visible representative of the gaming community, Mr. Hellmuth is acquainted with many celebrities from the worlds of film, television, athletics, business modeling, finance, and beyond.
Speaker: 0
03:25
The list of celeb celebrity friends is far too vast to list here in its entirety, but we have prepared this section we feel demonstrates how his overwhelming popularity among this demographic. Matt Damon, Steve Martin, Charles Barkley, Bill Clinton, Khloe Kardashian, Meh. Beast, the guy from Billions, Tiger Woods, Mario Lopez, Drake, and of course, Jay Z.
Speaker: 0
03:49
Once again, we here at All In regret the error. We should publicly apologize to mister Helmuth and recommit ourselves to truth and accuracy in reporting. Thank you.
Speaker: 2
03:58
Jason, that was great. I would just like to add a couple things. Phil is my best friend, has been for a very long time. I love him. He does have a lot of friends, and he opens his Rolodex to us. And so to the extent that Phil was hurt, because he was a little bit hurt last week, because we were ribbing him. We rib him a lot.
Speaker: 2
04:19
We make jokes in the group chat a lot, but it’s because we enjoy it. He enjoys it. But I think the way that we said it really hurt his feelings. So Philly, I love you. We love you.
Speaker: 1
04:29
We love you, Phil. We’re sorry. Sorry for that.
Speaker: 0
04:32
We Ai specifically ram sorry ai to be honest, I probably started the whole thing and got everybody yeah. We we just ai and have
Speaker: 2
04:40
fun with
Speaker: 0
04:41
you, Phil. Sorry. We love you.
Speaker: 1
04:42
Love you, Phil. Ai called you a panda eating eating bamboo.
Speaker: 4
04:45
And I
Speaker: 2
04:46
did not mean to say that you put your meat hooks into Timothy Chalamet.
Speaker: 0
04:50
And I didn’t mean to say that you took credit for and, you know, didn’t have a major contribution to the All In podcast obviously.
Speaker: 2
04:57
But Phil, honestly, you’re the best. You’ve been really instrumental in a lot of these important relationships that have joined our group. So thank you and we love you and let’s keep going, okay?
Speaker: 0
05:07
Yes, absolutely. And we wish you well in the world series of poker.
Speaker: 1
05:11
Go get them. Hope you hit.
Speaker: 0
05:12
Go get them world’s greatest. Seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, who knows? What are you guys doing now?
Speaker: 1
05:16
I’m getting it.
Speaker: 2
05:16
Is he
Speaker: 1
05:17
not playing with here? Is he is he skipping? He’s not playing in the main event. He’s not playing
Speaker: 2
05:20
the main. He’s not playing the main because the WSOPs are ridiculous in how they set up these tournaments. It’s stupid. We will do a better version by the way of the WSOP to announce this. We will be doing an event during the f one in Las Vegas where we will be launching our poker tournaments. Oh.
Speaker: 2
05:39
So for those of you who would like to have some quality ai class poker tournaments and some ridiculous cash games
Speaker: 1
05:46
Oh. Oh.
Speaker: 2
05:47
Let us know late November, guys. Book it. Make sure you got five, six days where you can pretend you have COVID. Get out of your job and don’t want space.
Speaker: 0
05:57
What about you, Ben? Do you like to, gamble? You ever played the horses, the ponies?
Speaker: 5
06:00
I can’t say that I’ve been big on the gambling. It hasn’t worked out well for me. I I have I have an an addiction. So Ai wouldn’t want that to get out of control, you know.
Speaker: 0
06:09
Alright. Well, we’ll, we will absolutely take advantage of your addiction.
Speaker: 2
06:13
Oh, Ben, have you ever Have you ever rolled the dice? Have you ever rolled dice? No?
Speaker: 5
06:17
Sai Ai never rolled dice.
Speaker: 2
06:18
No. Okay. So this is perfect. We have to take okay. Ben, we’re you’re coming to our all in event in Vegas, and I’ll tell you why. You we’ll do something on stage. But more important the dictator
Speaker: 4
06:29
for me
Speaker: 2
06:29
than Ben. Go ahead. More importantly for me, there is an incredible rule in craps where when you have a virgin shooter, somebody who’s never touched the dice Absolutely. I don’t know what it is, but you are the people that go off where you can make millions. Yes. I have seen this 20 times in my gambling life in Las Vegas. I remember I took my father-in-law.
Speaker: 2
06:53
I took my father-in-law and my kids while my wife was pregnant. She was, get out of the house. Ai father-in-law, I took our the three older kids to Vegas. He had never shot dice before. He touched the dice, broke the casino. It it is the most fun game, Meh, I’m telling you.
Speaker: 2
07:09
So you need to come November 22. We’ll make the arrangements. We’ll make sure you get out there. You’ll have a really great time. You’ll do something with us on stage. And And? Ben is gonna touch those little ai, and he’s gonna break the win, and I’m gonna be there to finance it.
Speaker: 2
07:24
Absolutely.
Speaker: 0
07:25
You are gonna get such great parenting and husband advice from Chamath. Ben, all of this dedication you have to your family, we’re gonna teach you a new approach. Just to just off to Vegas and, yeah, take your kids and your father-in-law and leave your pregnant wife at home. She’s she’s got work to do. Ai, everybody.
Speaker: 0
07:42
Welcome back to the All In podcast. Really excited to have Ben Shapiro back on the program. Ai listen to the Ben Shapiro shah. You know about Daily Wire. And, Ben, you’ve been covering this Trump Middle East trip, all week. So let’s get into that as our first topic here.
Speaker: 0
07:58
As everybody knows, Trump was in The Middle East. He secured a huge investment from the Saudis, six hundred billion dollars, a hundred and forty billion for a defense partnership, and MBS said he wants to make it a trillion. Bunch of high profile CEOs joined Ram, including friends
Speaker: 3
08:15
of the
Speaker: 0
08:15
show, Elon and, of course, Dara from Uber, Andy Jassy from Amazon. Who else was there? Alex Karp, Jensen, tons of people, including our, fourth bestie here, David Sacks, was there. He also closed a $200,000,000,000 deal with Qatar or Qatar, which includes 96,000,000,000 from Boeing to send a 60 planes there with an option of 50 more.
Speaker: 0
08:38
And he removed sanctions against Syria, a little controversial, we’ll get into that, to, quote, give them a chance at greatness. He gave a speech at a Saudi US investment forum in Riyadh, where he powerfully outlined his vision for a new Middle East, basically rejecting twenty years of American interventions and forever wars.
Speaker: 0
09:00
And, he gave big credit to a, quote, new generation of leaders, including MBS, for building better societies. Ben, what do you think here? What was your take on the trip? Is this the best Trump? Of all the versions of Trump, this did seem to me to be the best version.
Speaker: 0
09:18
He seemed really comfortable with this category of leader in this region in particular where we’ve Oh,
Speaker: 5
09:25
for sure. I mean, there’s no question about that. Right? I mean, he likes MBS. He obviously likes the the Meh of Qatar. He likes the the folks in in UAE. We’ve known that for a while, and and he’s he’s really signaling a a shift away from the Obama Biden policy toward a lot of these places ai Biden liked to say the word democracy and then immediately divide off from Saudi Arabia on the basis of that and ai MBS and all this kind of stuff, and then try to cut a deal with Iran, for example, at the same exact time, which, of course, pisses off the Saudis.
Speaker: 5
09:51
And Trump is going over there, and he’s in deal making mode. And you can see he’s in deal making mode. And his entire sort of approach to The Middle East is what he said in the speech, commerce above chaos. Right? Let’s do some business here.
Speaker: 5
10:02
And he understands that there are a lot of people in KSA, Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia, and and also in Qatar arya as well, who are really looking to do business. And I think there are a bunch of strategic aspects of this that are really good. One of them, obviously, is driving these places away from Ai.
Speaker: 5
10:15
And the more business ties you have with places like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, the the further away they’re going to get from China. I think you do have to be careful with Qatar in particular, which has some divided priorities, shall we sai. When it comes to terrorism, obviously, Qatar the the case they will make to sort of steel meh what what Qatar says about itself is that they have to have good relations with terrorists so that the west can talk with the terrorists on occasion, to to not steel man the case.
Speaker: 5
10:40
They gave $2,000,000,000 to Hamas over the course of the last several years and have funded the American University systems, the tune of $6,300,000,000, for a country that has a grand total of 2,600,000 citizens. It’s smaller than the state of Connecticut in terms of its citizenship. It spends something like two thirds what China spends on lobbying, which seems, you know, pretty weird.
Speaker: 5
10:56
But with that said, the idea of bringing dollars into The United States, combining on things like AI is what David Sachs has been working on over there. Like, that stuff is all really, really good. The the warning that I’d issued to to president Trump is just make sure that that you have strings attached too.
Speaker: 5
11:11
Meaning, clearly, there are strings attached from the other side when you’re talking about Qatar. So also, The United States should have strings attached. So you mentioned Syria there. If you’re talking about, you know, getting rid of the sanctions on Syria, there’s an argument to be made.
Speaker: 5
11:22
Obviously, Erdogan in in Turkey would love that because, basically, the the the leader of of Syria now, Al Saloni, he changed his name. He’s kinda like the the prince of terrorists. Right? He, like, he he’s the artist formerly known as Al Jawani. Now he’s al Sharai, Ai think he changed his name too. He was Al Qaeda, then he was ISIS, then he’s HDS. He basically works for the Turks.
Speaker: 5
11:40
And so, obviously, the Turks would love for Al Saloni to have sanctions removed. That’s fine. I mean, I think there’s a case to be made for it, but you have to make sure that he actually delivers on the other end of that, which would be getting rid of the terrorists in his country.
Speaker: 0
11:51
What do you think, Ben, about Qatar, Qatar? For people, it’s it’s the same word, just said differently here in the West, and and in their country. Do you think we should have deep ties to them? And is the steel meh argument that their relationship with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood acceptable to you, Ben Shapiro?
Speaker: 0
12:11
Or do you think we should hold the line with them and say, hey. You gotta cut off these relationships if you wanna have a relationship with The United States?
Speaker: 5
12:17
I mean, it seems to me that we have a lot more leverage in in the latter situation, and and Qatar has obviously been paying some $8,000,000,000 to have this airbase on its own territory, but then puts restrictions on how The United States can use that sort of airbase. That airbase was previously located in Saudi.
Speaker: 5
12:32
And and so I you know, it’s it’s my perspective that after October 7, for example, Ai States, under Joe Biden, should have gone to Qatar, which which obviously has a deep relationship with Hamas as proven by the release of that American hostage while president Trump was in the Middle East, which was done at the behest of Qatar, that that probably The United States should have gone to Qatar and said, listen.
Speaker: 5
12:51
The airbase goes away unless all the hostages come out and the Hamas leadership goes into exile, and you avoid the entire war. So there is leverage that can be exerted. I’m I’m not sure that the leverage is being properly exerted on Qatar. Let’s put it this way. Meh more enthusiastic about the ties that president Trump is fostering with Saudi and UAE than I am the ties that he’s fostering with Qatar.
Speaker: 5
13:10
I mean, back in 2017, there was nearly a war between Saudi and UAE and Qatar. I mean, that’s how bad the relations were back in 2017, and president Trump was on the Saudi UAE side of that. So, you know, moving yeah. Let tyler let’s just say trust but verify, I think, would be a much better strategy than just trust. Here’s some stuff.
Speaker: 5
13:26
We’ll hope that you you give us back on back end.
Speaker: 0
13:29
Shamath, let’s go to the business side here. Trump making a lot of deals. Little bit of a brouhaha over a $400,000,000 plan given to Trump. I’m not sure how relevant that is or if he’s even accepted it personally, and and I’m sure you’ve you’ve got some thoughts on that. But what did we see there? I Ai saw Sandeep, our friend, from Grok. One of your investments was there.
Speaker: 0
13:50
We’re seeing a level of investment in collaboration between Saudi, UAE, and America and the West that, hey, let’s face it, we haven’t ever seen. And they do seem to be leaning more towards, I won’t say democracy, but a lot of social reforms and, a lot of women, was pointed out by David Sacks, in the business community there.
Speaker: 0
14:10
I’ve I’ve made a couple of trips there. It seems to have changed on a human rights basis more in the last three or four years than in the last, I guess, twenty. So what’s your take generally on this position Ben has of, hey, better they be doing business with us, and let’s build and foster these relationships as opposed to have them fall into the arms of Russia, North Korea, or Ai.
Speaker: 2
14:30
Let’s just go do a little cleanup on a couple of these things, and I’ll give you my take.
Speaker: 0
14:36
Sure.
