Fixing the American Dream with Andrew Schulz

(0:00) The Besties intro Andrew Schulz! (3:29) Friedberg hits a quick Science Corner on the future of fertility (9:35) Reacting to Gavin Newsom's new podcast: genius or pandering? (19:36) Tariff experiment so far: risks, communication issues, and more (30:44) Why the American Dream is broken and how to fix it: cracking the housing market, social security reform (55:45) Aligning upside via increased stock market participation (1:11:23) How Andrew blew up in comedy, going direct via YouTube, building a cancel-proof following (1:22:25) State of America, conspiracy obsession, thoughts on Trump and DOGE GET TICKETS for All-In Live: Miami https://allin.com/events Follow Andrew: https://x.com/andrewschulz Check out Andrew's new special LIFE: https://www.netflix.com/title/81741999 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: https://www.tiktok.com/@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://x.com/chamath/status/1895948351516131515 https://x.com/ChineseEmbinUS/status/1897132043362034153 https://electrek.co/2025/02/07/renewables-90-percent-new-us-capacity-2024-ferc https://www.wsj.com/opinion/bidens-mortgage-relief-fuels-higher-housing-prices-policy-loans-risk-cb0a1974

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the All In Podcast. And you can subscribe to us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, yada, yada, you know the drill. We're gonna go to Miami for an epic F1 weekend. All In Podcast live on stage Saturday, May 3rd. Couple of special guests. Go to allin.com/events to buy a ticket. And we're really excited today because for the first time in All In history, we have a comedian. We have somebody talented on the program.

• 0:31David Friedberg?

  Ain't that the truth?

• 0:32Jason Calacanis?

  Ain't that the truth?

• 0:33David Friedberg?

  Real comedian, someone that knows how to make good jokes.

• 0:35Jason Calacanis?

  All right.

• 0:36David Friedberg?

  It's true.

• 0:36Jason Calacanis?

  Andrew, I think, feel like that was a dig to me, but okay. Andrew Schultz is here.

• 0:40Speaker 02

  How we doing, boys? Thank you for having me.

• 0:42Jason Calacanis?

  Schultz, pleasure. You just, you got a, you're on heater right now. You took time to come on the All In Pod. Thank you for doing that.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 0:50Jason Calacanis?

  Your Netflix special is crushing it. Top 10 around the world. It's called "Life."

• 0:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 0:56Jason Calacanis?

  L-I-F-E.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Pretty cool.

• 0:58Jason Calacanis?

  It's about your low sperm count. Tell us everything.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I am the face of she-sperm.

• 1:03Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm, which, that's kinda like crazy because you've got a mustache of a 70's porn star.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  I think I'm overcompensating, you know? I think I gotta trick people with the stash, when in reality, yeah, yeah, the balls are just...

• 1:14Jason Calacanis?

  You're firing blanks.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Dude, it's just pure oatmeal. It's bad. Yeah, it's a...

• 1:19Jason Calacanis?

  This special is so good. This special is so good.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Thank you for watching, man. I appreciate it.

• 1:24Jason Calacanis?

  We all watched it. We were, it's hilarious. And you got three old guys here who also have had to deal with some of these issues. We've all had to deal with...

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Do you guys have IVF? You guys do IVF for the babies?

• 1:36Jason Calacanis?

  Chamath, you wanna be honest here? Or are you, are you au naturel? Did you hit the three from half court? Logo shot? What happened?

• 1:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  My first four kids were natural. My fifth was IVF.

• 1:44Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think we're surprised. There's like 2 billion of you guys. You know, it's, it's easy to get the job done, right?

• 1:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You know, there is a, there is a period, there is a period after the Facebook IPO, I swear to God, I would look at chicks on Instagram and get them pregnant.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 1:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It was brutal.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Are they coming to collect?

• 2:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Hope not.

• 2:02Jason Calacanis?

  How many salamids you got, Chamath? How many ADAs? Uh, all right, Friedberg is our... Yeah, we're off to a hot start here. Friedberg, you look like you have a low sperm count, but you have a fourth kid on the way. But apparently, what's the story? Are you au naturel? This is for the first time ever. Nobody knew this. Breaking news. Friedberg au naturel with your 3.5 babies.

• 2:25David Friedberg?

  100%.

• 2:27Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:28Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:29Jason Calacanis?

  A vegan who's shooting with a sniper ring.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  I don't believe it. I don't believe it.

• 2:34David Friedberg?

  I'll find you guys a great study about veganism and libido.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Is that right?

• 2:38David Friedberg?

  Yeah, very impressive.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  What does it do? Reduce the woman's?

• 2:43Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:46Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh my god.

• 2:47Jason Calacanis?

  I know a place with the best roast cauliflower.

• 3:06David Friedberg?

  By the way, can I just tell you how much I hate cauliflower? Everywhere I go, that is the dish. I had it for dinner last night again.

• 3:12Jason Calacanis?

  It's the main course.

• 3:13David Friedberg?

  Yeah, it's the main course in restaurants.

• 3:14Jason Calacanis?

  Just like having a ribeye, except it's disgusting.

• 3:17David Friedberg?

  There's two things they offer you: portobello mushroom and roasted cauliflower.

• 3:21Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's what Sean does every time he shows up at the house.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Are you, are you a impossible meat guy?

• 3:26David Friedberg?

  No, I don't like that stuff. It's gross. Not for me.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:28David Friedberg?

  Yeah. By the way, you guys want to hear a quick science corner? So, you know how we talked about Yamanaka factors?

• 3:34Jason Calacanis?

  There is a roaring yes.

• 3:38Jason Calacanis?

  Wow. He's like, yeah, I don't care, Andy.

• 3:40David Friedberg?

  This is not the topical.

• 3:42Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, sure, we all do.

• 3:43David Friedberg?

  Let me hit this real quick, because I know we're never gonna get to it, because you guys just bullshit around, talking about politics for an hour.

• 3:49Jason Calacanis?

  This is important science talk, Sheltie.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, hit us, hit us.

• 3:52David Friedberg?

  You know how you can use Yamanaka factors, we talked about these, to basically turn a cell into a stem cell, right?

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 3:58David Friedberg?

  And that's what goes on in the lab. Andrew, you're familiar with the Yamanaka factor research.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Everybody knows about the Yamanaka factors.

• 4:04David Friedberg?

  You've been all over it for a while.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Dude, I've seen Squid Game.

• 4:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 4:09David Friedberg?

  Now there's a.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  You think I don't know about the Yamanaka factor?

• 4:12David Friedberg?

  We're not gonna get, I can tell you we're not gonna get.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  The Yamanaka factor, everybody knows about it.

• 4:17Jason Calacanis?

  You didn't visit the Yamanaka factory when you were in Kyoto?

• 4:20Speaker 02

  I went to the Yamanaka factor, and I swear to god, a guy showed up 15 minutes late, and he stabbed himself in the stomach, right there.

• 4:27Jason Calacanis?

  Right there.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  He killed himself right there. Yeah, it's called Sudoku. Exactly.

• 4:31Jason Calacanis?

  Sudoku. He did Sudoku in under a minute.

• 4:36David Friedberg?

  Okay, never mind. We'll come back to the science.

• 4:39Speaker 02

  Tell us, tell us.

• 4:41David Friedberg?

  So the interesting work going on right now is you basically can take any cell from a person's body, turn it into a stem cell, and then turn that stem cell ultimately into an egg cell. So you no longer need to go harvest eggs. And so you don't need to actually go get the eggs from the woman. You can make eggs from skin cells, for example. So in the next couple of years, there's, you know, there's a few little technical breakthroughs that are happening right now that will enable this. Where fertility clinics may end up just taking a little bit of your skin cell, creating stem cells, creating egg cells, and that's how we're going to end up doing IVF in the future. At any age. So you can make eggs at any age and you can ultimately produce offspring at any age. You don't need to actually have active healthy eggs.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  And this.

• 5:26David Friedberg?

  You like that one, right?

• 5:28Speaker 02

  This is fantastic because this is a nice workaround for the people that are trying to ban IVF because of the abortion protocol. They're basically, because it basically likely begins at conception is part of their belief, right? But and the idea.

• 5:42David Friedberg?

  You could take one egg cell, you could take one sperm, make a fertilized egg.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, those people don't know, but like we do with IVF is you try to harvest as many as you possibly can because not all of them are viable. And it's a pretty brutal process for the woman to go through. But if you could just grab something from the skin, you'd have almost unlimited eggs.

• 5:57David Friedberg?

  When a woman is born, she has all her eggs in her body. And as she ages, those eggs get depleted and eventually she doesn't have very good viable eggs left over. So this gets around that problem of not having viable eggs. We can be very selective about the eggs. And so there's a future here in the next couple of years where fertility becomes a simpler, hopefully easier and more widely available service than it is today, where it's really challenging technically and you've got to go do something that's invasive and you know, you've got to hope that there's good, healthy eggs and there's a good number of eggs and so on and so forth. So really interesting science.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  This is awesome.

• 6:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Schulz, did they sit you down and give you like the embryos that that were viable and the grades and the gender and you pick one? And what did you pick?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  We just picked the best. So this is a lot of pressure on that first one. Like all the other kids afterwards, I feel like don't have this much.

• 6:48Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, come out of the gate strong, have a good first quarter and then whatever.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 6:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's all good. So I got to ask you.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  Wait, you didn't say if you had the IVF.

• 6:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was about to, I'm about to put it out there. I didn't have IVF.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:00Jason Calacanis?

  But the first time we had the first kid, wife says, hey, we're ovulating, I'm ovulating. I said, put me in the game. Boom. First shot, half court logo, pregnant.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 7:12Jason Calacanis?

  Then she says, I want to wait before I have the next one. It was a little traumatic to have a kid. And she waits six years. Then we try for a year. Nothing for one year. So now I'm like, oh, man, we waited too long. It's a lot of pressure. You, you talk about this in the special. It's like for women, this is anxiety producing. So she's like, you gotta go get checked out. And this is when the most humiliating day of my life occurred. I don't know, Andy, what, what it was like when you went, but uh,

• 7:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They found all these grifters? Can they, can they identify grifters through the microscope?

• 7:42Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, no. I walk in and the thing opens and there's three women at the counter, at the reception. And they're like, hey, Jason Calacanis, you're here to give a, you know, I'm like, yeah, I am. And then they walk you to a room.

• 7:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, that's the spookiest thing. Yeah.

• 7:57Jason Calacanis?

  They walk you to a room and then they open it up and it's like some nightmare scenario where there's a motel eight room and there's a couch that's about three feet, three feet wide. And there's a towel on it.

• 8:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And there's a towel on it. And that sofa is not clothed for a reason.

• 8:14Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  It needs to be cleanable.

• 8:18Jason Calacanis?

  In fact, it looks very much like the hotel you're in, Chelsea. I don't know what's going on with the Netflix budget.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Why do you think I'm staying?

• 8:23Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe they could put you in the Four Seasons or the Peninsula.

• 8:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's so brutal.

• 8:27Jason Calacanis?

  So you did this, right? You had to go to the great television with the porn. It's like.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Oh, you're lucky you got the TV. I had no porn.

• 8:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I went to the phone. I went to the phone.

• 8:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had no porn. I had nothing. I didn't even have it, have any service in there, which was like another thing that was, it was annoying.

• 8:42Jason Calacanis?

  So what did you do? You rolodexed it?

• 8:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  No, Spank Bank. You had to go to Spank Bank.

• 8:46Jason Calacanis?

  That's what I'm talking about. The rolodex. You roll through all the memories.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Think about the memories, man, of my wife and only my wife. Nobody else.

• 8:53Jason Calacanis?

  That's what's infuriating. Absolutely. All those great moments with your wife.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Great moments.

• 8:57Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe there was accidentally one or two that got left in from when you were on the road.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  It's possible some like absolute would jump into the dreams that I had with my wife. That might be possible. I would never want them to be there.

• 9:10Jason Calacanis?

  No, that was the director's.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  There's nothing I could do. But yeah, it's, it is also funny how like we dramatize our experience. We got the easiest thing to do in the whole thing. We just gotta go into a room and jerk off as if that's hard for us. But we're like, the room is destitute and brutalist and the, the furniture was uncomfortable.

• 9:30Jason Calacanis?

  Speaking of jerk offs, uh, yeah. Speaking of jerk offs, Gavin Newsom's got a podcast.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  This is, uh, so I think that this is like. This is a great idea. Despite what you think about his politics. Is he a plastic bag in the wind? Yes. But it is a great demonstration of like how Americans admire bravery or courage. And we don't like, I think that's what the Democrats kind of displayed in the last election. I don't want to get too political about this, like.

• 10:01Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's all your opinion, one man's opinion.

• 10:03Speaker 02

  It's more just like, I, I respond culturally. I don't give a about the tribalism in politics, but I'll just be honest with you. So having him have like Charlie Kirk right there, who's like a professional arguer. That he is whatever, you know how like some people are autistic for dinosaurs? He's that for arguing, right? And to like sit across from him. To even address the French laundry.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  I was like, okay, this is actually the right thing to do. So. As, as, as easy as it is for us to sit here and go, okay, this guy wants, just wants to be president. Like this is a dumb thing, like. Blah, blah, blah. It's actually what the Democrats should be doing. So I think we need to reward. I think we need to reward this behavior. We want more conversation. We want conversation with people, especially that like you may disagree with. And like the second podcast he put out, I thought was the most impactful. There was one piece that was incredibly impactful. He's talking to some guy. I don't know who he was. Somebody I grew up in like San Francisco. He's like.

• 11:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Mike Savage, Michael Savage.

• 11:04Speaker 02

  He was talking about the taxes and like, he's paying all this money in taxes in California. And what does he get from it? And then Newsom said that like, yeah, rich people are going to pay more. But your actual like functional tax rate, if you're middle class, would be more if you lived in Florida. Because of the other stuff you get taxed on. This is the type of information that like you guys might be privy to, but the average person doesn't, they hop on the internet.

• 11:28Jason Calacanis?

  So you're saying he's like being human and addressing real issues instead of like culture war issues and just talking like Kamala?

• 11:36Speaker 02

  I think he's going culture war, like that's culture war, but he's actually putting out valuable information that defends the positions he may have taken in government that the average person doesn't really know. Like the average person like me just goes, alright, I'm in New York, I'm getting clipped at 50% and 5% city tax, like I'm getting crushed. But if I lived in Florida or Texas, I'd save 13% and it'd be a complete wash. When there might be someone making 50 grand a year and they move from California to Texas and they lose money. And they don't know that. Cause they're just listening to rich guys on podcasts talk about how much money they save when they move to Texas.

• 12:11Jason Calacanis?

  Well, you don't have to take a shot at us, but yeah, okay.

• 12:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think it was more, I moved to Texas this year. There's more of a shot at me and Friedberg, but go ahead.

• 12:18Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Uh, Chamath, your thoughts on Gavin's new podcast? What do you think? You, you know, you were, there was famously a little dip of the toe where somebody made a, a podcast, I'm sorry, a landing page that you were going to run for governor. We, we had a little fun with that. What do you think of Gavin? What do you think of his podcast?

• 12:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think he's an excellent politician. It's clear he's starting the 2028 campaign. Okay. I think he's done a really good job so far. I think Schulz is right. He is unwinding all of the kind of like landmines that the Democrats have stepped on. I think he's learned what Kamala did wrong. And now he's taking this very narrow path, which is like, I'm going to basically disavow all the stuff that people don't care about. So all the gender woke ideology stuff, I don't think you're going to hear him talk about. He'll try to drive a narrow wedge on these economic issues. So I don't know. I mean, I think it's going to create

• 13:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  a really dynamic 2028 campaign if he gets momentum. By the way, his popularity has gone up, which is insane, which after the fires and all of the ineptitude in California, all of the corporations that have run away, all of the people that have left, the chaos in San Francisco. After all of that, he started a podcast and his popularity has gone up. It's really incredible.

• 13:40Jason Calacanis?

  Coming around the horn, Friedberg. What do you think of Gavin Newsom?

• 13:44David Friedberg?

  Look, I think the podcast was brilliant. I think when I watched it, I was hooked because there are two things that I think were critical in how he runs it. Firstly, is he is showing for the first time, I think, that I have ever seen a Democrat do, or a Republican in modern politics, active listening to the other side. It seems so crazy that this is some sort of special event and special concept, but this active listening moment where you see a politician, it totally breaks down the walls where you immediately feel on guard or on offense against that person. Because if someone's actively listening to you, you actually feel like you're on the

• 14:28David Friedberg?

  same side somehow, and you're trying to come to a conclusion together. And so what that does is it invites the person on the other side, in this case, the audience, the listener, to be with Gavin, part of the kind of coming together. The second thing I think he did that's really brilliant is so much of the modern political bimodalism, where you're in one camp or the other, means that everything is a one or a zero. You know, Andrew talked about this. We're all generally, I think, none of us would consider ourselves political party affiliates. We are all generally people that like to think for ourselves on a topic or an issue, and we don't care about what party is associated. But the way modern politics has evolved is you don't debate the topics, you debate the one or the zero because of what the party says.

• 15:11David Friedberg?

  My party says this is the position, therefore I'm a one and you're a zero. And the other side says, I'm the one, you're the zero, meaning everything has to be binary. I'm completely right, you're completely wrong. And I think what Gavin has done is he's shown that these are not ones and zeros. They're 80/20, or 60/40, or 55/45. And he's willing to acknowledge that. He's showing that, you know what? We might be only 45% right. And on so many topics, the Democratic Party has ended up slightly wrong. They're 45/55. It's not that they're a zero or a one. They're slightly off on taxes, they're slightly off on social issues, and they're off just enough that they lost the election. They're off just enough that they lost the house.

• 15:52Jason Calacanis?

  Brass tacks, brass tacks. Andrew, 2028, Trump's running for his third term versus Gavin Newsom, who do you vote for?

• 15:58Speaker 02

  I mean, we gotta run it back for a third term for Trump.

• 16:02Jason Calacanis?

  No doubt, of course.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Uh, no, obviously.

• 16:04Jason Calacanis?

  No, but theoretically, if it wasn't a third term, Gavin versus Trump, who would you go?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  I it's, I mean, I gotta see what his like policies are and I gotta see where America is. I think they're like the big misunderstanding with this last election is that at least the Democrats who are still trying to like vilify these figures on the right. What they don't understand is they think that this was like some populist election where like people just fell in love with Trump and they just loved it so much, they would just do whatever he says. What I think is harder for them to grapple with is the self-reflection of a rejectionist vote. So I think people rejected the Democratic proposal.

• 16:42Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  And they went with what the other alternative was, which was Trump. And that's a way tougher pill to swallow. You have to look back at everything you've done and go, wow, we're off, we're not listening to the people. This guy listens to the people. I mean, it seems like I'm fluffing Trump here, but like, I would say that his greatest skill is listening to what people say. And I think a lot of times there's this Ivy League pretentiousness in the Democratic Party where it's like, we know it's better for you. And I know you say you want these things, you don't really want that. Let us, we've, we've studied and we've talked about it in our little thought experiments in class. So we know what you need. The, you just shut up.

• 17:23Jason Calacanis?

  Condescending, it's condescending.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  And exactly. So I think that like, when people go, ah, the food is giving me cancer. And then he appoints the guy who says the food is bad to run the food. The American people go, well, that kind of seems like a good thing. I like that. You know, it, it is like an acute understanding and listening to what people are saying. And sometimes to his disadvantage, like he came out against that.

• 17:50Speaker 02

  They were putting some like tax on people who drive into Manhattan or whatever like.

• 17:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Congestion pricing and.

• 17:57Jason Calacanis?

  Congestion pricing.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Initially, people really rejected it, right? And then, uh, so he was like, we're getting rid of congestion pricing. And like two weeks after they put that congestion pricing thing, everybody I knew with a car was like, this is the greatest thing the city has.

• 18:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you can actually move, right? You can take a taxi and it's faster than.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Government overreach is good. Bureaucracy is nice, like.

• 18:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you want a car, stay in the boroughs.

• 18:22Speaker 02

  Exactly. So it's like.

• 18:24Jason Calacanis?

  Get a car in Manhattan, explain this to people.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  It's a little bit egregious. I mean, you and I do, Jason, but everybody else shouldn't have it. Exactly. Our lives should be different. You know what I mean?

• 18:32Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely, absolutely. But what I mean, what's the point of us having nice cars?

• 18:36Speaker 02

  If we can't drive them whenever we want.

• 18:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, yes. And, you know, we grew up at a time on the Lower East Side, uh, you know, you could go to Tribeca. We could go to a club, Limelight, you could park outside the Limelight at night. You could go to Palladium, you could park on 14th Street.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  I parked right on 14th Street, okay? I go to what used to be a church, right? And then, you know, I sniff.

• 18:55Jason Calacanis?

  Can you pop ecstasy, you do a little whatever, but it's four in the morning.

• 18:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Listen, you two goofballs, between your stupid mustache and your Ozempic turkey neck, I am totally.

• 19:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Go to something useful.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Are we gonna let Chamath sit there in MacGyver's funeral outfit? Tell us that we're goofballs? This guy's wearing a vest with a collar. He looks like he's going to a Punjabi wake. I can't believe that he would even talk about the way that you're dressed and how you look.

• 19:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  This is custom Laura Piano, boys.

• 19:27Jason Calacanis?

  This is Laura Piano, really? Why does it look like you got it at Zara? All right, listen. Um, but more importantly, let's stay on track.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, we gotta stay on track. Can I tell you guys something about tariffs from a layman?

• 19:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, please.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  You guys are acutely aware of maybe how these things affect markets and yada, yada, yada. And most people don't have any fucking clue. So the, the, the average person, right? I look at this and I'm like, man, it kind of sucks that you gotta like negotiate your, like, your bid for a car that you're gonna buy publicly, right? So this is my assumption and maybe I'm like a little bit more optimistic than most about the administration. But if I go to buy a car and the car is listed a hundred K and I go offer the guy 80, right? I don't want everybody around me yelling out loud, how can you insult him by offering him eighty? This is an insult. And then I, I can't go to them and I go, I'm actually trying to settle at ninety. I'm just saying eighty, so he comes down a little bit.