Speaker: 2
14:36
First thing is we announced almost $2,000,000,000 deal, 1.7, I think, but it was what it was.
Speaker: 1
14:42
Miss Grock
Speaker: 0
14:43
did a deal. Yeah.
Speaker: 2
14:44
Yeah. For AI inference, we’re starting to build some enormous data centers in Saudi. I’ll get to why Saudi is a critical place to do that, but they’ve been exceptional partners. We are the only inference company in the world with an export license from The United States to do this. So, yeah, it was great.
Speaker: 2
15:01
That’s why Sunny was there and Jonathan Ross, our founder and CEO. So that was that was really big for us. This has been company that Jonathan and I got off the ground ten years ago. It’s been a long, long slog. So, yeah, there’s a lot of commercial activity that happened there.
Speaker: 2
15:18
Our friend Ai Yuko, who was just announced as the head of the commercial plane development group at Boeing, who’s making all the next generation planes. Boeing was there. Kelly York broke. They announced a hundred and $60,000,000,000 deal for Boeings and a bunch of other stuff. Elon announced that Saudi allows Starlink now for maritime and aircraft usage.
Speaker: 2
15:41
He also announced robo taxis are coming to Saudi. So the business community, I think, was quite central to this trip, which is cool. With respect to the plane, just to do some cleanup, this is a gift that is being handled between the Department of Defense and the Department of Defense of Qatar.
Speaker: 2
16:02
If and when that plane does get transferred over, it will then be scanned and retrofitted to military grade spec that then can be used by the then sitting president of The United States. And while people wanna be up in arms, just to be clear, this has happened, and Qatar specifically has done this multiple other occasions. You may dispute the countries.
Speaker: 2
16:30
You may not like the fact that it’s happened, but they’ve they’ve given a plane as a gift to the leader of Iraq, to the then sitting leader of Turkey, to the then sitting leader, I believe, of Yemen. So there are customs, I guess, and again, who am I to judge these customs, but that’s to us may seem excessive or untoward or maybe an attempt to ram, but to them is just actually a sign of deep respect or relationship building.
Speaker: 2
16:58
I think that we should not over judge this thing and let the DOD do their job and it’s a gift to The United States Of America and move on. I don’t think it’s a particularly big deal. What is the big deal? Here is what Trump did that I think is historic. I think the most important thing to recognize is that we, America, has been a global hegemon since World War two.
Speaker: 2
17:21
But I think that what we did was we took our eye off the ball and over the last twenty years and particularly the last seventeen, we have seen China slowly erode our global influence through an initiative that they frankly were very open and honest about and branded called Belt and Road.
Speaker: 2
17:41
And in Belt and Road one point o, what China did was use the balance sheet of China to invest incredibly aggressively and thoughtfully in all these critical geographies of the world, Southeast Asia, The Middle East, and Africa. Specifically in The Middle East and specifically between Saudi and Qatar, China, I think, has invested about $200,000,000,000 over the last fifteen years. What does that do?
Speaker: 2
18:09
It allows them to exert influence and economic cooperation, hard power and soft power. Right? In one week, the sitting president of The United States announced $2,000,000,000,000 of investment from those countries into The United States. What does that effectively do? I think what that effectively does is say that The Middle East is turning a page, that they are beyond these regional conflicts, that they sana thrive as a society, and that they are 100% aligned with The United States.
Speaker: 2
18:47
How do you know that? Because I don’t think that there’s another $2,000,000,000,000 of deals to be done with any other country other than America. That’s number one. And then number two, the reciprocation of how American companies are investing in that region is to the tune of several hundred billion dollars. Now why is that region critical?
Speaker: 2
19:06
It’s critical for two things. The first is that when you draw a thousand mile radius around Saudi Arabia, you touch 4,000,000,000 human beings. Four. Half the global population is within a thousand mile radius of Saudi. And so if you can establish cooperation and strategic alignment with that area, it is an incredibly important thing to do.
Speaker: 2
19:33
The Saudi ai, as an example, is thousands and thousands of miles. These are all these huge strategic things that we’ve known in the context of other conflicts and other geopolitical things that we’ve done for decades. But what Trump basically did was clean the slate. He wiped the floor with all this neo con establishment nonsense.
Speaker: 2
19:53
That’s what his speech did, which we can talk about in a second. But he created and forged an economic alliance that I think is going to be very difficult for any other country to undo. That is what I sai, dollars 2,000,000,000,000. That is an enormous bet for country to make on with another country.
Speaker: 2
20:12
And I think the fact that he did that with Saudi and Qatar and UAE speaks a lot to a really important strategy.
Speaker: 0
20:20
Freyberg, your thoughts on this trip and the growing and deepening relationship between UAE, Saudi, and The United States, and apparently, Qatar as well.
Speaker: 1
20:32
I think the biggest moment was the speech that Trump gave. It underscored, I think, a really important narrative shift for me. This was a powerful embrace of Saudi Qatar, of their choices, their way of life, their way of being. Basically showing, I would say, respect to those peoples without judgment, which I think is quite different from leadership of the past.
Speaker: 1
20:57
I’ll just highlight the mainstream media narrative is, oh ai gosh. Trump goes to Russia. Trump goes to China. He goes to North Korea. He goes to Saudi.
Speaker: 1
21:04
He embraces dictators. So the narrative has been that these individuals in leadership positions in these countries are dictators, and Trump embraces dictators. He loves Xi. He loves Putin. He loves Kim Jong Un. He loves MBS. That’s a bad thing.
Speaker: 1
21:21
Because the liberal view, and I would say largely the American view in the past has been that there’s right and there’s wrong. There’s our way of governing and then there’s the other way of governing. And the other way of governing is always wrong. That our form of American democracy is the only model that is ai. And all the others have to be wrong.
Speaker: 1
21:44
And meh, that’s a colonial mindset is what he’s highlighting in the speech. He’s saying that the point of view that all others are wrong means that they should come around to our point of view, our model of democracy, our model of governing. And in the speech, he basically underscored that that’s not really the case anymore.
Speaker: 1
22:03
We are no longer going to be colonizers where we are going to enforce our view of government on the rest of the world and say this is the only good path. But there are other paths and we can respect them. We can work together sai long as we aren’t harming one another, so long as terrorism goes away, which he underscored in his speech has gone away.
Speaker: 1
22:23
And by the way, I’m not trying to highlight or kind of prop Trump up for the speech vatsal. But I I do think that this underscores a shift in the political viewpoint that has now come to power in Meh. That, you know, we are no longer gonna have this kind of moral or social political framework that says it’s our way or the highway, but we are now going to go to folks like Xi, like North Korea, like China, and say we can respect your way of living.
Speaker: 1
22:49
We can respect your way of governing, and we can have partnership and continue to build a world together without saying that if you don’t follow our path, we’re never gonna be true partners. So for me, the biggest thing that came out of this whole visit was that shift in narrative that I think really is different than what we’ve seen in the past.
Speaker: 1
23:07
And it counters a lot of how the mainstream media has kind of, you know, framed his, quote, embrace of, you know, differing ways of governance.
Speaker: 0
23:18
Ben, this was obviously a Republican position as well. You know, just we’re going to have a hard line on human rights and democracy. And in fact, the entire Republican position in terms of and globalist, Clinton too was, Hey, let’s embrace Ai, and we will lean them towards democracy. That obviously didn’t happen.
Speaker: 0
23:40
They did build a vibrant economy and took 400, five hundred million people out of poverty into a middle class. But here we’re seeing something different. You know, I’ve speak a lot of time in the region, maybe four or five trips in the last couple of years. Last couple of times Sai was there, women doing business, dancing, music, and now there’s alcohol in The kingdom in some select locations. There’s a casino coming to UAE.
Speaker: 0
24:03
We’re actually seeing maybe this strategy of less judgment, more engagement actually result in more modernization. So what’s your take on this?
Speaker: 5
24:13
I mean, I think that one one of the things that’s happened in the media coverage of president Trump’s speech is is this sort of false binary that isn’t really what’s going on. So it was sort of posited as neoconism versus isolationism, and he mentioned both of those sorts of concepts in in his speech.
Speaker: 5
24:26
But the reality is that I think we should be careful about how we define these terms. What we really mean is that Wilsonian interventionism has been completely rejected by the American people and by president Trump.
Speaker: 1
24:36
Hundred percent.
Speaker: 5
24:36
President Trump is is saying that we are not gonna go into these like, to pretend that president Trump is being isolationist is obviously not true. I mean, he’s literally cutting trillion dollar deals with foreign countries and traveling there and making common bonds with them. It’s the opposite of isolationism in a lot of ways.
Speaker: 5
24:50
It’s a realism. Right? He’s a foreign policy realist who wants to make deals where he can make deals, and he wants to make a deal from America.
Speaker: 0
24:56
Opposite of isolation if they’re doing projects, you know, in the Trump family and the plane. This is the opposite of isolationism.
Speaker: 5
25:04
Right. Exactly. And so I think that that all the debates that are currently happening within sort of the Republican ecosystem are sort of which version of realism are we pursuing. Right? There there’s more hawkish version of realism that suggests that you ought to be more skeptical.
Speaker: 5
25:15
I mean, I think that’s where I am of of, you know, what you want from these countries in addition to the money. And then there’s a sort of more dovish realism that says, you know, basically, as long as the deals go forward, maybe no strings attached. And that’s that’s an interesting debate, and and it depends on sort of what levels of trust you have in various countries.
Speaker: 5
25:30
And, again, I think it differs country to country. How would
Speaker: 1
25:32
you be able to expand?
Speaker: 4
25:33
I wanna
Speaker: 2
25:33
Ben, I wanna build on what you’re saying and just ask a question because I Sai completely agree that that that rejection has all of these downstream consequences. The most interesting consequence for meh, but I would just like your opinion on this is Ram goes there, cuts all these deals, announces all of it.
Speaker: 2
25:50
There’s just an incredible show of force frankly. Ai? Economic force and political ai. And then within one or two days, Iran caves. Now we don’t know what the final contours of that deal are gonna look like, but that also has incredibly important implications to the safety and security, not just of that region, but for everybody.
Speaker: 2
26:09
I don’t know what you thought about just how Yeah.
Speaker: 5
26:10
I mean, again, we’ve seen
Speaker: 2
26:11
that there was a capitulation there.
Speaker: 6
26:12
You know,
Speaker: 5
26:12
so I ai is where, again, I remain pretty skeptical. I I think that that one of the issues that we have when it comes to negotiations with Iran, the sort of phrase that’s been used by Saudi, Israel, UAE with regard to Iran is the Iran has never won a war or lost a peace. So Iran is very good negotiation. They’re they’re quite sophisticated in how these they approach these issues.
Speaker: 5
26:30
And when president Trump says they can’t have a nuclear weapon, that’s all we need to know, all the rest is details. But, actually, when it comes to things like negotiating a nuclear deal, the devil is the details. Because is it going to be JCPOA part two, which is basically you can enrich to civilian levels with a certain level of transparency, but also you get money and the money can be used for terrorism or for ballistic missile development or rebuilding your air defenses.
Speaker: 5
26:50
And what what do those details actually look like? And and, you know, obviously, Qatar is very, very close with the with the Islamic Republic Of Iran, and sai they are they’ve been negotiating again as sort of a representative of Iran in in those negotiations. And so I’m gonna hold off. Let’s just say Ai I’ll be I’ll be I’ll be skeptical until right.
Speaker: 2
27:09
I agree with you. They need to be in the penalty box for some number of years because they have not earned the trust of the world in that they that they can conform to these things, and they’re not gonna do nefarious things once they get access to capital and funds. So to ai point,
Speaker: 5
27:20
Sai think
Speaker: 2
27:21
they have to earn their way out for sure.
Speaker: 5
27:22
That’s right. And I think that when when you look at Saudi Arabia, I think that one of the things that that would would be interesting to see is president Trump said in his speech in Saudi Arabia that he would he would consider it an honor if they would join the Abraham Accords.
Speaker: 5
27:32
His signal accomplishment, obviously, during his first administration was the Abraham Accords. The the the notion that he, again, continued to press forward, that commerce matters more than sort of ideological conflict. Right? That’s why UAE and Israel, for example, now have a pretty solid relationship that’s withstood a lot of the the the stressors that have been created by October 7 and the and the ensuing war.
Speaker: 5
27:51
Yeah. The the question of whether Saudi actually does that is an interesting one. Because if you’re looking for a a a new region in which commerce really does take the four, then obviously UAE, Saudi, they’re they’re very close. I mean, essentially, UAE is a
Speaker: 2
28:05
There’s no Ai don’t think there’s no There’s no distinction. There’s no there’s no better place, I think, in the world right now if you’re trying to find a meh new place to put capital to work than The UAE and then Saudi.