• 20:26Speaker 02

  But the unfortunate thing, when you litigate these things in front of the entire world, is that they look at that first measure, there's two hundred percent tax, and Trump can't balk at it. He can't go, yo, I'm just fucking, I'm, I'm just playing around with that number. I actually just getting them to come down twenty percent or ten percent, getting them to come down anything is a win. He can't say that because he loses all his leverage. So he's got to sit here and then get criticized by, I don't know if it's half the country. I don't know, you know, who really ends up caring about what these tariffs do. Obviously, there are repercussions in the market. I got a buddy of mine building a hotel out in Joshua Tree, and he's like, I don't even know if I can get brought into the country from Canada, so it does affect people in real time. But it's impossible to do these negotiations with any leverage if you have the people within your own country questioning your ability to negotiate in real time. That is what the layman would think.

• 21:11David Friedberg?

  Well, I do think you're right in the sense that in the early days, when Trump was talking about tariffs, initially, everyone was like, oh, my God, he's going to use tariffs, he's unpredictable. And then the narrative became, he's using it as a negotiating tactic. The problem is, just like in poker, once everyone knows that there is this kind of action, it's exploitable. And so this is now kind of an exploitable mode of negotiation where everyone now assumes he's just trying to negotiate, so no one actually takes him seriously. The question now is the response going to be that he's going to be serious about it, or is he actually exploitable? And you saw what China's response was. I kind of view China as like AI. Like, stuff goes into China, the AI processes it, and it comes back out. China is like, obviously, the way they're kind of structured.

• 21:55David Friedberg?

  You have very little psychosocial bias, like you do with other democratic governments. It's very systematic, it's systematically processed. Every piece of data is systematically processed, every action is systematically processed. And so I think when you look at how the Chinese ambassador responded to Trump on Twitter a few weeks ago, where they're like, you want war, we'll give you war. This is a hot war or a cold war, whatever you want. We've never seen that from an ambassador to the United States president before done on Twitter like this, let alone the Chinese ambassador. So I think it says a lot about how the Chinese AI is processing the Trump negotiating tactic or the Trump positioning statements on tariffs, which indicates that there may be now, I mean, we can talk about what game theory optimal play might be in this kind of poker game.

• 22:38David Friedberg?

  What's going to come next, but there's a real assessment that they've made on how far he is willing to take it. They've got a conclusive statement and they believe that this is the fastest way to kind of win their negotiating position. But it says a lot about where this is all going. Everyone now understands or views this as an exploitable moment, which unfortunately means that tariffs may not work or they're actually going to have to stick, which can be really ugly. Yeah, it could be painful. Could be painful.

• 23:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tramathia, thoughts on the tariffs in Andrew's position? What is the, I think it's, it's like 120 some odd years, Nick, maybe you can find this tweet that I had, but almost the majority of years as a nation, or close to a majority of the years as a nation, we had no income tax. And the way that we would fund the programs that we needed was not from insiders, but from outsiders. And that's where the tariff was born, right? It's people domestically in America don't pay any taxes on the things that they do. And instead, if you'd like to sell into the United States, you pay a reasonable tax.

• 23:41Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So this is the, so many years, so it's 126 years from 1776 to 1861. Then we paused it for a few years because of the Civil War. We restarted again in 1872. And you notice when it stopped, when it stopped was right around World War I, where this entire war machine broke out and we've never looked back. So, I don't know, I think that one way to think about this is we're probably going to go back and explore, isn't it better if we have this incredibly vibrant and rich country of 330 million people with a ton of purchasing power? What happens if we put the burden, not on them to fund the American infrastructure

• 24:22Chamath Palihapitiya?

  and social programs and safety net, but if we put the burden on all the companies in the other 7.7 billion people in the world and the 185 plus countries that want access to these folks? Should there be exceptions? Probably. Should there be waivers in very specific and narrow cases? Absolutely.

• 24:43Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But I think that that's where these guys are going. And I think that you heard this, by the way, yesterday from Howard Lutnik. I don't know if you guys saw this. But he said the Trump tax plan is going to cut federal income taxes to zero for anybody making 150K or less.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Saw that.

• 24:59Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It's crazy.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  What would the vulnerability in that be? Like putting the burden on all of these expenses that we would incur on other countries? What would that vulnerability for us be?

• 25:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There are two. The first is that-

• 25:13David Friedberg?

  If we keep the expenses.

• 25:15Speaker 02

  That's-

• 25:16David Friedberg?

  That's the key.

• 25:16Jason Calacanis?

  If we keep the tariffs, if we charge them to come into the market, we charge them an extra 25%.

• 25:20David Friedberg?

  But it's, we talked about this last week. If you cut the budget, then it's, it can be net neutral. That's part of what they said.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Got it.

• 25:26Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But he's saying, what is the strategic vulnerability? I think the strategic vulnerability is two. The, the thing with tariffs is, and you're pointing out this, let's just say today you say there's a tariff and then tomorrow you say, oh, we've found an agreement and we're going to take it off the table. One piece of logic would say, wow, that's great. We're able to change our mind on a dime. The problem for countries and companies is that they can't think in 24-hour blocks of time, right? They're making decisions in five and 10-year blocks of time. It's like, I'm going to go and borrow a billion dollars. I'm going to go and build a data center. I'm going to borrow 10 billion dollars. I'm going to build tanks. Once you start that, you can't just stop it and then restart it.

• 26:08Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So that's one strategic problem, which is that if you are not careful, some of these markets that are really crucial, I'll give you one which we talked about last week. Right now, 95% of all of the energy we generate in America is from renewables. Whether you like it or not, that's just what it is.

• 26:27Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The reason why that's possible is because America has a very sophisticated market where all these people come from all corners of the world. Insurance companies, life insurance companies, banks, and they fund all of it. And the reason is they can take a tax credit, they can lower their effective tax rate, they get a higher rate of return. It's all super complicated, but the point is these incentives exist. If all of a sudden you- Play around with that market, half that energy would go away. Electricity prices would rise, inflation goes up. And then if we have to go and compete against China for AI and a bunch of other stuff, where is the energy going to come from? You're going to brown out people? You're going to just turn their energy off so that you can fund a data center so that the TikTok algorithm is better?

• 27:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's literally what we would have to decide. So that's, that's one way. And then the second way is if you're providing a critical service or a good to American people for which there is no alternative, that becomes really problematic because that person can then pull that product and say, I can't afford to make it. The obvious example is if you make pharmaceutical drugs for rare diseases, what do you do? And again, those are all things that are like multi-decade-long decisions. Yeah. You'd love to make them and unchange them at every 24 hours, but it's just not possible because like you just make these decisions and you're stuck with them for a long time. That's where the tariff thing becomes problematic if you change them often enough.

• 27:56Chamath Palihapitiya?

  If you implement them and you're like, this is what it's going to be, the world can adapt and people can figure it out.

• 28:01Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, the other problem is just the communication of this has been terrible. We were on the program last week or two weeks ago, Joe Lonsdale's like, this is about fentanyl. So is it about fentanyl? Is it about getting rid of income tax at the federal level? Is it about supply chain resiliency? These guys get like a D in my grade book for communication. It's terrible communication. And this idea that you can't take Trump too seriously about his claims, like, well, he said he was going to overturn Roe v. Wade. He did it. He said he was going to close the border and send people home. He did that, you know?

• 28:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 28:34Jason Calacanis?

  He said he'd do a Muslim ban. He actually did that. So for every time he says something and you're like, that's cap, no way he's going to do that. I actually think people are starting to realize he's gonna do something here with these tariffs. They're not just a negotiating position. And the other problem I think a lot of people have with this is it centralizes power. Anybody can go to Trump now and say, I want an exception. I'm, you know, a car company, I want an exception. I'm a solar company, I, you know, I need an exemption. And then now you've got everybody going to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring, to give him a donation, to bow down. And it centralizes more power with them as opposed to having rules.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:11Jason Calacanis?

  And we need to have rules in this country that apply to everybody, not just people who give a million dollars like Bezos and Tim Cook and everybody. And Zuck, the weather vane gave him. We don't want to live in that world where you're just bribing Trump to get your tariff. And that's how people feel. That's how the business community feels. That's the reality right now. People are bribing Trump, giving him a million dollars to the inauguration, to get close to him, to go to Mar-a-Lago. And it looks really bad. You need to have a clear strategy here for what the rules of the game are. And he's changing the rules. So you have to go to him and he's, he loves that. That's actually, I think, what he's trying to do is get everybody to go through him. It's a really clever hack, I think.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, and perception is reality. So you have to react to people's perception. Like, we can throw data points all we want at people and we can throw research and all this other shit. But if people aren't meeting you there, then you're not going to be communicating with them effectively. And I think that, uh, that's something that like, you know, especially you guys need to know. You guys have privy to information that the average American probably is not. And we can bitch and complain about how they don't read or how they're not looking up, you know, what happened in 1913 to change the course of American history and how we started to. Or we can go, okay, we need to find a way to disseminate this information so that they can make these decisions. And I guess, or feel comfortable with the results of these decisions.

• 30:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Do you think America would be okay with this idea of taxing outsiders and then?

• 30:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Relying on it versus income tax paid by its own citizens?

• 30:39Speaker 02

  I think that the second half is really all that would matter. I think that people are I think the majority of people are thinking about the next week. So if you say that I don't have to pay taxes like and I think this is what Republicans are doing way better than Democrats right now is like Democrats don't have build the wall. They don't have slogans. They don't have things that immediately tap into like core emotional feeling, regardless if you're gonna do it or not. We want Greenland. Okay, that's cool. Democrats need eggs or a dollar. Democrats need things that like echo their sentiments and how they want to like take care of people and provide for the disenfranchise. But it has to be done in a way where it's digestible. You can chew on it. If you want to make housing more affordable, then you say, yeah, we're seizing public land. We're building 10,000 units like

• 31:22Speaker 02

  you have to tap into what Americans need, which is a feeling of not just comfort. Every American thinks they're gonna be a millionaire. That's what this country drives off of, right? It's every poor American.

• 31:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That hope, that hope, yeah.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  And the second they stop thinking they will be.

• 31:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Or they can be.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Or they can be, it falls apart. And then some healthcare CEO gets shot and people celebrate. They're they're celebrating because they no longer feel the hope that they could be in that position.

• 31:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  They feel so disenfranchised. They they and this is what like I'm telling you, like the you guys of the world need to pay close attention to because there's gonna be no empathy if anything bad happens. Oh, the stock market is down. No Americans are invested in the stock market. Like, that's all you guys.

• 32:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I've been saying it's, no, no, I've been saying this for months. I've been saying it for months. Nobody cares about the stock market, nor should we. And the reason is because we, people who own these assets, have overly benefited more than we've deserved for the last 15 years, ever since the great financial crisis in the United States. People who, as Jason said, could cozy up. And by the way, Jason, I think the the the claim that you made, which is is is severely true for how from 2007 up until now has played out. Because if you look under all the programs. If you could have lobbied Obama in those critical years of the GFC.

• 32:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yep.