Speaker: 5
28:15
Yeah. No. I mean, I I agree with that. And I think that that, you know, obviously, integrating the region across religious boundaries would be a very, very good thing, and I think president Trump also has an interest in that. So it’ll be interesting to see how things develop from here.
Speaker: 5
28:26
Now I could it’s it’ll be again, I I remain skeptical of sort of the idea that that just commerce alone is going to usher in a new era. I do think that that The United States typically, when it’s when it’s brokering these deals, does put its thumb on the scale in particular ways.
Speaker: 5
28:42
And those ways are not just putting money into KSA or taking money out of KSA, which, again, I’m I’m great with that. I think it’s brilliant what president Trump is doing. I know a number of businesses, obviously, that are working in Riyadh and doing wonderful work in Riyadh, and and I’m I’m I think what MBS has done, transformatively, to KSA is incredible.
Speaker: 5
29:00
If what you’re looking for is a broader sort of regional calm that’s going to last the course of time, what you don’t need is an upsurgent Muslim brotherhood or a resurgent Iran or the rebuilding of terrorist groups that threaten both Saudi Arabia as well as as Israel and other Sunni allies in in the region.
Speaker: 5
29:16
And so, you know, I I think that there are a couple of ways to see what president Trump is doing. One of them is I hope that there’s a step two, Right? Which is, okay. Now Saloni Arabia, we have a great relationship with you. It would be really great if you did join in Abraham Accords, and now you have this very strong regional block that economically is is more interdependent, which is, of course, what he pursued during his first administration.
Speaker: 5
29:36
Or is he moving in a direction? And this is also plausible, where he’s basically saying, listen. Everybody’s sort of on their own. We’re gonna cut independent deals with each one of these nations in bilateral fashion with The United States. And I think it sort of remains to be seen which strategy president Trump is taking, sort of bilateral approach to to relations with each one of these countries individually or whether he’s attempting to forge more of an interdependent regional economic bloc.
Speaker: 0
29:58
Two questions for you, Meh, rapid fire. Abraham Accords was brought up. Will the Saloni sign it? Will MBS sign it? And Trump sort of alluded, hey. They’re gonna do it in their own time. What’s holding it up in your mind? And if they if and when they do sign it, what impact would it have on the region?
Speaker: 0
30:14
Then number two, your thoughts on this Qatar plane kerfuffle and the media sort of obsessing over it. Are they over indexing on it,
Speaker: 5
30:22
or not? So, as far as the Abraham Accords, you know, again, I think that this is a it is a shift in tone for president Trump. Abraham Accords was considered sort of his signal foreign policy accomplishment during term one, and it it it’s my belief if if he’d been reelected in 2020, by February 2021, I think Saudi would have been in the Abraham Accords.
Speaker: 5
30:38
Obviously, one of the obstacles continues to be the war in Gaza, what actually ends up emerging there. But one ironically, one of the things that actually has undermined the the kind of incentive for Sai to join the Abraham Accords is Israel’s complete devastation of all of the proxies of Iran.
Speaker: 5
30:52
So one of the things that was driving Saudi and Israel together was the fact that there was this really giant threat in Iran. And so now it appears, it could be at least plausibly read, that one of the reasons why president Trump is selling a hundred and $50,000,000,000 worth of military hardware to KSA is to provide a defensive barrier against Iran, well, assuming that maybe Iran does end up going nuclear.
Speaker: 5
31:12
So, you know, it what what happens with Iran does have serious ramifications for the possibility of an Abraham Accord including Saudi Arabia. That seems like it’s more distant than it was a couple of years ago, and it may take more time than I think that special envoy Steve Witkoff and and the Trump administration would like it to be.
Speaker: 5
31:29
As far as the as far as the plain kerfuffle, you know, on my show, I said that it looks skeezy, you know, and and I will I will maintain that position. It doesn’t have to be that it’s illegal in order for it not to look particularly good because, of course, the other half of the deal is that once the plane is retrofitted and used by the president for a certain period of years, it then goes to the Trump presidential ai.
Speaker: 5
31:46
And that was one of the conditions of the gifting. And Qatar is quite famous for for putting a lot of money in a lot of various pockets ranging from the attorney I mean, the the current attorney general of The United States, Sai Bondi, was a foreign registered agent for Qatar for a while, being paid by by Qatar to do that sort of lobbying work.
Speaker: 5
32:04
Qatar is pretty famous for for putting its money
Speaker: 4
32:07
Yeah.
Speaker: 5
32:08
In in a variety of pockets.
Speaker: 1
32:09
By the way, just just just to put a a number on that, Qatar, Sovereign Wealth Fund, the QIA, the investment authority, it’s about a half trillion dollars of capital, about 50,000,000,000 of which is invested in US funds. And many of the folks in and around the circles that are associated with the White House obviously have, QIA as an LP or have had funds that they’re affiliated with that have QIA as an LP.
Speaker: 5
32:34
And and and my point about this is that put aside whatever moral qualms, you know, anybody has about this sort of stuff, which, again, you can argue either way. The the the key to me is if you like president Trump’s agenda, the biggest obstacle to president Trump’s agenda there are basically two obstacles.
Speaker: 5
32:47
One is the economy goes south. Right? That’s an obstacle to any president’s agenda. That’s why it’s really important what he’s doing in The Middle East. It’s why it’s important what he’s been doing backing off of the tariff war in a lot of ways. It’s why deregulation, passing the tax cut is important.
Speaker: 5
32:58
All of that’s important. And then the second thing that can really hurt any administration is corruption, and even allegations of corruption can be incredibly damaging. And sai, for example, there’s a crypto bill that was on the floor of the senate, or is about to enter onto the floor of the senate just last speak, and it ended up being killed by Democrats plus a couple of Republicans.
Speaker: 5
33:14
And Democrats, at least publicly, maintained the reason they killed the crypto bill was specifically because of allegations surrounding the Trump family and Trump Coin, Trump Meme Coin, World Liberty Financial, and all this sort of stuff. And so the question listen. As a Trump supporter who raised money for president Trump and campaigned with president Trump and campaigned for president Trump, as as a person what I want is his agenda to be successful.
Speaker: 5
33:35
If an obstacle to that agenda is the optics of a thing like taking a $400,000,000 jet from Qatar, which does amount to the single biggest monetary gift ever given to The United States even if you consider it to just be a gift to The United States generally, not to the the Trump ai personally or anything like that.
Speaker: 5
33:53
Is that is that the kind of thing that harms him in the public mind? And if that ties into a broader narrative that his political opponents are trying to drive, that he is corrupt or the people around him are corrupt, is that a win for him? Right? Just on a practical, efficacious level, is that a win for him? Is that a win for his agenda?
Speaker: 5
34:08
Because the the media coverage this week, it could’ve all been about him doing deals in these various places and bringing money back home to The United States.
Speaker: 0
34:15
Sana unnecessary distraction.
Speaker: 5
34:17
That that’s kinda that’s kinda my view of it
Speaker: 0
34:19
at the very least. The appearance of impropriety
Speaker: 2
34:21
Yeah. I agree with that.
Speaker: 0
34:22
Amongst half the country who doesn’t like him and he’s now tipping into, you know, almost as unpopular as his first term, they’re just gonna weaponize that in the midterms and it’s gonna scuttle the important agenda, Doge, you know, and and getting rid of the things
Speaker: 4
34:36
that I’m
Speaker: 5
34:36
and actually, it breaks down. You know, this is this is the thing that also ties into to the economic problem. Right? The right now, everybody is is basically like, oh, who cares about this kind I think a lot of people. Like, who cares about this kind of stuff? As long as the number goes up into the right, then all this sort of stuff doesn’t matter very much.
Speaker: 5
34:50
If the number starts going down, then you start having all these kind of corruption allegations rise to the surface in a in a new way. Right? Because that that’s what happens with with presidents very often is what you see is there are kind of a bunch of little dents that are in the Yes.
Speaker: 5
35:04
In the vehicle. And then there’s a car ram, and suddenly, you know, all the dents are very evident to the naked eye. And and that’s what I’d like for him to avoid.
Speaker: 0
35:10
What if he loses the midterms and then we start impeachment three, four, and ai? Correct. Investigation three, four, ai. And now we’re back to lawfare and insanity, which nobody wants to be in. Let’s talk about another win. It was a pretty great week objectively for Trump. On Sunday, treasury secretary Bessant announced a trade deal with China in Geneva. The details were basically, here we go, another pause.
Speaker: 0
35:33
Tariffs will go down from a 45% to 30%. Maybe that’s manageable. China’s cutting their tariffs for The US from a 25 to 10%. And they’re sana end this de minimis rule, also known as the ai garbage fashion rule, Ti Meh, Shein, all that kind of stuff. When they drop shift you stuff, that’s under, I think the number’s 800 or so. The market loved the news.
Speaker: 2
35:56
Don’t don’t. Make America dress well again. Don’t do it.
Speaker: 0
36:00
I think this is, like, an important part of this. It’s, like, this, you know, ridiculous garbage fashion. I hate it. The market was up massively, but, you know, the Dow and the Nasdaq are basically flat to slightly negative. Our partners over at Poly Market, you know, have a nice market on the chances of a US recession. That peaked at 66% during the Liberation Day chaos fallout.
Speaker: 0
36:28
And, hey, here we go. Now it’s 38%. So we’re kind of, maybe cleaning up the chaos. He shook the globe, the economic globe, Friedberg. And now maybe, as I think a lot of people have predicted, he found an exit ramp. Maybe that was the plan all along. Maybe it’s four d chess.
Speaker: 0
36:45
Maybe he’s reacting to the market. Maybe all that doesn’t matter, but here we are. Dave Friedberg, when we look back on this whole trade Ram tariff turmoil, what are we gonna look back on this a year from now and think? Was it just a distraction or is it actually gonna create a trillion dollars in tariff revenue and we’re gonna get rid of 150 people paying taxes who make under a hundred $50,000.
Speaker: 0
37:09
What what’s gonna happen with this when we look back on it a year or two from now?
Speaker: 1
37:14
Well, I don’t know where the tariff deals are gonna end up, so we don’t know yet. Right? Yeah.
Speaker: 0
37:19
So we’re asking for a guess. Right?
Speaker: 1
37:20
Yeah. Yeah. And so I I don’t know. I don’t know. Like I said, I think one of the biggest things that needs to happen that is being discussed in these trade deals is regulatory parity, such that US companies can participate evenly in foreign markets. I kind of highlighted a few examples of why it’s challenging for US companies to set up and do business in the local jurisdictions for a lot of our trade partners across multiple industries.
Speaker: 1
37:44
I think that’s being heavily negotiated. So that doesn’t make the headlines. That’s not kind of the top of the news. Everyone talks about the tariff number, the tariff number, the tariff number. But at the end of the day, the access to foreign markets for US companies, you can even think about I mean, a good example for us is a lot of the fines that happen to US tech companies in the EU.
Speaker: 1
38:04
And there are just billions and billions of dollars of fines being paid out of our companies. That’s another form of taxation. The fact that China won’t allow US tech companies to operate, but we allow Chinese tech companies to operate here. So the regulatory parity is kind of the biggest thing that I think needs to kind of be identified in these deals before we have a real sense, Jake, out because this, again, could be a real economic growth driver for American businesses, and that could have a real effect on our GDP.
Speaker: 1
38:31
So that’s the biggest thing I’m looking for versus just the tariff number is parity and access to global markets for US companies. Right. Right.
Speaker: 4
38:39
We know
Speaker: 1
38:39
and and and those are the details of the deals that are gonna take several months. Normally, these are multiyear trade negotiations with, you know, big trade teams that go back and forth over several years to figure these deals out. So to create maximum leverage and accelerate outcomes, it seems like a lot of this trade hype got everyone to the negotiating table.
Speaker: 1
38:59
Now the hard work’s being done to figure out the details of these deals. And hopefully we end up in a better place for American businesses because of it.
Speaker: 0
39:06
Ai, I know where you stand on this. He creates that big pothole crater. Everybody gets excited. It creates a lot of attention and then, maybe the real negotiation starts. So a year from now, when we look back on this, what would success look like for the Trump administration in Chamath Palihapitiya’s mind and assessment?
Speaker: 2
39:24
I think this goes back to what I said at the beginning. I think tariffs have the potential to be the on ramp to our version of Belt and Road. And I think that that is an incredible jujitsu move of what was an exceptionally well executed and methodical program by the Chinese government to cement hard and soft power all around the world ai The United States wasn’t looking and obsessed with cheap garbage that they could buy at Target.
Speaker: 2
39:59
Okay? So this should be a wake up call to us. We don’t need all this cheap nonsense. We can live with fewer things. Those things could be of higher quality, they may be of higher price, but more importantly, we need to make sure that we’re cementing bilateral deals with as many countries in the world and building the next phase of Speak America, of American hegemony.
Speaker: 2
40:26
We need to do it. So the fact that we are negotiating with China, I think is very good. I think that they are a necessary partner of ours, but we can’t take our eye off the ball. The tariffs was a way of ripping the band aid of all this globalist free trade nonsense. And now we need to reset this in a methodical, calm way.
Speaker: 2
40:47
Now some markets we’re not gonna get ai. And in some industries we have some very complicated thinking to do. As an example, which we’ll get to later, the pharma EO is very complicated and very nuanced. Okay? But this is the hard and necessary work.
Speaker: 2
41:03
So my perspective is this is the beginning of Belt and Road two point o. I think we started with a real bang in The Middle East, and I just encourage the administration to go and finish the job and get as many bilateral deals done as possible and reset how important The United States is as a partner.
Speaker: 2
41:22
We always knew it, but we allowed that hard influence and hard power to get frittered away with all kinds of nonsensical idealistic thinking that was just wasteful. And now we just need
Speaker: 4
41:33
to waste
Speaker: 1
41:33
And there
Speaker: 0
41:34
sai also globalists who wanted to make money, right? It’s like easier to make cheap stuff over there and then sell it here. And, it’s harder to make money
Speaker: 2
41:42
I think that was ai. I think that was short term and non strategic thinking by many of those companies. I think that we’ve created dynamics that we can change. We can change the incentives for how consumers consume in The United States. And I think it’s worth thinking about how to do that.
Speaker: 0
41:59
Alright. Well, here is the Poly Arya on tariffs generating greater than 250,000,000,000 in 2025 that we set or Poly Market set. Basically, no chance that that’s gonna happen. So we will sai. I think, everybody coming to the table and Russell Crocs will be betting.
Speaker: 5
42:16
I don’t Ai
Speaker: 2
42:16
don’t even know how you’re gonna settle this, Jason, because what does it mean will tariffs generate? I think it’s a really interesting bet, but the real question is is on the measurement. There is not gonna be some number that OMB or somebody else puts out that says it generated x.
Speaker: 0
42:31
Well, I think Lutnick was saying he was tracking that, but we’ll see. I mean, because if it’s reciprocity and we see us making more money or getting charged less fines to the examples we had earlier, then you could include those in it. But, yeah, it’s it’s a hard it’s a hard bet to settle, but I think people believe it’s not gonna generate a massive amount of revenue.
Speaker: 0
42:50
The relationship with China and this sort of changing concept of consumerism, you think that’s a possibility for Ai? Do meh on Amazon sana an unlimited number of Amazon boxes in their ai bin?
Speaker: 4
43:05
I mean,
Speaker: 5
43:06
I I’m not sure that’s how consumers have ever thought about this sort of ai stuff. I’m, you know, I remember when I was younger, there was, you know, a lot of talk about made in America cars. You know, buy buy buy made in Meh. And and that just kinda failed because it turns out that the American cars just weren’t as good as the stuff that you could get elsewhere.
Speaker: 5
43:19
And it turns out that Americans are both producers and consumers. And, yeah, it’s it’s it’s easy to say don’t buy cheap crap from China, but it turns out a lot of stuff that actually is not all that cheap also was manufactured in China. Hopefully, now it’ll be manufactured in Vietnam or or manufactured in India or in other third party countries.
Speaker: 5
43:36
The idea that we’re gonna be, you know, reshoring all that stuff to The United States. We’re not gonna be making t shirts in The United States. That that’s not a thing. But, you know, I I I do think that ai now, my read is that we it’s too early to tyler. Meaning that this this just reminds me of the old Yiddish joke where the couple isn’t getting along, so they go to the rabbi, and they say, what do we do, rabbi?
Speaker: 5
43:53
He says, I want you to bring a chicken into your house. They bring the chicken in their house, and it still isn’t working, and they go back to the rabbi. He says, I want you to bring a cow in your house. Sai bring a cow in to their house, and they sai, it still isn’t working, rabbi.
Speaker: 5
44:02
It’s just terrible. They they go back to the rabbi. He says, I want you to bring two goats into your house. They do that. They come back.
Speaker: 5
44:07
He the husband sai, this is awful. I can’t handle it. He says, take everything out of your house. So take all the things out of their house. And they’re like, oh my god. This is this is just fantastic because that that’s basically what Trump did here. Right?
Speaker: 5
44:16
He put the chicken and cow and the two goats in the house. I still think he left the chicken. Right? And so it’s it’s kinda it’s gonna be, you know, a question as to how much impact the chicken has. Meaning, the 10% tariff rate that we still have on the rest of the world is, you know, more than quintuple what it was at the very beginning of this process.
Speaker: 5
44:32
I mean, the average tariff rate and not to use, you know, a number that David doesn’t like, but the average tariff rate right now is higher than it’s been anytime since the nineteen thirties. Is that gonna have some carryover effect? I mean, Walmart is already suggesting they’re gonna have to start increasing their prices.
Speaker: 5
44:44
So I don’t think that we’re out of the woods, and I do think that the biggest threat with regards to this sort of stuff is less the tariffs than the feeling of uncertainty for investors as to what comes next. And that’s where the pharmaceutical EO starts to come in or the negotiations over over the tax bill. What actually makes it in? What doesn’t make it in?
Speaker: 5
45:00
When when it comes to, you know, the stuff that makes investors sanguine and one of the reasons why investors are sanguine about Saudi Arabia is because Saudi Arabia is a kingdom, and that kingdom is very wealthy. And that very wealthy kingdom doesn’t have to worry about the next election.
Speaker: 5
45:13
They don’t have to worry about the next policy that that they just have to throw out there for public consumption. Now president Trump, because of the rapid shifts in policy, the the feeling if the if the feeling comes away is we’re now back on a solid path. This was all a tactic, and and we’re hunky dory. Ai. You’re gonna see the markets go up. You’re gonna see more investment and all the rest.
Speaker: 5
45:31
If the feeling basically, more Scott Bryden and fire Peter Navarro into the ocean via catapult would be my advice to the the Trump administration.
Speaker: 0
45:39
And if you do that reasonable, actionable suggestion, Ben. A very reasonable action but predictability. You know, we’re sitting here a couple weeks ago and I was as I was mentioning, I would I know a lot of ecommerce folks, and they were saying layoffs coming. We don’t have predictability. And and the really hard part is how do you invest in a business? You know, you’re running daily ai. It’s a 9 figure business.
Speaker: 0
45:59
You wanna hire people. You know, you need to have advertisers. Many of the advertisers you probably have are somehow related to consumption in America. What’s the first thing they’re gonna pause? They’re gonna pause advertising. Right? Why am I advertising this, you know, mattress?
Speaker: 0
46:13
And why am I, you know, advertising Eight Sleep, the best mattress in the world? I happen to be an investor. I’m a little biased. But why am I gonna market Eight Sleep if I can’t get it to the country or if the price is too high? You know, it’s like it it could it causes all these downstream, issues.
Speaker: 0
46:26
I guess during all of this now, talking about, like, shaking the globe and the and the economy here, Republicans are working hard on the big, beautiful bill. It’s it’s big and it’s beautiful, Ben. I don’t know if you sana get into your Trump dueling Trumps, but it’s a big beautiful bill.
Speaker: 5
46:42
So big. So beautiful. Many people are saying.
Speaker: 0
46:45
And many haters, Nancy Pelosi, nasty woman, she bet on Walmart, bad bet. GOP’s plan is to push this bill via reconciliation so they can void the sana filibuster with 51 votes instead of 60. The Trump bill would extend the twenty seventeen Tax Cuts and Jobs Act through 02/1934. That’s kind of the big piece here is these tax cuts.
Speaker: 0
47:06
And there’s a bunch of campaign stuff ai no taxes on tips or ai, things that Trump promised to, you know, in some cases, swing states like Nevada. Those are, trying to get in there. And an increase on universities endowment tax and the tax foundation. This is a nonprofit that analyzes tax policy.
Speaker: 0
47:24
Estimates that tax cuts would reduce revenues by 4,100,000,000,000.0 over ten years, so 400,000,000,000 a year. And, the bill also aims to cut 1,500,000,000,000.0 in spend over the next decade. Some Republicans think this is weak and are pushing for 2,000,000,000,000 in cuts or more. Notable cuts include a stricter Sai rules, tighter Medicaid caps, and removing taxpayer benefits.
Speaker: 0
47:47
From illegals, gosh, Freeberg, you actually I understand from our group shah, did a deep dive here. And you, I think, are responsible in many ways for bringing the issue of our national debt to the forefront, especially particularly with this administration, Doge, which we give you a lot of credit for, you being a single issue voter for this.
Speaker: 0
48:08
Are you worried about the budget now? We’re we’re a hundred plus days into Trump. Do you think he’s got any chance of cutting the deficit?
Speaker: 1
48:16
I’ll talk about the house tax bill, which I think is, to use your term, JKL, absolute discratiat.
Speaker: 2
48:23
Ai, bill is discratia.
Speaker: 1
48:26
Oh, it’s a bill. It’s a discretion. It is absolute discratia. If you’re an American, you should feel shame that your elected officials are proposing that this is the bill that gets passed, that we vaporize this much money, that we put ourselves this much further in debt, that we do not treat the situation as the fiscal emergency that it is.
Speaker: 1
48:48
The bill ultimately yields no real change in the annual deficit. The annual deficit could climb to $2,500,000,000,000 being added to the federal debt load every single year going forward. In fact, if you look at the treasury yields, the thirty year is now kissing 5%. So The United States has called $37,000,000,000,000 of debt.
Speaker: 1
49:13
At 5%, we’re paying close to $2,000,000,000,000 a year just in interest on our debt as this debt gets refinanced.
Speaker: 0
49:23
Fribourg, do that. Favor for the audience if you could explain why it’s going up, why it’s so high, and what that means
Speaker: 1
49:29
to turn. The debt or the interest rates? The
Speaker: 0
49:31
interest rates. Yeah. Well, the
Speaker: 1
49:32
interest rates are going up because the probability that The US will default on its debt payments, which is what you’re buying when you buy US treasuries. You’re getting the US government to pay you some number of dollars with interest over time. And the market is now demanding that that interest rate be as high as 5% because of this fiscal situation that The United States finds itself in.
Speaker: 1
49:53
We are now burning an additional 2,500,000,000,000 a year adding to our debt load. We are in a fiscal crisis, and we’re not willing to admit it. And I’ve said this from day one that DOGE can only do so meh, And clearly, that’s the case where they’re now talking about sub $300,000,000,000 a year in potential annual savings from Doge action.
Speaker: 1
50:11
At the end of the day, Congress needs to take action. And this bill from Congress doesn’t take much action. I will tell you that if you look across the board, all of these programs are still being proposed to be run at a cost that is well in excess of their pre COVID levels.
Speaker: 1
50:26
And so I would set two guiding principles if I was to be the benevolent dictator of The United States Of America. My guiding principle number one would be that any program that we intend to continue to persist have its budget level cut to pre COVID to 2019 levels. Second would be and if we did that, by the way, we would be in a much better fiscal situation.
Speaker: 1
50:45
The second would be that we add no new programs in the moment. There’s a whole bunch of new shit thrown into this bill as well as increasing the cost and a few cuts here and there. I’ll just highlight a couple that I think are worth noting. You know, there’s a cut in the SNAP program, which is the meh nutrition assistance program. That’s food stamps.
Speaker: 1
51:01
And I talked about this with Brooke Rollins in the interview I did a few weeks ago. You can watch it on YouTube. And we talked a little bit about how this SNAP program has absolutely exploded in size ram 60,000,000,000 a year in 2019 to a hundred and 20,000,000,000 a year today.
Speaker: 1
51:17
So in this budget proposal, they’re actually cutting it back by about 30,000,000,000, so to 90,000,000,000. So it’s still 50% higher than it was pre COVID. And there’s a lot of kind of stories we could go through on what happened during COVID that caused this thing to blow up the way it did.
Speaker: 1
51:33
But political wrangling pulled money out of the government into people’s pockets and that is persisting today. I’m a big believer in cutting taxes. Obviously, I’m probably more libertarian than anyone else on the show or that we’ve ever had on the show. But at the end of the day, you can’t just say, Hey, let’s cut taxes and spend more than we’re making. It doesn’t make sense.