• 32:50Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Oh, my God, the amount of money that was. No, because we we took interest rates literally to zero. Anybody like us who could have gone and gotten levered up and gone into the stock market was richly rewarded. And the problem is, we left everybody else behind. And I think the great thing about Trump is he is going to reset that. He is going to take a lot of wealth away from asset holders. You're seeing it every day, 500 billion, 500 billion. There is no sympathy. I think it's fantastic.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  That's great to. It's great to hear you even saying that. Because I feel like a lot of people that are in maybe your guys' position. Don't understand that disconnect. And that is important to understand there like. Even what happened in the Palisades, like in LA with like the fire, the second people heard it was like rich people's houses. There was no empathy for it. They didn't.

• 33:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, four million dollar house. Yeah, it was like.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  And it is.

• 33:47Jason Calacanis?

  I don't even have a house. I can't find a house. You burned your house down and you move, you went back, you went to your vacation house now. Oh, I'm sorry, you're living at your ski house? That's a tragedy. Like, literally, you're right.

• 33:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  It probably explains why we don't hear anything in the news anymore about anything that's happening with respect to reconstruction or. Any of the disruption that's happened. It's a rich person problem.

• 34:06Jason Calacanis?

  It's a rich person. And, you know, I think putting together what you just said, Schulz and you, Chamath. Trump is a master at connecting with people and listening to them. I thought the, one of the greatest things he he he he did during this last election is when he said, no tax on tips. When he said no tax on tips, he was going right for Nevada. He was going right for that swing state, you know, to get those folks who live off tips. But what he was also doing is saying, I know that there's a bunch of y'all. That sometimes get cash tips, you put it in your pocket, it's the gray market, I get it. I, you know, I run a, you know, I got caddies who get a Hyundai from, you know, whatever, taking somebody out on the course. We're just going to make it official. You don't get tax on tips because we know that you're, you know, you're the bottom third of the country. In terms of your economic power.

• 34:51Jason Calacanis?

  Those kind of statements really do connect with people. Trump has just mastered this. This party is, Trump is the Democratic Party that we grew up with.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  It's kind of crazy.

• 35:01Jason Calacanis?

  It's kind of crazy, right? And then the Democrats became this elitist group that seemed to be in the pocket of business interest. I don't know what bizarro world we're living in.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  I think you tapped into it right there. It's like. I think that they they could usually win the next election if they made it a class war, but they don't because it feels like they're in the pockets of these billion dollar corporations. So they can't really, I mean Bernie did it really effectively, right? Like this random Jew that lives in Maine or something like that is like, yo, we gotta get some money from these rich people, give it back to the poor. And all of a sudden, all of America turned him into like our surrogate grandfather. So you can

• 35:38Jason Calacanis?

  And then he got shivved by Hillary and the machine.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  And and I mean, what did they say about his fans? Like they went very specifically, they're like, he has a, his, the Bernie bros have a sexism and bigotry problem, right? They made him radioactive, right? So now you killed the working class and the working class is no longer supporting the Democratic Party. So who do they have left? They have the identity politics groups, so they can't piss off the identity politics groups because they're like, that's all we got left. They did the same shit with us during the election, right? They're like, the podcast bros have a sexism and bigotry problem. They try to make people radioactive and it's like, that card's been played so many times that people are desensitized.

• 36:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think there's one big shoe left to drop. I think we've started the process of really, really taking a bunch of heat out of the asset markets like equities. So we've taken trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth away. I think we're going to take trillions more. But the next big market, and this is actually where Andrew, to your point, we reestablished some hope, I think for a lot of people is we are going to whack the housing market. It's just gonna happen. And let me just say something about that.

• 36:44Jason Calacanis?

  How is that gonna happen, Shemar? Explain it because there are seven million homes that we still need to build to to service just current demand. How does that actually happen with the supply and demand problem in your mind?

• 36:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There are a bunch of mechanisms that have to get cleaned up right now. So one mechanism is that there are a whole host of mortgages that are basically being propped up. They, it was a program that's that really got out of control under the Biden administration. Nick, you can find this article, it was in the Wall Street Journal. We are going to figure out how to get these two government-related agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, out of what's called conservatorship. And these are the folks that are responsible for essentially wrapping guarantees around mortgages so that the mortgage market can function. The details don't particularly matter that much, but the point is that what we are doing is we are unwittingly

• 37:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Propping up with American taxpayer dollars, the US housing market. Why is that bad? It is locking an inordinate number of people from that first critical step that actually makes them feel like they are winning and they're on their way to achieving their dreams, which is, can I make a deposit on a home and then can I live this out? And you have these artificially inflated prices all around the country as a result of this. So I think this next wave is deeply beneficial to the middle class. Which is, there is no reason, like you guys see it, when you read the Wall Street Journal, I think it is the dumbest in the world when I see an article which is like, this house just is $65 million

• 38:23Chamath Palihapitiya?

  on .4 acres in some rando place in Miami. Yeah, I was thinking Malibu, but yeah. But what is this? This makes no sense. And so when you re-rationalize a bunch of equity values and you re-rationalize the cost of a home, I think what you're going to do is you're going to allow a lot more people to find a more reasonable way to enter the housing market. And I do think that that's a really big step in allowing them to feel like they're part of the dream. So you lower asset prices, you can own some stocks, maybe you own a 401k, or if you've never had a 401k but your employer offers it, for the first time, it may actually make financial sense to put a small amount of it in there.

• 39:05Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You've never been able to own a home, all of a sudden, home prices are whacked 30 or 40%, you're able to do that. Because of how Trump goes after the budget, when his rate of borrowing for the US government goes down, your mortgage rate goes down. Now, all of a sudden, you can enter in because home prices are less and you can actually get a mortgage. They may all seem very random, but they can come together in giving 50, 60 million people a shot that they have been screaming since the great financial crisis they don't have.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  This is so huge because on like a core emotional level, you want as many Americans as possible invested in American success and excellence.

• 39:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Totally.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  And the greater the delta between like them and their first home or their first investment stock, the greater that distance, the more disillusioned they become in America in general. When they feel like, like you said earlier, like the way that you guys got into the market when you could basically take out loans for nothing, and then you saw these incredible gains, they feel left behind. The second they feel like they're in on it, they own apartment, they own some shares of Tesla.

• 40:08Jason Calacanis?

  That's why crypto is so popular is because they're like, oh, I got.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Only access.

• 40:12Jason Calacanis?

  I got, yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like comedy in some ways, like all I need is a microphone or music. Like there's a path for me and crypto obviously is a giant scam.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  It's a scam, sure, but I can get a piece of this. I can get a piece of this, this American dream. And I would rather that they were invested in the, you know, a Vanguard account or something like that. I would rather they're invested in the entire market. I mean, there's this, this idea, and I'm sure you poke holes and tons of holes into it. And, but this idea like every American born gets a thousand bucks put into.

• 40:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a friend of ours, Brad Gerson with this Invest America is the concept.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  And regardless if the concept is good or not, the emotional connectivity to the success of American industry is really important when you know at 22 that you could get this thing that's been compounded for 22 years. You could pay off some college loans, you could put something down on a house, you could pay for trade school, whatever it is. I think you have a different energy towards America and its success. And then you have a lot less of these kids who are just like, America is this horrible place and capitalism is bad. Yeah, capitalism is bad when you're left behind. When you're invested in capitalism, it's great, baby.

• 41:17Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. We're on the express train.

• 41:19David Friedberg?

  Let me give you guys, um, I did an analysis of, I wasn't sure if I should put it out, but I'll tell you guys the numbers.

• 41:27David Friedberg?

  The US social security program is meant to be kind of the retirement program for folks that don't have access to private retirement accounts. Okay. And this program was set up in the 1930s after the Great Depression. And there's a trust fund, the OASDI, which is the, the fund that they invest the capital. So every year we all put money in with our social security taxes out of our paychecks goes in there and it gets invested. You know what it gets invested in?

• 41:55David Friedberg?

  It gets invested in one thing, US Treasuries, which have averaged about 4.8% return since the beginning of the program per year. Meanwhile-

• 42:05Jason Calacanis?

  What if you put it into the market?

• 42:06David Friedberg?

  Meanwhile, the S and P has been averaging 11%. So here's the math. If in 1971, which was the year that we went off the gold standard in the United States, if we invested the Social Security Trust Fund in the S and P, the balance of the Social Security Trust Fund today would be $15 trillion. That would be roughly one-third of the value of the total S and P 500, which would be jointly owned by all Americans who took their capital. Now here's what's up. What's up is that the middle-class people who had access to private retirement accounts benefited by buying the S and P 500, and the wealthy were able to access it. So all of the equity value that accrued from American enterprise and the prosperity of the American system accrued to the people that had access to the private accounts.

• 42:50David Friedberg?

  Meanwhile, the people that only had access to the public accounts got stuck owning Treasuries. Today, the Social Security Trust Fund has $2.7 trillion balance, and based on the outflows and inflows, it's going to go bankrupt in 2032. That means Social Security is either going to get cut, or the Fed's going to print a ton of money to keep Social Security benefits-

• 43:08Jason Calacanis?

  Retirement age goes up a little bit, yes, a lot of levers, yeah.

• 43:12David Friedberg?

  Wow. So I did the math. If you assume that the S and P 500 continues to grow at 10 and 1/2% a year, on average, there's ups and downs, and sure, there could be basically drawdowns and all these other sorts of things. But here's an important point. We could put about $500 billion in the trust fund today, and it will not go bankrupt again. And it will continue to grow every year. And then, all Americans have participation in American enterprise. And importantly, this becomes the world's largest sovereign wealth fund ever. You don't need a separate sovereign wealth fund. We already have one. We have it. It's called- It's called the Social Security Trust Fund. And what we've done is we've totally mismanaged it, and I went back to try and understand why this is the case. Why have we only ever bought Treasuries? Early on, the US needed someone to loan money.

• 43:54David Friedberg?

  So they basically forced the citizens to loan the government money in the form of Treasuries. But today, the Social Security Trust Fund owns only less than 10%, about 8% of the total Treasury bonds outstanding. The rest are owned by the Fed and foreign investors and private investors and others that want to own it. So why are we forcing all the American citizens to participate-

• 44:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, we're propping it up for no reason.

• 44:13David Friedberg?

  And we're discouraging access. So basically, we've created through the social security system, we've created the deep inequity we see in this country. If instead, we had allowed the social security system to invest in the S and P 500, to buy American enterprises, to fund American businesses, then every American would be wealthy. And that middle class that uniquely participated by basically arbitraging the market, where they forced the treasury bond yields on the poor, and they got to take access to the equity yields, would have not happened.

• 44:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they had 401ks, right?

• 44:44David Friedberg?

  They had 401ks. They had Roth Ires, and they were able to participate with brokerage accounts and buy in the market. But what we can do right now is we can fix it. And here's an important point. People will then argue, oh, well, what if there's a down year, two down years in a row? You know what? We're already going to be printing money to make up the hole in social security. We're not going to let social security go bankrupt. We're not going to let it dry out. So we're already going to print money to make the social security hole. So if that's the case, we can create a backstop for social security. We're going to have to do it either way, but we might as well take on the beta.