Speaker: 1
51:54
A lot of the stuff’s gonna be exploitable. The tips and overtime exclusions are a way to pander to people to get votes and now keeping your promises on those votes. I think at the end of the day, the tips and overtime rule could invite a lot of gamesmanship and loopholes that will be created and people will wake up and be like, uh-oh.
Speaker: 1
52:10
For example, if I’m an independent contractor, I will enter into a contract with someone that sai, here’s the service I’m providing you for $50. And then there’s an optional tip you can give me at the end. And then I won’t pay taxes on that tip. And I can give you a hundred other examples that this will create an inordinate number of crazy insane loopholes.
Speaker: 1
52:26
The interest on the debt at $1,900,000,000,000 a year equates to 7% of GDP. That means 7¢ of every dollar that moves in every transaction in this country is being used to pay down interest on money we overspent in the past. It has become an absolute crisis. I think that there’s a few folks that should be shout out on this, which is senator Paul and senator Ron Johnson, who both highlighted how ridiculously under impressive the spending cuts are in this bill.
Speaker: 1
52:58
I think we’ve got a lot of work to do. I’m deeply disappointed. I’m scared, and I hope that, that this all gets kind of fixed up and Ai Do
Speaker: 4
53:05
you think
Speaker: 2
53:06
that we should line item out all the new spending irrespective of what it is?
Speaker: 1
53:11
All new spending, line itemed out. That’s rule one. And rule two is all existing programs gotta go back to pre COVID levels. You do those two things, we’re in a great place.
Speaker: 0
53:19
Yeah. And just to put some numbers and some charts behind it, here is the the debt back to Clinton era. Clinton obviously balanced the budget, so you get this nice, flatness there. Clinton added, 392,000,000,000 in eight years. It’s barely noticeable on the chart, $4,050,000,000,000 a year.
Speaker: 0
53:34
Bush, dollars five point four trillion four years, about 1,300,000,000,000.0 a year, Obama, dollars a trillion a year. And then we get to Ram, dollars one point zero, dollars two trillion a year. Suddenly we decided we would double it. Biden, same thing. They added almost exactly the same amount to trillion ai year. And Yeah.
Speaker: 0
53:51
Ai right Trump right now
Speaker: 2
53:53
is taken out.
Speaker: 0
53:53
Ram to do the same.
Speaker: 1
53:54
Yeah. It’s not total dollar amount. It’s percent of GDP that you’re adding. And, you know, right now at at 2 and a half trillion dollars a year of deficit, we’re talking about a deficit to GDP of, like, 8%. Yes. 8% a year. This is ai Argentina. This is, like, insane.
Speaker: 1
54:16
The fact that we don’t treat this like a fiscal emergency and everyone goes up and they tout, oh, we’re gonna make 60,000,000,000 in cuts in Meh. That’s out of $820,000,000,000 of annual spend. You know? Oh, we’re making 30,000,000,000 in cuts in Sai. That’s still 50% higher spend in total than we were in 2019 a few years ago when we didn’t have that much of a problem.
Speaker: 1
54:37
This has become, like, such a reset of expectations. And I worry again that we went into this, I think, in a very optimistic way thinking that this administration was gonna treat things differently. We had Doge. We had alignment on the importance of the budget. Besson has highlighted it. And then it’s kind of back to gamesmanship in DC.
Speaker: 1
54:55
All these representatives from Congress show up and try and get money for their constituents in a way that is not sustainable. We’re not gonna be able to keep this up and we’re not really having the hard and tough conversations we need to be having. And every year, everyone wants to get elected by keeping programs and keeping money flowing that their constituents elected them to do.
Speaker: 1
55:13
And they wanna add new programs sai they can go on CNBC and say, look at this cool new program I stood up. It’s great. This is gonna create the future of America. And meanwhile, there’s no future of America because we’re burning 2 and a half trillion dollars a year.
Speaker: 2
55:24
So would you call this the Bessant wants the three three three plan. You’d call this the three three eight plan?
Speaker: 1
55:30
I don’t know if there’s a three, but, yeah, it’s definitely the eight. This is eight, almost nine.
Speaker: 5
55:37
Yeah. Almost nine. I meh, I think all of this is right. I mean, the the reality is that US debt to GDP ratio is extraordinary already. It’s it’s only going up from here. And the we have to acknowledge here that the Republican majorities in the house and the senate are incredibly narrow.
Speaker: 5
55:53
That for every Ron Johnson who’s saying the right things, you have a Josh Hawley who’s saying the wrong things in Missouri and writing full scale op eds in the New York Times talking about how not a buck should be cut from Medicaid under any circumstances. And this, you know, does run headlong up against the reality, which is that the one one of Trump’s signal changes from the old Republican Party was not just sai change away in terms of foreign policy toward a more realism and less and less, you know, interventionism, but it really was a change away from the Paul Ryan tea party, Republican party as well.
Speaker: 5
56:20
And whenever you think about Paul Ryan on a lot of other issues, Paul Ryan was on your side of this, David, when it came to actually trying to fix That’s right. The fiscal problems with The United States. And I’m old enough to remember the Tea Party when we were out protesting literally in the streets about government overspending as a response to Obamacare, and that’s gone completely by the wayside.
Speaker: 5
56:36
And so when when you’re looking at Republicans today arguing over whether to zero out waste, fraud, and abuse, the problem is not in the end waste, fraud, and abuse. The problem is the programs themselves as they are currently structured. And unless you’re willing to make serious systemic changes to things like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, You’re not gonna solve any of these problems.
Speaker: 5
56:53
And here’s the the sad reality is nobody is willing to do that. So just as we were saying earlier, maybe Americans are addicted to to cheap goods from abroad. Americans are certainly 100% addicted to government sustenance. They are they are absolutely addicted to this. All net taxes in this country are paid by the top quintile, all of them.
Speaker: 5
57:09
Because below the top quintile, you’re getting as much back from the government or more than you are paying into the system. And we are also gaming out to the future, paying away our kids’ fiscal future because of all of this. So, you know, when people ask me what’s gonna happen, I mean, the answer is we’re gonna either wildly inflate our currency or we’re going to go into massive austerity measures, you know, five to ten years from now.
Speaker: 5
57:28
There’s not gonna be a third choice. I mean and so maybe politicians keep kicking it down the road. Maybe that’s what this is. But even the kind of cuts that are that are being talked about by some of the people in congress who I like are not gonna be enough to actually put us back on the right fiscal road.
Speaker: 5
57:41
Even if the Republicans do what they’re talking about with regard to work requirements, for example, on Meh. They’re saying there should be an eighty hour a month work requirement
Speaker: 4
57:49
A month.
Speaker: 5
57:50
If you’re unable a ai. Two months. Work. Well, that’s that’s crazy. That’s crazy. Right? That five hours four hours a weekday, for for, for a month to to get your Medicaid requirement if you’re an able-bodied person in The United States of of working age. You know, that that sort of stuff is not sustainable, but nobody’s actually gonna take that on.
Speaker: 5
58:07
And so the question for president Trump is gonna be, is he willing to actually go to the barricades and not just make the case that the tax cuts have to be maintained, because they absolutely do, but also that Republicans need to get on board with some of these cuts because you’re gonna have a lot of pushback from the purplish Republicans, from from the Josh Halley’s in Missouri and from the Ai Lawlers in New York.
Speaker: 1
58:26
That’s right.
Speaker: 5
58:26
And and all of the people who are afraid they’re gonna lose their seats if there are any cuts.
Speaker: 1
58:30
That’s right. And existential cuts. I mean, it is like an existential crisis that no one’s willing to stand up and highlight just how critical this emergency is. 2 and a half trillion dollars of deficit spending on a $28,000,000,000,000 GDP. Tell me when in history that’s actually worked out at the end of the day except when you’re in some sai, and you’re gonna end up taking over some country and getting all their resources.
Speaker: 5
58:52
And as you mentioned, this actually this sai this has, you know, knock on effects with regard to things like de dollarization. Why are you investing the American dollar if you believe That’s right. Treasury yields. Going to
Speaker: 1
59:01
This is the debt this is the debt debt spiral that we find ourselves in because what happens is people stop owning treasuries when they start to question whether or not thirty years from now, the US government is gonna meet its debt obligations. Even the smallest marginal question of that ai interest rates up 1%, two %. Suddenly, your thirty year treasury yields at 6%, seven %.
Speaker: 1
59:20
And then your interest rates ai, and then your deficit spending ai, and that’s how it becomes a spiral. So now the debt goes up even more than it did the year before. And And then the next year, it goes up even more per year than it did the year before. That’s why it’s called a debt death spiral.
Speaker: 3
59:35
And I
Speaker: 1
59:35
will say that let let me sorry. Let me say one thing. One of the things I’ve heard in a lot of members of cabinet that I’ve met with over the last couple of months is we’ve got all these new sources of revenue. I had an interview with Doug Burgum. He talked about unlocking America’s assets. We’ve got this balance sheet with lots of assets.
Speaker: 1
59:49
We’re gonna do land leases and all sorts of other things. We we met with Lutnick. He’s gonna sell the Trump gold card, the immigration card. We met with Besson. He’s got these ideas on how we’re gonna drive. Everyone’s got great theory on how we’re gonna grow GDP and actually grow government revenue.
Speaker: 1
01:00:03
But until those dollars start to flow in, we have to get our fiscal house in order. We have to cut spending. When those dollars start to flow in, then you can start to speak. But you can’t spend ahead because ai, the cost of the debt and the economics uncertainty is gonna limit our ability to execute on the back end on that revenue generation.
Speaker: 1
01:00:22
And I’m very worried about no one ai of paying enough attention to this. So I just, you know, I feel very passionate having seen this bill that we’re just not on the right track. It’s really it’s really frustrating.
Speaker: 0
01:00:32
Let me pull up a tax chart here, Nick, from the chat and get Chamathia your comments on this, bar chart here, just who’s paying taxes. As you can see, you know, the top 1%, which I think is this panel here, and the top 5% paying the majority of the taxes in the country. Is there any way to increase revenue? And is there any way for politicians to say, hey, let’s cut military?
Speaker: 0
01:00:58
That hasn’t come up yet as a concept, but maybe cut a little bit of military spending and maybe put in some modest austerity measures now Before, as Ben’s pointing out, we get to, you know, Spain and, you know, Greece. I don’t know. What was that? Ten years ago when they had to Portugal and and they had to do, like, intense things.
Speaker: 0
01:01:19
So your your home country, Chamath of Italy. Like, austerity meh, Americans, I don’t think we’ve had to ever face austerity measures, certainly not in our lifetime. So income, taxes, can we get more revenue in? Or is that unrealistic? And then cutting military, maybe on the margins, Chamath?
Speaker: 0
01:01:36
Or do you not see
Speaker: 2
01:01:37
this as a major issue? It’s easy to catastrophize.
Speaker: 4
01:01:40
Okay.
Speaker: 2
01:01:40
I think I think that is easy because I think there’s enough data there. The harder thing, if you’re gonna make a directional bet, is to try to find the nuance. So what is the nuance? The nuance is you can point to all of these countries, but what is singularly different between all of those countries and The United States Of America?
Speaker: 0
01:01:58
Is that a question? It’s entrepreneurship.
Speaker: 2
01:02:00
It’s rhetorical.
Speaker: 4
01:02:01
Okay.
Speaker: 2
01:02:02
The difference is we are the shining city on a hill and every other country is not. And as much as we want to believe that there’s equality, there isn’t. There’s a hierarchy and America is the most important country in the world. Period. Full stop. End of story. What does that give us the ability to do?
Speaker: 2
01:02:18
It gives us very different parameters with which to solve this problem. It gives us, I think, the parameter of time and it gives us the parameter of acceptance from a lot of other foreign governments. Why? Because they need America to also succeed. There’s this very funny quote which is, when you owe the bank a million dollars, it’s your problem, but when you owe the bank a billion dollars, it’s their problem.
Speaker: 2
01:02:42
This is true here. And I think that we have to recognize that the right thing to do is obviously what Ben and Dave are saying. I don’t disagree with that. But if you panic, I think you’re sana start a cascade that is unnecessary. And by moving to a place where you’re all of a sudden trying to cut entitlements incredibly aggressively, I don’t think sets the stage for a thriving American population that then allows this problem to actually be solved.
Speaker: 2
01:03:14
So what is my proposal? I do think we have to monetize the balance sheet of America. I do think we own probably hundred trillion to a hundred and 50,000,000,000,000 of assets. All of us as citizens, we own that. And I do think Explain
Speaker: 0
01:03:33
what those assets are to the people listening because they may not know.