• 45:16Jason Calacanis?

  Chelsea, go.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, no, no. Tom, you were going to say something.

• 45:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  The reason why we didn't do it goes back to what you said before, which is we have a bunch of, we had a bunch of very, quote unquote, well-educated Ivy League-trained people running these institutions. And the feedback, I don't even know what it said, but I can tell you what the memo said. There's too much risk. We've sensitized this model. It doesn't make sense. This is the safest thing to do. So it goes back to just like, we need a little bit more practical thinking. Like, at the end of the day, why the S and P 500 exists is, of all the thousands and thousands and thousands of companies in the world, you know how many companies in the world make more than a billion dollars a year? More than 20,000.

• 46:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And of that 20,000, the S and P 500 is just the 500 best. It's the best of the best of the best. So to your point, Friedberg, it didn't take a PhD from Harvard to figure out that if you just owned an index of the absolute 500 best things happening at any given point in time, it would have gone up.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Also, since when do Americans, since when are Americans risk intolerant? Like, there's something baked into the DNA of the people that decide to leave their families and move here. Totally.

• 46:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Immigrant country.

• 46:33David Friedberg?

  And to your point, imagine logging in, like, like, we've all had, I'm assuming, a 401k account, and I remember how exciting it is to log in and see the account. And Schulz, I want to say something that's really important. Like, you talk about us people, like, you know, early on, the commentary, which is something I hear a lot. My first job was making $4.25 an hour cleaning toilets in a pool hall in upstate New York. Chamath has similar stories, J Cal has similar stories, like any of us that participated.

• 46:58Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I made $4.55 Canadian working at Burger King.

• 47:00David Friedberg?

  Yeah, and I had, like, and then, well, the worst part about my job in the pool hall was that then the manager made me go play poker at his house, and he took all the money back, which was really.

• 47:07Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I stole, I stole the chicken fingers at night. Bring them home. My mom would, my mom would whip them up.

• 47:13David Friedberg?

  But it was so exciting in my career, in my life, to be able to, like, go from that moment to the moment where I had a 401k and I could log in, and I could see the businesses that I owned, and I understood that, and I saw the value go up, and I got to participate in that. Imagine if every American, when, when, when you get your social security statement today, all it tells you is a dollar amount and how much you're going to get in the future. Imagine if you logged in and you got to see all the businesses you own a piece of.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Every single day.

• 47:36Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You feel connected. You would be lighting a Tesla on fire.

• 47:40David Friedberg?

  We can fix this. And by the way, we can solve both the sovereign wealth fund question and the social security trust fund question. Every dollar that's going into these sovereign wealth fund ideas, or if they come to fruition, or, in my opinion, and obviously I haven't spoken to stocks about this, but the crypto fund and all this other sort of stuff, every dollar that should go into the social security trust fund. And that social security trust fund should be for the benefit of all Americans, and it should be equities, it should be ownership, it should be participation in what the American dream enables. The American dream enabled us all to succeed, and it should enable everyone else to participate in shares and equity in American enterprise that can come to market. So.

• 48:16David Friedberg?

  It's not about a thousand bucks when you're born. It's about an ongoing participation, putting your money in and having that money allocated in a way that America, that's smart and wealthy Americans get to allocate it, which is into owning shares and businesses. That's it.

• 48:28Jason Calacanis?

  Chelsea.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, I, I think it's great. I hopefully you guys don't feel like I'm like discrediting you by saying you guys, but I'm just trying to give you guys.

• 48:35David Friedberg?

  No, no, I think it's a great, it's an important framing because it's like, it, you're, you're a hundred percent right, but like I, you know, we see comments on YouTube like, oh, you guys, and I'm like, dude, I remember like, it feels like yesterday. When I was in frigging debt, I graduated college with a bunch of debt and I went and like, found a job and worked my ass off and I was working 20 hour days and never slept and like, you know, it wasn't easy. I mean, I feel like very emotional about this right now. Sorry. Hang on. Um.

• 49:02Jason Calacanis?

  It was hard.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:03Jason Calacanis?

  Build the fields, man. It was hard.

• 49:05David Friedberg?

  It wa- it wasn't easy, bro.

• 49:07Jason Calacanis?

  It wasn't given to you.

• 49:08David Friedberg?

  None of us inherited, none of us inherited. We ca- we, we came to American and to see the joy, to, to see what we all benefited from. I'm getting emotional about this, but it's like.

• 49:17Jason Calacanis?

  Well, it's because the American dream's broken and we gotta fix it. Andy, fix it for us right now. Come on.

• 49:22David Friedberg?

  To have people talk about it as if, as if being successful and, and getting there is a crime. It makes you a bad person.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 49:30Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's a dream. It's a dream. Chelsea, go.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  I think the, the framing, this is very important. Like my mom is also an immigrant, right? She came here from Scotland. She has no education. They stopped going to school like 14 or something like that. Comes to America and she's this massive success here in terms of like where she came from, where she got to, right? And what she was able to buy. She was able to buy a home in the East Village of New York City. She was able to buy a beach house, like just off of like grinding hard work. And what she saw here, which I'm sure a lot of you guys also saw is opportunity. She had ambition and opportunity. And I, I think that that's what. I think a lot of times that's what immigrants see when they come here because they probably come from places where they feel absolutely no opportunity. So the second they feel like there's a little of it, if they work those 20 hours a week, I mean, I saw my parents grind.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Like my work ethic just comes from watching them. You know what I mean? Just watching them just kill it every single day. So. What I think that you guys are speaking to, which is really important, and I think it's important that people know your story as well, because it becomes more accessible. When they see you guys and they know what you came from, they know you're working at Burger King, and now you guys are worth billions of dollars. It's very important that Americans know that that's possible for them, maybe not to hit a billion, but maybe to hit a million, maybe hit 300,000, maybe to buy a fucking house. It's a hundred thousand dollars that they're really proud of.

• 50:48Jason Calacanis?

  Own it outright.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  And own it outright. And the fact that this is accessible. Like what you just said to me is just hope and abundance. Like that's the messaging of what you just said. You said something that made it seem very simple to me. We put this money here, everybody's now invested in the success of the American economy. And now when we see the stock market ticker look green, which is all the average person sees, green or red, we don't really know anything. But when we see green, we get excited. We go, wait, wait.

• 51:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  And now we start.

• 51:16Jason Calacanis?

  Goes up.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  And we start rooting.

• 51:17David Friedberg?

  Kim off feels that way too. Yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Well, but think about.

• 51:20David Friedberg?

  Getting excited right now if you're saying it.

• 51:22Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, he's gonna start crying. Oh, wait, it's green today?

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:25Jason Calacanis?

  It's been red for a week.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  But think about like CEOs, right? Like these people have become villainized, right? And it's because we are not attached to the success of their companies. That's right. When if you if your biggest holding is Tesla.

• 51:37Jason Calacanis?

  But it doesn't.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Please believe you're not upset.

• 51:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I think people think that their success now works against your best interests.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 51:45Jason Calacanis?

  And the system's rigged and the system's rigged and you can't be part of it and you're being ground down. This is, I think, really good proposal, Friedberg. And if you look at housing, that's the other one. I when I if I run for president, you know what my position's gonna be, Schulz?

• 51:59Speaker 02

  What's that?

• 52:00Jason Calacanis?

  I'm gonna build five cities with 3 million homes in each. And you can only buy them if you make under X amount per year. It's not gonna be like the projects or like, you know, subsidized housing in New York. Talking about. It's not gonna be Stuyvesant Town, okay? It's gonna be like nice house. It's pretty good if you can get it, yeah. Stuyvesant's not bad, but not like projects. I'm talking about like proper homes. We are the most innovative country.

• 52:25Jason Calacanis?

  Society ever created, I mean, since the Greeks, they were pretty great too, but we could build five new cities. Why the can't we build five new cities with three million homes in it? Let's do some like Manhattan project for housing and then healthcare. How the hell do we not have like good healthcare for everybody in this country with the richest country in the world, greatest economy, whatever? We should be able to solve those problems. And that's why people don't feel like they're part of this is because basic housing, basic healthcare and your retirement. It's not like it's rigged against you.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  This sounds crazy, but for young people, I think they would forgive healthcare if they were invested in the market. And I think that being invested in the market is just so daunting, but the feeling that everybody else is getting rich when you're not is the reason why I bought crypto, not knowing anything about it. It's a reason why everybody else bought it. It's this feeling that the train is running away and you're not going to be part of it. So how do we get them to feel part of that success?

• 53:20David Friedberg?

  I think really importantly, you know, today, just, just to give you guys some other statistics, 60% of a middle-class household's net worth is in their home. Only 10, 10% of their net worth is in owning the S and P 500 in, in index funds or whatever in their retirement accounts. And so by creating this American dream around housing and allowing the federal government to provide loans on housing, we've increased the cost of housing. We've created a very like destructive housing bubble in the sense that it has reduced people's exposure to participation in productive value creation. And that's through the ownership of businesses. Instead, we've stored our net worth in a house. And in order to keep the economy and the social structure stable, we've created policies that allow the continuation of the

• 54:05David Friedberg?

  growth in the value of houses. So people feel like their net worth is incrementing.

• 54:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You're 100% right.

• 54:10David Friedberg?

  And that's unfortunately very unnatural.

• 54:12Jason Calacanis?

  They restricted making new housing, which makes it worse with the restrictions.

• 54:16Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Have you guys heard of Warren Buffett's most public failure?

• 54:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Warren Buffett's most public failure was when he was brought on as an advisor to Arnold Schwarzenegger, when Schwarzenegger was running for governor. And Buffett kind of looked at the laws in California and there's a law in California when you own a home that when you pass on, you can pass it off to your kids and you can basically keep the cost that you paid in terms of setting the real estate taxes. And it's had an enormously negative effect in unlocking turnover of homes. And that's a large driver of why homes are so expensive in California. So Buffett looked at this. And there was a lot of fanfare. Schwarzenegger's like, here's my economic genius. And the first thing he said was, guys, I think we should repeal this law. He was gone two days later.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 55:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's not popular.

• 55:07David Friedberg?

  And by the way, there's a lot of other policies like this, you know,

• 55:10Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Two days later, you have to resign.

• 55:12David Friedberg?

  If you do the, if you do the true kind of like macro analysis as an investor, you should probably have about 20% of your net worth in the US in real estate, not 60%. And so we need to give people the ability and we need to think about all the follow-on and trickle effects of creating a set of laws, a set of policies that basically incentivize almost all of your net worth to go into a single asset, your home. And what that then means in the fact that we have to keep pumping up the value of that home. And we have to have a system in order for people to feel like they're getting ahead, keep inflating. And eventually people can't afford homes. And that's where we are today.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  When did you guys first started, start your education in, in the markets? Like at what age did you feel like you sought out?

• 55:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I bought my first stock in the company I was working for, or the parent company, the company I was working for in 1989, when I was 18 years old.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  So 18. What about you, David?

• 56:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I bought $300 in stock.

• 56:05David Friedberg?