Speaker: 2
01:03:36
So the largest land owner in The United States is The United States Of America. The ability to allow you to drill is given by The United States Of Meh. The ability to do many things.
Speaker: 0
01:03:47
By the way, Chamath, I’ll
Speaker: 1
01:03:48
just give you the numbers from my interview with Bergam. The federal government owns 500,000,000 acres of land, And they have control over 3,200,000,000 acres in the outer continental shelf, which is the land under the ocean around North America. The resource availability in that land, under the water and in the the ai of mainland is in the kind of immeasurable trillions of dollars of value.
Speaker: 1
01:04:16
And their business model, Bergam’s stated business model in the interview I did with him is land leases and royalties. So enter into private partnerships and then participate in the value creation.
Speaker: 2
01:04:26
I’ve talked to Doug about this, so I agree with him. We’re talking about a balance sheet. Again, I said a hundred trillion. You could probably make the case that it’s 2 or 3 or 400,000,000,000,000, but let’s just use a hundred trillion. My point is that our balance sheet is much larger than our debt obligations, number one. Number two, we owe $33,000,000,000,000. It’s as much their problem as our problem.
Speaker: 2
01:04:48
And number three, every country that owns debt does so in part because they need America to be successful so that they themselves can be successful. So I think if you look at all of these interdependencies, the right thing to do is we need to monetize the balance sheet of America much more aggressively than we’ve looked at before.
Speaker: 2
01:05:07
And two, what Dave and Ben said we must do, which is we need to draw a firm line and say no new spending. I completely agree with that idea. But I think if you do both of those two things at once, you have meaningful inflows that can fund a lot of the tax cuts that people sana to propose.
Speaker: 2
01:05:27
It’ll also allow us to show that we have some level of discipline by not overspending in all of these other random pork barrel projects. And I think it allows us to set a path towards this three, three, three plan, just to be clear to everybody what Scott Bessen’s three, three, three plan is it’s
Speaker: 1
01:05:45
Which is also Dalio’s plan.
Speaker: 2
01:05:49
It’s 3% inflation, it’s 3% GDP growth, and it’s a 3% deficit to GDP percentage. And if we do that, that’s the renaissance in The United States mathematically. Okay? We can quibble about the politics but it would be a economic and mathematical renaissance. So that’s what I would do.
Speaker: 2
01:06:09
If this is the best plan that Jason Smith and Mike Crapo can get done between the house and the sana, if this is the best plan, I urge the United States government to figure out how to start aggressively and quickly monetizing our balance sheet.
Speaker: 1
01:06:28
I’ll just I’ll just respond to two things. I’ll match you a couple of you
Speaker: 0
01:06:31
do that. Let me just ask one question. The land we’re talking about here, Friedberg, and the oil, I guess, or the minerals that are under the ocean floor?
Speaker: 2
01:06:40
Everything. Everything.
Speaker: 0
01:06:42
Well, I mean, what else is there under the ocean floor? Ai sort of the question you
Speaker: 5
01:06:46
are asked.
Speaker: 2
01:06:46
Cold earth.
Speaker: 0
01:06:46
Yeah. Zinc. So who’s
Speaker: 1
01:06:49
gonna buy lithium Yeah. Okay.
Speaker: 0
01:06:51
Who is the ai? I think is what we’re all wondering of this land in The United States and for what purpose?
Speaker: 2
01:06:57
The private companies that that would then use those resources to manufacture critical requirements for The United States and other countries who want to buy.
Speaker: 1
01:07:05
And so for example, The US is now the largest exporter of methane. We have four pipelines that go to this facility that I visited with Doug in the interview I did in Louisiana. They liquefy that natural gas, which is methane. They put it on ships. Those ships go to India. They go to Taiwan. They go to Japan.
Speaker: 1
01:07:26
So US companies are selling liquid methane that we’re pulling out of the ground to those countries that they then use to heat their homes and power electricity production. We don’t necessarily need to go back today and say, hey. Let’s cut entitlement programs deeply. We should certainly should make entitlement programs more efficient. We don’t need to.
Speaker: 1
01:07:44
All we have to do is take all the other programs and reset them to COVID or pre COVID levels.
Speaker: 0
01:07:49
So
Speaker: 1
01:07:49
And secondly is get rid of all the new programs. What’s wrong? Okay.
Speaker: 0
01:07:52
So we all agree on the new programs too. No.
Speaker: 1
01:07:54
I know the new ones.
Speaker: 2
01:07:55
No. My wife, she ai texts me. She’s sitting there and she does things to tilt meh, and she says this Saloni. In the serious moment, my wife would have fought last speak. You got
Speaker: 0
01:08:04
ai fight last night? And what was
Speaker: 2
01:08:05
the fight? Ai night. And I just sent her a very quick text that said, I’m really sorry about last ai. And she says, I’ve moved on.
Speaker: 1
01:08:12
Just the point comes from the side
Speaker: 3
01:08:14
of the road.
Speaker: 1
01:08:15
Laughing. So she moved on. Did she send her that text while I was talking about death situation? Bro. It was your last fight with your wife over.
Speaker: 2
01:08:22
Let’s get it
Speaker: 0
01:08:23
all out in the gym.
Speaker: 1
01:08:24
By the way, dude, when when Jamont and his wife when Jamont and his wife get into a
Speaker: 2
01:08:28
fight It’s the worst, bro.
Speaker: 1
01:08:28
It’s the worst that I’ve ever experienced. I was on a plane with them flying back from DC.
Speaker: 0
01:08:32
Oh my
Speaker: 2
01:08:32
God, this fight. Oh my God, so a four hour fight.
Speaker: 3
01:08:36
I saw you talking to the waitress, and you the way you look at the waitress.
Speaker: 2
01:08:41
No. It’s more serious
Speaker: 3
01:08:42
than I.
Speaker: 6
01:08:43
More serious
Speaker: 0
01:08:43
than I. Way
Speaker: 1
01:08:44
more serious than that. And it’s like ai you’re in a, like, in a coffee house or a coffee shop in Europe, and there’s this, like, European couple speaking some language you don’t understand. So at some point, we are
Speaker: 0
01:08:58
thinking about that. Figure out
Speaker: 1
01:09:00
that we can use Yeah.
Speaker: 2
01:09:01
The more you hang out with us, there will be a moment where you will observe me and Nat fighting. It will be a multi hour affair. It is not initiated by me.
Speaker: 1
01:09:08
It’s not
Speaker: 2
01:09:08
how long Ai wanna keep it going.
Speaker: 0
01:09:10
It does end with a passionate lava making from
Speaker: 3
01:09:13
a 12:30 to a 12:36AM. It’s a full of six minutes of
Speaker: 0
01:09:18
a It’s a bolosso
Speaker: 2
01:09:20
chaotic lava making. Honestly, right now, six minutes feels like a long time.
Speaker: 3
01:09:24
And then we all go downstairs and we
Speaker: 0
01:09:26
eat the leftover mangrove. It’s an incredible tradition in Italy. We fight three
Speaker: 5
01:09:31
hours, sai
Speaker: 2
01:09:32
we make a love for
Speaker: 0
01:09:33
four minutes and then we eat the little glass.
Speaker: 2
01:09:34
Okay, look, meh this thing back on
Speaker: 4
01:09:36
track for a second.
Speaker: 2
01:09:36
Let me get back
Speaker: 0
01:09:37
on the rails. Here. Okay. I wanna ask you an important question, Dave, if I may. Are you, as a man of science, who believes in global warming and who cares about the ai,
Speaker: 1
01:09:45
is it a great ai,
Speaker: 0
01:09:46
is what a lot of people are thinking about?
Speaker: 1
01:09:47
Oh, great question.
Speaker: 3
01:09:48
Great question.
Speaker: 4
01:09:49
Is it
Speaker: 0
01:09:49
a great idea for us to rip everything out of the ocean shelf in Alaska and sell all this incredible land we have that’s preserved with nature and trees to foreign governments and people who own our debt? Is this a great idea? Do you have concerns about this versus austerity and maybe not buying as many bombs?
Speaker: 1
01:10:08
Here’s the economic argument. Energy demand, heating demand, power demand is growing globally with or without The United States.
Speaker: 0
01:10:15
Okay.
Speaker: 1
01:10:16
Does The United States, which produces that energy cleaner than anyone else, want to participate and benefit from that energy demand? Or do we wanna leave it to other countries that are gonna do it in a dirtier way? And what do I mean by that? So natural gas is methane. I’ll just give you the natural gas story real quick. And we pull it out of the ground. We figured out a technique for putting pressure into the ground.
Speaker: 1
01:10:36
That pressure forces the methane to come up through the rocks, and then we capture that meh. And then we liquefy ai, so reduce it down by, like, 800 tyler size. So now it’s liquid. It’s negative a 60 degrees Celsius, and we can transport it. Methane, when it burns to create electricity, is 60% less carbon into the atmosphere than burning oil or coal. Sure.
Speaker: 1
01:11:00
So the first argument is methane is a cleaner way of producing electricity than oil or coal, which would be alternatives. However, when methane leaks, it’s 80 times more heat capture than c o two. So you gotta make sure that your methane production, your methane extraction systems arya tight, aren’t leaking meh, and that makes it a cleaner amount
Speaker: 0
01:11:19
of in America and other countries don’t.
Speaker: 1
01:11:23
And other countries don’t do as good a job, etcetera, etcetera. And then that power is gonna be generated, and someone’s gonna make that energy somewhere. So if it is a cleaner power source and we can make it cleaner and we can do it better, then it’s certainly the case that The United States should be, as we are today, an LNG or liquefied natural gas or liquid methane exporter.
Speaker: 1
01:11:41
So that’s, like, also
Speaker: 2
01:11:42
Sai I can I build on this? Sai I Yeah? Also, it’s ai, can Americans grow up? I mean, these are industries that have to exist, have the courage to have some hierarchy and some ai, please. Like we are talking about a potential debt spiral on the one hand, we’re talking about cutting entitlements on the other and people wanna run around and basically sai, don’t do anything.
Speaker: 2
01:12:07
Well, don’t do anything is not an option. So yeah, monetize the assets. Okay? You may not like the way that Trump says it when he says drill baby drill, but the actual outcome is the same. We need to monetize.
Speaker: 2
01:12:23
We need to generate revenue in The United States as quickly as possible. We need to do the things that maintain technical supremacy. We need to do the things that maintain political supremacy. If we don’t, we will be a second and third tier country. Why does anybody in America want that?
Speaker: 2
01:12:39
If you’re an American citizen that wants that, go to another country.
Speaker: 0
01:12:43
Ben, as we’re saying here, do you think maybe we do solar or maybe clean gas here, drill, baby, drill, or probably some people in the audience are thinking, well, why don’t you rich guys pay 1% more taxes and cut the military 5% And then a little bit of austerity measures on the arya sound like a better strategy. How would you respond to that argument? That many people in the audience are probably thinking right now.
Speaker: 5
01:13:02
So, I mean, if the numbers added up, that might be plausible, but the numbers just don’t add up. I mean, the idea that if you just incrementally increase the top tax bracket, that that’s gonna pay off the massive national debt that we have racked up or the national deficit that we’re racking up every year.
Speaker: 5
01:13:13
The numbers don’t add up in any way like that. And and when you take a look at energy production, the same thing is true. Solar is not gonna be making up for LNG anytime soon. That’s for sure true globally. And, you know, when it comes to America’s role in the world, which is the biggest thing here, when it talk when we talk about cutting the military budget, that always sounds sexy, but the reality is that undergirding things like, for example, the big deals that president Trump is cutting in Saudi and UAE is the giant American airbase that we have in Qatar and the ability of The United States to provide the defense mechanisms for those countries.
Speaker: 5
01:13:42
I mean, let’s be very clear about what’s going on in The Middle East. If The United States did not exist, there’s a solid shot that the Saudi monarchy, the Qatar Emirates, and The UAE would not exist in their current form, and you would have something like a Muslim brotherhood running many of those nations.
Speaker: 5
01:13:57
And so the reality is that always backing American soft power is the threat of American hard power. And this is this is for sure true when you look at things like what’s going on in Taiwan. I mean, one of the ways that we we you guys know much more about this than I do. One of one of the ways we’ve been talking about getting out of the possible debt spiral is massive increases in productivity due to AI.
Speaker: 5
01:14:14
Well, if China outcompetes us in Ai, or if China were to take Taiwan, like, right now, that would basically crush the hope of that. And the reason that China is not doing that right now is because, number one, we actually are building up the the American naval assets. President Trump is is is working on that. But number two, because we are rapidly scaling with regard to our our own energy production.