  Um, I signed up for an E-Trade account in college because I saw that TV show called Bull. Do you remember that TV show? It's about investment banking during the dot com bubble. It was such a, no one knows that show. And I was like, man, Wall Street is so cool. I want to learn about stocks because I was an astrophysics major. I didn't like, I didn't know what I was going to do after I was going to go to graduate school or whatever. And then I got caught up in the dot com bubble and I started reading the Wall Street. Journal every day. I would take it down to the frigging Plaza and I would read the journal at school during lunch. And I tried to learn about tech and business and markets because I've always been a tech guy and I'm like, man, there's all these startups and this is how the markets work. So I set up an E-Trade account. I put some money in it and I started and I bought some stocks and I read the investor business daily on what stocks to buy. They had a rating.

• 56:50David Friedberg?

  And I bought those stocks and they went up and I'm like, man, this is awesome. Like, I love owning stocks. And that kind of kicked me off. And then I got an investment banking job after college and it totally changed my career trajectory. I was like, I want to go work in the tech industry and work in business.

• 57:02Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What about you, Chamath?

• 57:03David Friedberg?

  And it shifted it up.

• 57:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  When did you buy your first equity?

• 57:05David Friedberg?

  But by the way, that, I'm sorry, let me just say one thing. What you asked is a really important question. I just realized this, Andrew, because my, um, my interest in that stock market thing at that time actually changed my career trajectory and it really reset what I was going to do with my life to get involved in business and go work in the tech industry as opposed to work in science as a researcher. And that was a really big shift for me. So it gave me that kind of a feeling of like, oh, I got to learn more. And then that that kind of changed my career. Sorry, go ahead, Chamath.

• 57:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was 14 or 15 years old and there was a, this is when Rodney King had the shit kicked out of him and almost died. For all these race riots in LA and nothing had changed actually in America, but where I was growing up in Canada, the provincial government created a program that said, if you're a minority and you're on welfare, we'll pay for you to get a job. I, I was a minority on welfare. So I got a job. And it was at a startup that was just going parabolic and their stock was going nuclear and I lived in this shitty part of town. And I would see the controller of that company drive past me every day while I was waiting for the bus.

• 58:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And one day he stopped. And I went with this guy, Sam Legg. He drove me that whole summer. And he taught me, what does the company do? Why is the founder a billionaire? What the hell does this even mean?

• 58:31David Friedberg?

  He unpacked.

• 58:32Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And so I saw firsthand what it meant to work not for a salary, but to get a stake in the thing that you're working for. I bought a couple of shares. It went up and it was great.

• 58:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But then I really fell in love with this idea that I could understand something and own a piece of it. And then it really accelerated when I graduated from college because I was like Friedberg, I was in debt. And I was like, how the do I get out of debt? And I traded stocks on behalf of my boss. This guy, Mike Fisher, who I thank to this day. And I made so much money right before the dot com crash. He gave me the money to pay off my student loans. Wow. And then ever since then, I was hooked. I was like, okay, I can learn this and I can deal with the vicissitudes of this. Look, the markets are brutal. There are moments where you just wake up and it looks like everything's working. And then there are moments, and this is what everybody needs to understand, though, if some of these programs work,

• 59:28Chamath Palihapitiya?

  where it literally looks like the bottom is falling out. And I cannot describe to people the pressure you will feel on behalf of you and your family when it looks like you're taking a thirty or forty or fifty percent negative downturn to your net worth. Yeah. It inflicts a level of psychological damage that I cannot describe to you. And the bigger the numbers get. And by the way, I told this story on Tucker. There was a period where I would wake up and I could just tweet and the markets would go up. They were like, what's he gonna say next? And then it all stopped. And then there was a two and a half year period where I gave it all back and then some. That's frustrating. The Midas touch goes away. It's beyond frustrating. It shakes you to your core.

• 1:00:12Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So if we do these programs, I think the Friedberg idea is just beautiful. It's lovely. What about you, Schulz? When did you make? But I just to finish, if we do it, we have to try to teach people how to deal with the drawdowns because that's where if you don't teach them how to deal with the vol, the volatility of losing money. It's great when everything's green. But those red days, man, how you comport yourself, how you act, how you treat other people in the red days are the only days that matter. Yeah, it's a growing experience. What about you, Schulz? When did you buy your first equity?

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  I was probably.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  Thirty-five.

• 1:00:51Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  Think about so, so my, my, I mean, my.

• 1:00:55Jason Calacanis?

  How, how old are you?

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  I'm forty-one. So I would maybe even a little bit later. Now, I might have like owned stock without even realizing it type of thing where like I had like a business manager who set up some retirement fund or something like that, but not me actively choosing a stock and buying it. Um, my, my wife's father-in-law is a very, uh, successful businessman and, uh, he's, he's, he's, I don't want to say like predicted the markets really well, but he has. I mean, he was in Nvidia like super early, early, early, early. And, uh, a bunch of others. And we were like sitting down and like Aspen somewhere and he like said, hey, listen, what do you mean? You don't own anything? He goes, hey, can you take a, you know?

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  I don't know if he said ten grand or a hundred grand or something like that. He goes, can you just put it in these different stocks? I go, okay, sure. I open up this like E-Trade account or whatever the it was. But an interesting thing right there is like you guys were so young. It was eighteen, twenty-two, fourteen. And to me, I think like the education of this is really important. Like my parents did really well, but they're financially illiterate. Like there was no passing on this like knowledge of like investing when.

• 1:02:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  What it means to invest. Like they made their money by like working every single day for it. Not like you guys don't, but like they were teaching dance lessons. So it's like, this is how much the dance lesson costs and you pay me and maybe I'll have forty people in the class. Okay. More people are paying. And now other teachers can also teach. But it was intimidating to them. It was inti- intimidating to me. It still is intimidating to me.

• 1:02:20Jason Calacanis?

  Well, this is the, I think the upside of crypto in some ways. Also the upside of prize picks or the, you know, gambling poker. It's the upside of Robin Hood and, and Coinbase and all these things being available. This generation, generation bet, like they love to gamble these young kids.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  This is my concern though.

• 1:02:35Jason Calacanis?

  And they're, no, but they're learning. They're learning how to take the, the downdrafts. I think that's my position.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  They are learning. I think they are learning. So maybe like the barrier of entry is less, but my concern is that they're treating it more like gambling than investing. And I think that we've almost like tricked the American public into thinking that investing is gambling. That's right. When the way that you guys are describing is it's not. It's like investing in the S and P and then leaving it there and taking those downturns. And you have to learn.

• 1:03:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, but here's the thing, you have to learn these lessons at the poker table. You cannot play poker without real money or else you're not going to get the burn. You're not going to stay up at night.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  How do we, how do we?

• 1:03:11Jason Calacanis?

  So that's what these kids are doing. They're, they're.

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  How do we educate them? It's not every kid, right?

• 1:03:14Jason Calacanis?

  It's the education comes from doing. And if you let these kids trade, they will figure it out over time. And then what happens is like you, they get married, they get, they get a baby, they want to get a house. And then they say, you know what? I'm going to, I'm going to stop buying meme coins. I'm going to start buying Bitcoin. I'm going to stop buying Bitcoin. I'm going to buy Nvidia and things with real revenue.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  I think they just get addicted to gambling.

• 1:03:34Jason Calacanis?

  Happening all the time.

• 1:03:34Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Exactly. I agree with you. I agree with Schulz. I don't think that I, I think you're being super reductive like, oh, they'll get on the, the, all of a sudden understand Dave Swenson's Yale endowment asset allocation model. Bullshit. I've seen, they won't. I have seen thousands and thousands and thousands of guys over time who deeply steeped in this business wash out.

• 1:03:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And each to a one, the more sophisticated they get, they all fall to the same pressures, which is they don't know how to simplify and they don't know how to be patient. These are things that every human being needs to learn. And I don't think time in the market actually solves those two traits. Those are psychological traits that you have to go and figure out in a different way. You look inside yourself and you have to figure those out.

• 1:04:23Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Yeah, fair enough. But between the choice of, hey, we're going to grow up blue collar. We have no access to these markets. We have no way to trade in them. We have no way to learn. And then today, I think the system we have today is better. Can people go off the, you know, jump the fence and lose all their money? Of course they can, but they could go to Vegas and do that. Prior to that, they could work with a bookie. They could do football sheets. I, I think they're learning. And when you use some of these modern apps and you look at the strategies and you see people on Reddit, working on these stocks and their thesis, I think it's trending in the right way. There can always be more education, but this is.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  Let's hope.

• 1:04:58Jason Calacanis?

  Let's hope.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  I think the average American.

• 1:04:59Jason Calacanis?

  Don't bet on the Jets, right? You said it before.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  I think the average American doesn't even know what compound interest is.

• 1:05:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I agree with you. In fact, I'll tell you, I'll tell you a great story. Work to do. I, one of the best things that happened when I invested in the Golden State Warriors, I bought 10% of the team in 2011 or something. I got to meet all of them and I got to meet a lot of my heroes. And I remember one meeting where I sat with

• 1:05:24Chamath Palihapitiya?

  a goatee like player. Let's just put it that way. We'll bleep it out. We'll bleep it out. No, I don't want to say his name, but you. Okay. Fair enough.

• 1:05:33Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And he asked me the most incredible question. He's like, Jamar, can you explain compound interest? And Schulz, I can tell you, I still have this spreadsheet.

• 1:05:45Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I just showed him a compound interest table.

• 1:05:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And he had no idea how 8% versus 10% is like gargantuan.

• 1:05:55Speaker 02

  Over 50 years, over 20 years. Yes.

• 1:05:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And to your point, it was illuminating that you're right. Unless you, unless you go and you jump into it and you live it. And Jason, I agree with you. Like there's nothing like, look, Stan Druckenmiller says the same thing. Invest, then investigate. Like there's nothing like putting the risk on. Absolutely. There's nothing like playing a hand in poker. There's nothing like taking a shot at a different strategy in blackjack. Win or lose, you get feedback. But my point is, most people don't get better. And so that's what you have to solve. It's like, how can you make it interesting, fun? How can you talk about the losses? Like this is a thing that I had immense trouble with. I still do today. I think I've gotten better with it, is to be able to talk about the losses. How do you talk about getting whacked for $4 billion? So I can do it now, but it's brutal.

• 1:06:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, it stung for a while. And how, how ashamed, brother, you saw me. You're a better person since then. You saw me go through it. How ashamed was I for the two years that I had to unwind that shit? How bad? It was hard for you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was hard.

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  I mean, imagine your whole identity is built into, you know, you being successful in these markets.

• 1:07:00Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you measure it the wrong way. Like you point to the number in the bank account, not the way your wife treats you, not the way your kids treat you, not the way your friends treat you. And then you're like, okay, well.

• 1:07:09Jason Calacanis?

  I'm thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty percent poor. So I'm just that much less of a human being.

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. But that's a good reality check to lean into family and those things that matter.

• 1:07:19Jason Calacanis?

  So my point is like, if you can, if we can get people more into the market, I think it's an incredible thing. But you have to wrap it in these guardrails that have nothing to do with the market. Everything to do with who you are as a person.