Speaker: 5
01:14:35
I mean, you have to be an energy intensive nation in order to produce AI. And and so The United States has to has to play this game. If we’re not playing this game, we’re losing. I mean, China is out producing outside energy by leaps and bounds right now. So I’m
Speaker: 2
01:14:46
not bounds. My simple request for Americans is don’t be mathematically illiterate and let’s all grow up together. Come on.
Speaker: 1
01:14:52
Yeah. Yeah. And I’ll just say, like, the the just to go back a couple comments to Chamath’s point. Number one, monetize our assets. Totally agree. There’s opportunities. We gotta do it in a clean way. We follow the law. We follow the EPAs there to make sure that these methods and systems that we use are not endangering species or the planet or whatever other kind of acts were are important.
Speaker: 1
01:15:13
But I’m not sure that the ramp up is gonna make up for the deficit. I think that’s really important sai I it’s great to say that at a high level. There’s a North Shah there. We can monetize our assets. But as you build out the annual plan over the next ten to fifteen years, first of all, political cycles are gonna affect this.
Speaker: 1
01:15:31
If the Democrats come back into power in this next election cycle, they’ll put a blockade on this stuff. It’s not gonna be persistent. So, again, we have to fix the spending problem. And this idea that we have to cut entitlements to fix the spending problem, I don’t even think that that’s step one.
Speaker: 1
01:15:46
I think step one is don’t add new programs. Step two, go back to COVID level spending. And then step three is you can address the entitlements and all the other ai of spending. And step four is you execute as quickly as you can on monetizing America’s assets. But I’m not sure that the ramp up is gonna be fast enough to make up for the deficit over the next
Speaker: 4
01:16:04
few months.
Speaker: 5
01:16:04
One one quick comment here also that I think is important, and that that is that the American people, we’re gonna have to get used to the idea that we can’t just spend every dollar that comes in. So if you take a look at at the the Spanish Ai in the sixteenth century, Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century is a dominant power in Europe.
Speaker: 5
01:16:19
And then they discover all the gold in the new world, and so suddenly, they are easily the richest power on Earth because of the amount of of money that’s coming in. And they immediately start spending all of it, and they immediately start expending all of that capital in order to build up and build up and do different projects.
Speaker: 5
01:16:33
And pretty soon, they’re bankrupt, and they’re defaulting on their debt routinely. I mean, there’s there’s not a a correlation between your asset base and inability to go bankrupt. I mean, we all know very rich people who go bankrupt because they outspend their asset base. In in The United States, we can expand our asset base for sure, and we should do that, of course.
Speaker: 5
01:16:51
But if we don’t wean ourselves from the addiction to spending particularly on social programs because that’s what’s gonna bankrupt us, then all we will do if we increase our asset base is say, hey. Look how much more money we now get to spend because it’s there.
Speaker: 0
01:17:02
Just so you know, Chamath did hit the brakes before he hit that situation. He hit the brake. He pumped the bryden. So
Speaker: 2
01:17:08
Yeah. I I I searched a couple billion, but I learned a couple lessons. He almost flipped the car. I, not not really, but I think I just wanna pick up on what Ben and Dave said. This is a great opportunity for us to grow up as a sai, collectively to have some priorities. The problem that we have right now is we allow all kinds of fringe belly aching, and we don’t have a good sense making mechanism to prioritize that belly aching.
Speaker: 2
01:17:30
And so everything seems like a class five hurricane and everything is not a class five hurricane. And how we respond should be proportioned. We need to react proportionally to the actual challenge at hand. And I think what maybe is just said differently is, this is a class five category issue.
Speaker: 2
01:17:50
How we spend and our revenues are completely, completely bryden. So we need a new way of addressing it. And the people that would have issues with how that’s solved need to have the maturity to actually point to what the alternative is. Because there is no way to quickly raise several trillion dollars without selling land and without giving land leases and without taking royalties for drilling.
Speaker: 2
01:18:16
And so they should say explicitly, I would rather the country go into a debt spiral and go bankrupt. Okay, then just
Speaker: 4
01:18:25
say that.
Speaker: 0
01:18:27
Yeah. I mean, and to the point of taxes, if you, even if you raise taxes 20% on the rich, it’s sana like impact $300,000,000
Speaker: 2
01:18:33
It’s not gonna be a pimple, it’s the pimple on the dog’s ass people.
Speaker: 1
01:18:39
Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:18:39
We we have to stop the spending train. Hey, let’s talk about, do we wanna go farm or do ai wanna go science corner? I don’t wanna have you, miss your science corner there, freebie.
Speaker: 1
01:18:48
Well, my science corner today is just a rant against the governors who are signing laws banning cellular meh. And, I’ll just, hit on it real quick.
Speaker: 2
01:18:57
This is a this is a your this is your take too on this because you’ve done this once this rant.
Speaker: 1
01:19:01
Correct. Governor DeSantis did this in Florida. Since then, Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana. What’s your issue with the cellular meat, sir?
Speaker: 0
01:19:09
I’m not covering. So why don’t you try
Speaker: 3
01:19:10
to make them stay? Cellular meat. It’s a Yeah. Like a chicken. So this
Speaker: 1
01:19:21
speak, Montana’s governor, Greg Gianforte, signed a law, house bill four zero one, banning cellular meat. That bill goes into effect on October 1. You guys can laugh all you want. If it was in a market that you were an investor in, in innovation or technology. For example, if they said we ban AI in our state, how would you guys react?
Speaker: 1
01:19:40
What sort of opinion or commentary would you guys have
Speaker: 4
01:19:42
on this?
Speaker: 2
01:19:43
Move around move around the state, let the state go to zero, and then come pick up the
Speaker: 0
01:19:46
largest land. We have 49 other ones.
Speaker: 1
01:19:47
And I think that’s really important. And and now, by the way, there’s a house bill being proposed to do the same thing throughout The United States. Meanwhile, China and Europe are building cellular meat systems that are rocketing ahead. They’re actually economic drivers because they make the cost of food cheaper. They create new industries.
Speaker: 1
01:20:02
There’s a lot of supply chain that goes into these industries. Whether consumers like or want to buy the product or not should be left to the consumer. It should be a free market. The market should ai. As long as they’re regulated, check for health, check for safety as they all are today.
Speaker: 1
01:20:15
The FDA, the USDA, and others are all involved in regulating these systems. They shouldn’t be banned because in every single state
Speaker: 2
01:20:21
What is it that we they said
Speaker: 1
01:20:22
the reason we’re banning them is to protect our ranchers, our cattle ranchers. And so in all these cases, they’re saying it’s economic protectionism. No.
Speaker: 2
01:20:30
But that’s Ai I look. I I take this very different view. I mean,
Speaker: 1
01:20:34
these are people. Uber to protect the cab ai. Woah.
Speaker: 2
01:20:36
Woah. Woah. Woah. Woah.
Speaker: 1
01:20:37
We just hit 90. Why are we trying to buy? I guess, look at the cab drivers. Crazy.
Speaker: 2
01:20:41
Yeah. I don’t like the benevolent dictatorship model of running a country. Each of these 50 states have the ability to make decisions. Some are good, some are bad, some are neutral. If they sana make fundamentally bad decisions for themselves, let them. If they wanna make fundamentally good decisions for them, let them. At the end of the day, those populations in those places are making those decisions.
Speaker: 2
01:21:01
I don’t see it as a big deal.
Speaker: 1
01:21:02
Yeah. And I think the reason is that most of the consumers, 95% of them, don’t give a shit about the product. Whereas Uber and others were different. Many people did care about the product. But, fundamentally, it unlocks economic opportunities that they don’t see today. And I think that’s what’s really frustrating about this is a small cohort vatsal created regulatory capture mechanisms by getting these laws passed in these states.
Speaker: 1
01:21:22
These are this rancher industry. Can I say something?
Speaker: 2
01:21:25
Thank you, Catalina. As somebody who’s tried this, that meat sucks ass, okay? Yeah. If the meat was delicious
Speaker: 1
01:21:29
That’s ai.
Speaker: 2
01:21:30
I’ll just be honest with you.
Speaker: 1
01:21:31
You don’t have to listen.
Speaker: 2
01:21:32
No, this is my point. I’ve not even had it.
Speaker: 1
01:21:34
I don’t give a shit about the meat itself.
Speaker: 2
01:21:35
Let me make my point. If this product was exceptionally delicious, it would be widely consumed all over America and this would never come to pass because there were taxi drivers in Montana, but the reality was Uber was better in Montana. And there were taxi drivers in Florida, but Uber was better in Florida.
Speaker: 2
01:21:54
And my point is that when the product is so good, it allows adoption and it quells the naysayers at the fringes.
Speaker: 1
01:22:02
Okay, then
Speaker: 3
01:22:02
let me point that
Speaker: 1
01:22:03
out to you.
Speaker: 2
01:22:03
When the product is a little bit more ram.
Speaker: 1
01:22:05
Meh got it. But what if someone banned Uber before it had a chance
Speaker: 4
01:22:09
to get it?
Speaker: 0
01:22:09
That’s a good point. I mean, I think your point is this is a developing technology. It’s early stage.
Speaker: 1
01:22:13
And they’re stopping it, guys.
Speaker: 2
01:22:15
Because what would happen is there there were places that banned Uber and what happened? They all flipped?
Speaker: 1
01:22:20
That’s because Uber ai forward and broke the law.
Speaker: 2
01:22:23
No. No. No. They were
Speaker: 0
01:22:24
We reinterpreted regulations. Even ai.
Speaker: 1
01:22:28
Favor of what’s right for
Speaker: 0
01:22:30
the people of America.
Speaker: 2
01:22:32
What I’m saying is not in the place that it was banned, but there were enough places around it
Speaker: 0
01:22:36
Yes.
Speaker: 2
01:22:36
Where the product value could be demonstrated and
Speaker: 1
01:22:38
government didn’t exist. Shah doesn’t mean you pass a law banning it. You should still let the consumers have the choice. It’s regulatory capture.
Speaker: 2
01:22:46
Who cares?
Speaker: 1
01:22:46
If this was some one of your companies, Chamath, and they were banning some pharma company or social media or some bullshit that you’d started or got invested in, you’d be all up in arms saying they’re blocking us, they’re keeping us from developing, we’re early stage I
Speaker: 2
01:22:58
wouldn’t have thought that happened. No. I don’t Sai don’t cry at this
Speaker: 4
01:23:00
stage.
Speaker: 1
01:23:01
An investor in anything that’s gonna benefit from this. I think it’s fucked up. Well, I
Speaker: 2
01:23:04
don’t think so because it happens all the time. I would say meh over it, grow up, figure out the markets where you can make it and make the product excellent sai that then all these people in these states at that point have a very
Speaker: 1
01:23:14
different point of view on regulatory capture, capitalism, and free arya, Tamat. That’s a fact.
Speaker: 4
01:23:17
No. No. No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker: 1
01:23:18
No. No. No. No. No.
Speaker: 3
01:23:18
No. No. I’m just curious.
Speaker: 1
01:23:19
Eat pork that’s made in a fermentation tank? Is that just made
Speaker: 0
01:23:23
by Jewish. You gotta bring up pork? No.
Speaker: 1
01:23:24
I’m actually curious about this. I’m curious about this.
Speaker: 5
01:23:26
To God. This is this is the only reason I’m interested in this topic at all. This is ai not to get into abstruse Jewish law, but it’s ai an actual open question is that if you grew pork in a tank and it didn’t come from an actual pan
Speaker: 1
01:23:36
Totally fine.
Speaker: 2
01:23:36
Would it
Speaker: 5
01:23:36
then become kosher? And is it considered a vegetable as opposed to a meat? Because it’s not coming I
Speaker: 0
01:23:40
talked to my rabbit
Speaker: 2
01:23:41
about it. Yes.
Speaker: 5
01:23:42
Right? It’s like ai, this stuff to me is really interesting. And, hey, if it gets me to be able to eat bacon, I’m all for it. Like, that’s it. I’ve I’ve heard amazing things. The reviews are excellent on bacon.
Speaker: 0
01:23:50
Yeah. Okay. Let’s go to farm here. Shout out to Long Hill Pecogna Steaks. We’ll send you some.
Speaker: 2
01:23:55
Oh, I just made an order from Long Hill. I just bought 500 worth of stuff. I got a discount though. Yes. I don’t know if you got the email, but if you put the Memorial Day promo code, you get 10% off.
Speaker: 1
01:24:07
Oh, guys. You gotta have a standing order. I have a standing order
Speaker: 0
01:24:09
with Long Hill Wagyu. Well, I mix
Speaker: 1
01:24:12
it up.