• 1:07:31Speaker 02

  And I think like, the first step is showing, like, what is the most simplistic version of the benefit of the market? And I think it's compound interest. I really think that that is, if we start there, like, remove the stock market. Don't even talk about it. Just like, what happens if I left it in a savings account that's getting 4%?

• 1:07:49Jason Calacanis?

  And I don't touch it, right? You know the rule of seventy-two? That was the one that opened my brain up. So the rule of seventy-two is whatever the percentage you grow per month, divided into seventy-two. So let's say you were growing 7.2% in the market per year, divide that. It takes 10 years to double your money. So it's a time to double your money.

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:08:09Jason Calacanis?

  If you were growing 7% a month, you know, on whatever your investments are, let's say you got a great business that's growing like Facebook or something like that, that means you double the number of users or revenue every 7.2 months. Once you understand that, you can do it quickly. Just like in poker, you know, the number of outs, each card represents roughly 2% chance, because there's 50 of them, right? So they each account for about 2%. Then you can start doing this stuff in the back of your head. I had this idea, I think I talked about it here on the program, of doing the Kids Investment Club, and I bought the domain Kids Investment Club. I actually need to do this. I gotta prioritize this and find a CEO for it, or do it as a nonprofit or something. Just kids need to learn this early. Robin Hood or somebody should make an app where they can invest like a shadow,

• 1:08:52Jason Calacanis?

  but it's, you know, like with their parents, maybe they can make the trade, the parent approves it, something like that. There's something where we should be learning all this in high school. This should be like, what's more important than this?

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  Remove the fear. Remove the fear and and the reason it's important is to what we were saying earlier. Get the American people invested in American success and you will find so much more patriotism. You will not find us nitpicking on all these little things that a lot of us maybe go, why is this such a big deal? Like the the bathroom, like most of us are unaffected. I cannot begin to explain how quickly we'll forget about the bathrooms. When the S and P is up fifteen percent and you're looking at your portfolio and you're like, I if you could take a wherever you want, okay?

• 1:09:35Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. Yes, I had you got something else to focus on. Absolutely. Look at this. Hey, Friedberg. Here's your time machine. Check it out. There's your favorite show. I don't want to make you more emotional. But there is your guy, Stanley Tucci from Bull. I think it on TNT.

• 1:09:49David Friedberg?

  I think it only made it one season, right?

• 1:09:51Jason Calacanis?

  One season, but Tucci gang in full effect.

• 1:09:54David Friedberg?

  I was such a tech nerd growing up, but I never thought about the business of technology. And then the startup boom happened and you got this bull show on TV and I'm like, man, this is so much more exciting than sitting in a frigging lab. Doing mathematical modeling where I was like pulling my frigging hair out. I'm like, I want to get after that. And the rest is history, you know?

• 1:10:11Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Have you guys watched Stanley Tucci on HBO where he tours Italy and he does these little?

• 1:10:15Jason Calacanis?

  So great. And on TikTok, I have seen it and I've seen him cook on TikTok. He's like, today. Is it rolling? It's rolling. Today I'm going to make you a fruit of the mare. It's a got the. But I'm doing it in the capaccia base and we're going to put and I'm like, I just. Can this guy do ASMR or put me to bed at night? I mean, this guy, he is, I I'm got a man crush on Tucci.

• 1:10:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Tucci is the best.

• 1:10:40Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, he is. I would like to roll with Tucci. Can you imagine if we went to Italy and just had like a? Just roll with Tucci through Italy? I love that guy.

• 1:10:50David Friedberg?

  Any dream is possible, J. K. You could pull it off.

• 1:10:52Jason Calacanis?

  Where we're all dreaming here. We're all dreaming here. All right.

• 1:10:56David Friedberg?

  We're still dreamers, by the way. Really important. Everyone should know that. I think like there's no. The thing that the thing that a lot of people assume. This is the truth about humans in general. There's an end to the rainbow, but there isn't. You ride the rainbow till you die. That's it. And there's always hope. There's always dreams. There's always more and it doesn't stop. So it makes it fun.

• 1:11:16Jason Calacanis?

  Are you taking the ketamine in Austin or something? What happened? You just got all full of something.

• 1:11:19David Friedberg?

  I'm a little hungover today. I started drinking at 10 a.m. yesterday.

• 1:11:22Jason Calacanis?

  We went to, um, we went to the mothership last night.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  Oh, how was it?

• 1:11:25Jason Calacanis?

  And we, well, we hung out with a couple of your boys, I think.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  Who'd you hang out with?

• 1:11:30David Friedberg?

  Tony.

• 1:11:30Jason Calacanis?

  Well.

• 1:11:31David Friedberg?

  Tony.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  Of course, Tony. Tony, the legend.

• 1:11:34Jason Calacanis?

  And, um.

• 1:11:34David Friedberg?

  Shane Gillis was there.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  Shane.

• 1:11:37Jason Calacanis?

  Shane Gillis was there, but he was big time. He was big time. There was a mob around and we didn't get to meet him. Uh, the guy Bert, who take, I didn't barely recognize. Yeah, he had his shirt on, so I didn't recognize him, but.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:11:48Jason Calacanis?

  I was like, but then I saw the body shape and I was like, yeah, that's, that's probably, probably him. When did you start in comedy?

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  I was, uh, I think it's almost been like 18 years or something like that.

• 1:11:58Jason Calacanis?

  So you started in your early twenties in New York, going to the Funny Bone or what?

• 1:12:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I have a question actually, yeah.

• 1:12:02Jason Calacanis?

  How'd you get into it?

• 1:12:03Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How do you keep your, like, how do you pay for your life before you make it? How, like, what? Like, is it that you have a normal day job?

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  I lived, I lived with my parents for like a very long time. Like my parents lived in East Village, so I was walking distance from like multiple comedy clubs. It was, you know, incredibly, uh, I mean, I worked like with my parents for a little bit, then I managed restaurants and I like just managed them.

• 1:12:26Jason Calacanis?

  You managed restaurants in Manhattan?

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did. I started in Santa Barbara when I was going to college. That's where I did my first comedy gig. And then I managed a restaurant out in Brooklyn and, um,

• 1:12:35Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, really?

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Not very good.

• 1:12:36Jason Calacanis?

  Would I know it?

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  It was Biscuit Barbecue. It was in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

• 1:12:39Jason Calacanis?

  Oh.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  And then, um, and then I started to make a little money in stand-up. It was like enough to like buy a mimosas falafel. I like had like a five to 10.

• 1:12:48Jason Calacanis?

  Falafel money.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  I had, I had a five to $10 a day budget and I like, I could eat cereal for breakfast and then I just, and I saved some money because I was going to school. Well, when I was going to school, I was working at that restaurant and I like saved some money and like I had a little pipe dream of opening up a bar with a friend of mine in New York. And then I was like, you know what? I'm just going to spend this money trying to be a comedian and I hope by the time I get. Rid of the money, I'm making money at comedy and it came down to like $700 in my bank account. I was like renting out the room where I slept in and I would sleep in a closet in my apartment. And it just, and it worked out. It just worked out. I started making a couple of money, do a couple of gigs, start touring, got on a TV show. And then it, then it kind of worked out.

• 1:13:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Was there a moment that where, like, because when you, when, you know, when the cancel culture was alive and well, that's when I first encountered you. It was initially on TikTok, actually.

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:13:40Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you were on fire because you were saying stuff nobody else was saying. And I thought, how does he even dare to pull this shit off? And so was there, was there a moment that where you broke or you tipped or no?

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  So I, you kind of like, it's interesting. You kind of break and then you go away. Like, so I, so I broke on like some MTV shows and I was, you know, doing all these things on MTV. I had my own shows and all that kind of stuff. And then I kind of, you know, the MTV thing kind of dried up and then I kind of went away, but I was luckily doing this podcast with Charlamagne. And the podcast was very popular and that was like providing for me. And then I was doing some shows on the road. And, you know, people would come out from the podcast, but, um, and then I really couldn't get any traction in standup world. So when I was doing like comedy stuff with MTV, it wasn't really in the standup world in this because my standup maybe wasn't of the ilk of what was like popular at the time. And I have a lot of empathy, by the way, for like the people who are just working at a network. They're producing these shows, like they, they're kids in private school.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  I want to tell a crazy joke about women or gays or whatever the fuck it is. And they're like, I'm not trying to get fired and like, I'm just trying, my kids are private school. We just got them into Dalton. I don't want to rock the boat. Like, you know,

• 1:14:49Chamath Palihapitiya?

  reasonable.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  You understand, like, I, I don't think that they're

• 1:14:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Self-preservation.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  Exactly. So, but I didn't want to change my comedy. So I was like, okay, where can I put it out? And luckily we were putting the podcast out on YouTube and it was successful. And I just started putting things out on YouTube and I started doing these shows and these shows started selling out. It was like really weird. Like the first thing I put out, I sold out the next weekend and I was never got sold out.

• 1:15:13Chamath Palihapitiya?

  How many seats?

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  These are like 300 seat clubs and you do maybe four or five shows a weekend.

• 1:15:18Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And you get 50 bucks a seat, 20 bucks a seat.

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  No, not even. You get a flat rate. You get two grand to do the weekend or something like that. And a lot of these times, the comedy clubs would just like call people and say, hey, do you want to see this guy? And give away the tickets for free. It was really, the old model was basically, it's like a bar. So you just get the people in and they sell the drinks. So the weekend would sell out and then another one would sell out and I was like, holy shit. Maybe, maybe there's something, there's a conversion rate that I didn't see. And I kept putting stuff out on YouTube. I would do a new clip every week for a year on YouTube. And then I put these, a special on YouTube instead. And then I learned very quickly that there was this huge like white space in the market. Like the comedy on TV was corny and people didn't really like it. And nobody was putting out like the quote unquote, like real comedy. There's different versions of comedy, but I'm being very simplistic.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  And the more edgy stuff I put on YouTube and it just exploded. And um, yeah, my career kind of really took off from there. And then COVID came around and there was a, I was able to be a little bit more honest because I wasn't tied to a network and worried about maybe losing my job at the network.

• 1:16:24David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  And then it just, I think in America, we reward bravery. Yeah.

• 1:16:28David Friedberg?

  You just signed a Netflix deal, right? I mean, you did the show.

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:33David Friedberg?

  We're actually doing the show in Austin tonight where we're going to talk with some folks about this general concept. Where you start out as kind of an independent, say whatever you want. You're totally free. It's your own platform. It's your own voice.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:44David Friedberg?

  And then you go sign a deal with another platform. Like, are you now, you know, did you find it hard to trade the money for whatever might come along with that? There's restrictions, there's.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  There's two ways, there's two ways to look at it, right? It's like, there's one, like, I think that, I don't want to give myself too much credit here. But like, I think that what we did is created another marketplace for comedy that the streaming networks had to now compete with.

• 1:17:07David Friedberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  So they were losing comics to YouTube. Because it was more advantageous to put your comedy up on YouTube and build a following and then go sell tickets on the road. Whereas before, the only way you could like really make a big chunk of money on your comedies if you got one of these fancy specials. Now people are like, I don't even want to do the special because if I put it on YouTube, I can tour for years and really build a fan base to have this autonomy. The Netflix thing is interesting because like Netflix is the second biggest, I guess, uh, streaming service on the planet. It's like YouTube, the Netflix. So if I already have this huge imprint on YouTube, it would only be smart for me to now tap into the second biggest and see if there's some people there that aren't consuming my content on YouTube.