Speaker: 2
01:24:12
I mix up the picanha. No. I do the picanha, but I do some Denver steak sometimes. I mix them
Speaker: 0
01:24:17
Nice. Yeah. I like the New York Strip. We’ll send you Ben, you eat speak, right?
Speaker: 1
01:24:20
Of course.
Speaker: 5
01:24:21
Of course. Of course.
Speaker: 2
01:24:21
Ben, try this place called Long Hill Wagyu. It kicks ass.
Speaker: 0
01:24:24
It’s right by me in Austin. It is incredible. And you know, Freidberg doesn’t eat meat and he, you know, it’s, it’s just the the nature of it. Okay. Let’s ram on pharma. Okay. Trump signed an executive order to slash drug prices on Monday. I mean, this is like a great week for Trump.
Speaker: 0
01:24:39
I like everything Trump did this week. The goal is to cut prices 30 to 80% by giving The US Meh. If you don’t know Meh, it just stands for most favored nation status. That’s a generic term in business. It means we get to pay the same price of whichever country gets the lowest ai for a specific drug. This executive order would cut out the famous middleman.
Speaker: 0
01:25:00
He’s talking about PBMs. You’ve, heard Mark Cuban, friend of the pod, talked about that a whole bunch. Here’s RFK Jr’s quote. Congress is controlled in so many ways by the pharmaceutical industry. This was an issue that people talked about, but nobody wanted to do anything because it was radioactive.
Speaker: 0
01:25:16
It’s radioactive, obviously, Chamath, because listen, so many politicians are getting donations and lobbyists. What’s your take on this? Obviously, Amore is in this business and is in pharmaceuticals. So she has some great insights, I’m sure, as you do.
Speaker: 2
01:25:31
Yeah. Let me start by talking about the specifics of the EO. The really interesting thing about this EO was that there was a very detailed report that was published in the National Bureau of Economic Research a few years ago that studied this exact thing. So the president used the term Meh, but the concept here is called international reference pricing.
Speaker: 2
01:25:56
Anyways, there was an extremely detailed study that said, okay, what happens to drug prices when you use this Ai pricing meh? Okay. And what they showed in that study was a very interesting takeaway, which is, if you set the IRF with only one country, typically what happens is for The United States, the change is about minus 2%.
Speaker: 2
01:26:23
If you do it with a basket, the actual profitability of the pharma companies would go up slightly. If you had a required comparison, meaning it had to be a like for like opportunity, profits fall about 20%. And if you use The US bargaining framework, then profits could fall about 27 and a half percent.
Speaker: 2
01:26:43
So this is the impact of that, but there are a lot more nuances of it. So the question would be, what does this all mean then to the downstream impact of pharma? The thing to keep in mind is that we are in a very complicated situation on the arya and d side of the house. And what this chart shows is clinical trial enrollments in China versus The United States. Now this has been happening well before the EO.
Speaker: 2
01:27:10
But what this effectively shows is a really important comment which I’ll come back to. China, A Few Years ago, very smartly, completely reformed the way that it does trials and the procedures. And as a result, what they saw when they had this regulatory reform was an explosion in the number of clinical trials.
Speaker: 2
01:27:31
And there are as many clinical trials now in China as there are in The United States and oftentimes they’re bigger, which is to say that the amount of innovation and the surface area there is already exceeding what’s happening in the West. So that’s where we are. Now, why does this all matter?
Speaker: 2
01:27:49
If you go to the next chart to tie it all together, as you saw at the beginning, international reference pricing has an impact to profits. Profits can have an impact on R and D. As we stand today, R and D, we are neck and neck with the Chinese. What is more important to understand is that actually the last ten years has been very complicated for Western pharmaceutical businesses when you look at the average rate of return.
Speaker: 2
01:28:20
As an industry, these things used to be extremely profitable businesses. But as of the last decade, it’s been very, very hard. In fact, I think like the Deloitte study that I saw was at the can you believe this? The average ROI for broad based pharma is 1.5% as of 2022.
Speaker: 0
01:28:39
Per year. So if you invest a billion dollars, you’re making back 10,000,000 a year.
Speaker: 2
01:28:43
You’ll make $10,000,000, which is not enough to fight this R and D battle. So if you then further affect the profitability scale of pharma, the impact is probably that we push R and D to different places. So I I bring all of this up basically to say I think that what Trump did in one vein was brilliant. Why?
Speaker: 2
01:29:03
He took a plank of the Democratic party. Like if you guys think about like what Bernie Sanders ran on Yeah. It was this.
Speaker: 6
01:29:12
And he took
Speaker: 2
01:29:13
it and he jujitsu ed it and now he owns it. He’ll be able to take credit for it. And the Democrats are robbed of a very critical political plank that they have, which they’ll have to fill in with something else. And if you sai, by the way, Ro Khanna and other folks said, oh, we agree with this and we’d like to do this via, you know, some bill.
Speaker: 2
01:29:33
So even they had to kind of flip and say, yeah, this is kind of a good idea. So politically it’s good. The execution of this is gonna be complicated because of what I showed. We were already at this delicate balancing act of how to make sure that there could be a lot of domestic R and D that’s was still economically viable.
Speaker: 4
01:29:50
Mhmm.
Speaker: 2
01:29:50
The last thing I’ll say is we still need to do one important thing, which is Ai think that this EO is an important start, but it doesn’t yet address the much bigger problem, which is that there is a lot of money that goes to many other things other than drugs. So when you look at a dollar of healthcare spend, which is, you know, almost 20% of GDP, I think the number is that, you know, there’s 30% that is administrative complexity, 20% that is pricing failures, which is effectively to say PBMs, failure of care coordination is 5%, overtreatment is 10%, fraud and abuse is almost 10%.
Speaker: 2
01:30:29
So there’s a lot of other organizations in this value chain that kind of eat out of that dollar before it gets to the sense that goes to pharma. And so it’s important to make sure we don’t overlook those. The biggest ones being the PBMs.
Speaker: 0
01:30:42
Yeah. Ben, your thoughts, on this e
Speaker: 2
01:30:44
Nine percent goes to fund. Yeah.
Speaker: 0
01:30:46
Yeah. What what are your thoughts, Ben, on this broadly speaking?
Speaker: 4
01:30:48
I mean,
Speaker: 5
01:30:48
I have a general rule. If if Bernie Sanders likes sai policy, I don’t like the policy. And so the and so when it comes to when it when it comes to the this particular EO, I mean, the the real problem here for using MFN status, as president Trump is calling it, is that if we are going to use the kind of tariff tools that president Trump has talked about to even the playing field, it seems to me this is where you actually should put pressure on places like Canada or Mexico or the EU is for them to actually pay their fair share for the drugs that they are getting from The United States because we’re patenting all the drugs over here, and then we’re selling it at discount prices to all of these nationalized health care systems.
Speaker: 5
01:31:24
And so if you do that with Medicaid, what you’ll probably get is, number one, a lot of these pharmaceuticals just won’t be used by Medicaid. Well, pharma won’t sell it to them. Instead, you’ll have to go into the private sector, which means it’s gonna be more expensive in the private sector than it would have been otherwise.
Speaker: 5
01:31:35
If you’re covered by private insurance, your pharma bill is actually gonna be higher than it otherwise would be. What we should be doing is getting other countries to pay their fair share, drive up the price on those other places, and then you can actually do something that looks more like an MFN status because you’re not artificially you’re basically squeezing the balloon here, and you’re inflating the balloon here.
Speaker: 5
01:31:53
The the the inflation side being the private health care insurers in The United States and private consumers in The United States. And so if you’re talking about, you know, just artificially lowering prices by basically clocking pharma, I mean, the reality is if you wanna kill r and d, this is a great way to kill r and d.
Speaker: 5
01:32:08
Speak people in The United States, I don’t think, have a clue as to how much money gets spent on r and d that craps out. Because what you see is the big winners. It’s like going to a casino and only watching the guy who’s got the hot hand with the dice. Right? I’m I’m I’m the the version with the dice on that got the hot hand.
Speaker: 4
01:32:21
Hand. Right?
Speaker: 5
01:32:21
It’s me. But Let’s go. You don’t see the other hundred ai, the the casino is absolutely cleaning out. And the reality is the vast majority of biotech companies and pharmaceutical startup pharmaceutical companies and people who are trying to do this sort of stuff spend literally billions of dollars and then crap out at phase three of the FDA trials.
Speaker: 2
01:32:37
Ben, just to build on this because you’re you’re making an excellent point. Did do you guys know what the cost of the average trial was in in the early nineties? It was about $250,000,000. The average cost of that same trial in 2025 is $2300000000.0.10
Speaker: 0
01:32:53
X.
Speaker: 2
01:32:53
And effectively what happened in that thirty year period was a thousand regulations became a 50,000 regulations. And so to your point, one thing that we could do is if, if this EO, you know, is gonna continue and and really be implemented in a forceful way, the other side of it is we have to find a way of decreasing the regulatory burden sai that then the cost of the trial isn’t all the administrivia, but it’s the core science.
Speaker: 2
01:33:19
Well, and And isn’t
Speaker: 0
01:33:21
the issue here, Friedberg, that there’s a free market for drugs outside of The United States where they seem to negotiate really well. And then inside The United States, we we don’t seem to negotiate our prices for drugs as aggressively as Canada, Mexico, and European countries do?
Speaker: 1
01:33:36
As is the case with the cost of education and the cost of housing, the cost of drugs is largely inflated because of the federal government’s role in being the primary buyer or capital provider to that market. Right. So similar to how the US government provides all the capital through the federal home loan program and all of the capital through the federal student loan program, the cost of tuition has no market check, and the cost of housing doesn’t have a great market check because there’s an unlimited, endless supply of capital coming from the federal government.
Speaker: 1
01:34:04
Similarly, through our purchases of prescription drugs, the federal government as a buyer doesn’t have any incentive to keep prices low. There’s no individual. There’s no shareholder. There’s no one that has some check that says, you know what? We’re actually not gonna buy that drug because it costs too meh. Or, hey. We need an alternative.
Speaker: 1
01:34:24
If every individual had to pay for their drugs or private insurance was the only way to get your drugs was through private insurance, we would have a much more dynamic marketplace. So the way that we negotiate drug prices is pretty messed up. There’s also this construct in the arya. These PBMs are pharmacy benefit managers.
Speaker: 1
01:34:39
If they got cut out of the market, it would save a lot. I’ll just give you guys some numbers on these PBMs. There’s three major PBMs, CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and OptumRx. These three companies make, on average, approximately $3 in operating profit per prescription claim processed. They make money in markups.
Speaker: 1
01:34:58
The FTC has been investigating them and have several open cases between 2017 and 2022. The estimate that these companies generated $7,300,000,000 in excess profit by marking up prices on specialty generic drugs. The list goes on on kind of the egregious behavior and the role that they play as middlemen in the industry.
Speaker: 1
01:35:16
Their job, and I’ll kind of describe it, is to be the managers of prescription drug benefits on behalf of the health insurers, large employers, Medicare part d plans, and other payers. So as an intermediary, they provide this role where they can coordinate between the health insurer, the pharmacy which dispenses the drugs and the drug manufacturers.
Speaker: 2
01:35:38
But they’re allowed to be owned by the payer, which is crazy.
Speaker: 1
01:35:41
And now they’re allowed to be owned by the payer. Crazy. And there’s a lot of obfuscation of the true cost of the drugs. There’s a lot of markups, a lot of spread taking. And so if you took the PBMs out of the market, that would solve one of the problems. But at the end of the day, I’ve said this many, many times before, anytime the federal government is involved as a payer in any market based system, it creates a distortion and the market is no longer free or efficient.
Speaker: 0
01:36:05
Alright. Four, Ben Shapiro of the Ben Shapiro Shah in Daily Wire, Mahapali Happatia, and David Friedberg. I am executive producer for ai. We’ll see you all next time.
Speaker: 2
01:36:16
Love you, boys. See you all.
Speaker: 4
01:36:18
Thank you.
Speaker: 2
01:36:18
Bye bye.
Speaker: 0
01:36:19
Bye bye, bitches.
Speaker: 4
01:36:21
We’ll let your winners ride.
Speaker: 6
01:36:24
Rain Meh David
Speaker: 4
01:36:29
And it said, we open sourced it to the fans, and they’ve just gone crazy with it.
Speaker: 6
01:36:33
Love you, sis. Queen of kin wah.
Speaker: 4
01:36:42
Besties are gone.
Speaker: 6
01:36:52
We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they’re all just useless. It’s like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.
Speaker: 1
01:37:00
Wet your feet. Wet your feet. Where did you
Speaker: 4
01:37:06
get mercy? Where did you
Speaker: 0
01:37:06
get mercy? I’m doing