• 1:17:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  So back to the, so then back to the, the guy who's got the, the kid at Dalton now, when you go and negotiate a deal with Netflix, are they basically silent or do they have?

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  Not a single note.

• 1:17:57Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah. So you do whatever you want and it is what it is. Let it rip.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  Now, my last special was supposed to be with Amazon. So it was with Amazon and they had some notes. And I bought it back from them and I put it out myself.

• 1:18:08David Friedberg?

  Wow, really?

• 1:18:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I sold it, I sold it myself. And it was actually one of the coolest things ever because I think I'm maybe one of the only comics that actually knows what they're worth. Yeah. You don't really know what you're.

• 1:18:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Well, walk us through that. So you do it and what do the notes say that you're like?

• 1:18:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was two jokes and like, I get it. They make money selling toilet paper. Like, why are they gonna have this huge, you know, uh,

• 1:18:32David Friedberg?

  You made fun of the toilet paper industry. I got it.

• 1:18:35Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  Big toilet paper, big TP, very powerful lobby. You know what's funny is like culture has changed and I feel like a lot of times the streamers are like down river from culture. So like, I bet now I would be able to put it out on Amazon and be totally fine. But at that time, it was maybe very edgy and a volatile time culturally. So I was able to put it out and, you know,

• 1:18:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  But you had the choice, right? You could have taken the jokes out and kept it. But then instead you took the harder path, which is I'm just gonna buy it back.

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:01Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And I take the risk and I'll figure it out later.

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. I, I have, I'm not risk averse at all. I actually enjoy risky. It kind of excites me. But, um, what excites me more is like putting out the piece exactly how I want to put it out. And I can't like scream about censorship and comedians should do the jokes we wanna do. And then the second somebody gives me a big check, I go, whoa, we don't have to do the joke. Like, I have to be at least consistent on that. And, um, Culture continue to change and you gotta give Netflix credit too. Like they took a lot of, they took a lot of hits for putting out comedy that some people thought was maybe a little bit too offensive.

• 1:19:34Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, the Chappelle's stuff, yeah.

• 1:19:36Jason Calacanis?

  Chappelle's stuff is really. I put him in the crosshairs. They stood strong, right?

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  Absolutely. They stood strong and like seeing that gave me a lot of confidence. I was like, okay, like, and they did literally, we just made the whole thing and they just gave us money. So like they were not involved at all in like the creation, so to say. They, they were involved in giving us money for it and then they're involved in the marketing, obviously. And their algorithm and getting it out.

• 1:20:01Jason Calacanis?

  That's all Sarandos. He's, he believes in comedy.

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but he's like a huge comedy fan from back in the day. I think people don't realize that about him. Like, you need somebody who actually loves the art and is not just looking at it as a thing that they can monetize. Like there's a, the term this guy used, that you have to find somebody spiritually aligned with you. And that's not mumbo jumbo. It like, they truly understand the intention of comedy. So things aren't as hurtful or painful to them because they understand what you intend to do. So.

• 1:20:29Jason Calacanis?

  And then I got.

• 1:20:29Jason Calacanis?

  It's interesting too. They, they tried to cancel you? What, what, what was the joke?

• 1:20:33Speaker 02

  Who?

• 1:20:33Jason Calacanis?

  The, the mobs. Cause they went after Tony Hinchcliffe twice.

• 1:20:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:20:38Jason Calacanis?

  And each time he went 10x. They came after Chamath on this program. That was the first level up. We got three times the audience after they tried to cancel Chamath.

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:45Jason Calacanis?

  The White House released a statement.

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't really work when you have like core fans that believe in you. And I feel like you guys have probably built that, you know, the relationships you've built with your fans. There's probably people very grateful of the information that you give them. And so when they try to paint you in a certain light, you actually have like a hundred hours of time with those people. They, they know you to be more than that one statement that you've said. So now they're not as concerned about that thing you said that maybe is taken out of context or people have been offended by. I think like the biggest thing that people miss about comedians is like. You're allowed to be offended by the joke that I say, like, you're allowed to react however you wanna react about it. You had your life, you went through some crazy shit.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  Maybe you're, maybe you were bullied as a kid and like you don't want other people to potentially have those feelings. So you see a joke that could elicit that and you're like, I wanna protect that from, protect them from that. That's kinda noble. I'm like, I'm cool with that. If you yourself tell me you don't like me teasing you, I'm not gonna tease you personally ever again. I want you to feel good. But it doesn't mean that I won't continue to make those jokes somewhere else. And I think my shows, like I got the most diverse audience in comedy history.

• 1:21:54Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  So it's like, you come out to one of my shows, you can't tell me that people don't like these jokes. And I tried very hard to like, like if I'm curious about your culture, you'll know it through the jokes. It's not some little bullshit, like I'll try to dive deep and even surprise you about something that I might know. And I think in that way, people start to feel seen and they don't feel bullied, they actually feel like represented. And they're like excited about it.

• 1:22:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Look, you, you said something at the beginning, which I thought was really interesting, which is you're like a, you have to, great comedians are great observers of culture. So can you, can you just tell us like, just observe the cultural moment, what? We talked a lot about it, but I just want you to be maybe like, put a point on it. Where are we? Where's America? What the hell is going on?

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  Like what's happened, what's happening like?

• 1:22:39Chamath Palihapitiya?

  However, you feel that question, like what the hell is going on?

• 1:22:42Speaker 02

  Um. All time low confidence in institutions. Low confidence in information.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  There's an obsession with conspiracy because there's, I mean, that's twofold. One, like it's the easiest way for dumb people to feel smart, like when you know something no one else knows and you get to share with people. Like there's that like dopamine hit where like, I bet you didn't know this happened, you know?

• 1:23:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  Um, but those thrive in times where there's not real transparency. So I think everybody's looking for answers and nothing is exactly how it seems. And the only way to re-instill that confidence is I think like brutal transparency. Like you gotta just be like really honest with the people. This is what it is. And we're Americans, we're proud people, you know, so we can get through whatever you say. But you gotta tell it to us as it is. And I think we're just assessing relationships right now. And I think like when the economy is rough. Like you're seeing all the Jewish stuff right now, right? Like obviously with the conflict. Well, this is the thing you gotta understand, like, most people have never met a Jewish person. Like most Americans have no clue what a Jewish person is outside of Kerbium, Judaism, or Seinfeld.

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  They don't know what it is. They think Jews are Upper East Side New Yorkers.

• 1:23:55Jason Calacanis?

  Like the, yeah, the, like Seinfeld, or they think it's like Hasidim, like it's just like one or the other.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  Exactly. They don't even know what like a Sephardic Jew, they don't know what an African Jew is, or a Moroccan Jew, they have no clue what that is. And they shouldn't. They're like, how many Jews are there? They're like more people from Laos than there are Jews, right? Like, it's like a very small population. So I think there's like a little bit of a disconnect. And, you know, when you don't know a people, and I think this is probably true, and I, I could be off, but I think there's like an ambient feeling towards Jews from people who don't know Jews. It's an ambient light. And the stereotypes are probably not like the best. They're not exactly negative as long as the economy's good. Right? They're like, oh, they, they're successful. They kind of stick together. They, they own businesses. They, whatever.

• 1:24:44Speaker 02

  And as long as the economy's good, everybody's cool. And then eggs get expensive and you're buying on your rent and you don't feel hope. And you don't, and then you start going, why do they got all that? What the, what are they about? Why are they, why are they separatists? You know, like, I'm here proselytizing, I'm trying to get everybody to go to heaven and they just got their own thing with. And it's very easy for them to become this like other group. And then you extrapolate that with what's happening like Palestine and, and Israel. And you get people to start like assessing like the relationship between America and another country. Like you saw America become very uninterested in Ukraine quickly. Like we, we, we, the second the economy goes down, we start going, well, what do they do for us?

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  What, why are we giving them? Like, and they're starting to ask similar questions about Israel. And there's a lot of antisemites that are jumping on it and they're muddying the whole thing. They're going, ah, this is what did they control the government, they do this, all the, every conspiracy.

• 1:25:44Jason Calacanis?

  We told you so. By the way, you're, you're speaking a profound secret that.

• 1:25:51Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Many administrations in government have known for a long time, and I think this is where some of the mistrust comes from. I talked about this like, maybe it was like a couple of months ago, but the most incredible stock market was actually under Biden. The most amount of money printed was under Biden. The most cumulative total budget deficits was under Biden. The most amount of short-term refinancing of debt was under Biden. And part of what you can explain is that if you keep the signals that everything is healthy or up, you're allowed to propagate all of these other things that would get very quickly recapitulated.

• 1:26:30Chamath Palihapitiya?

  And when you take the gas out of the market and you take the gas out of all these other markets and all of a sudden the price of energy is up and the price of this is up and the price of that is up, then you start to question, hold on a second, why are all of these things as important? You know, the above the line, below the line conversation that we have tried to have several times on this pod, Jason.

• 1:26:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you have to like meet people, you have to meet people where they feel in order to communicate with them, right? Like they could like, when people right now like assessing like America's relationship with Israel, like it's, it's, and they, you hear these like soundbites, like that's our closest ally. And then they go, well, what does that mean? It's like, well, let's explain to them what that means. Like, let's explain the importance of that relationship and how it's beneficial to Americans. Because if you don't explain it and you just go, oh, just be quiet, whatever, then they start to look at these lunatics on Twitter and start to go, wait, is that, is that true?

• 1:27:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And then they're down in the conspiracy hall.

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  Exactly. Like you have to explain, like, I don't know what the mineral deal was about, but I know for with, with Ukraine, but I know for a second, there were some Americans who go, oh, we're going to get some minerals out of that? All right, minerals sound good.

• 1:27:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, they're going to pay us back.

• 1:27:35Speaker 02

  It's that, it's that simplistic, right? So it's like, I think, I think that kind of communication is important and it will actually help understand these relationships, which I imagine are very important. I'm not privy to all the geopolitical decisions that are going on there. Who knows? Intelligence from Israel could have thwarted 20 more 9/11s. Yeah, maybe you can't say that because you expose the intelligence operatives you have in the field. But it would, I think, be helpful to understand the value of that for the everyday American. So that when you see something crazy on Twitter, you can go, okay, you're just a anti-Semi and you're looking for a justification for your hate.

• 1:28:11Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is your point about Trump. Sometimes he has these.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  Maybe we'll see you later, bro. Take care, David.

• 1:28:16Jason Calacanis?

  This is like, I think.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  There's gonna be a conspiracy theory about that right now. I just want to let you know.

• 1:28:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you just.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  You talked about Israel and he's like, alright, I'm out of here.

• 1:28:24Jason Calacanis?

  And the one Jewish guy left. Way to go. Way to go, Chelsea.

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  This is how it starts, David. David, this is how it starts.

• 1:28:31Chamath Palihapitiya?

  You drove him out. Thanks a lot.

• 1:28:32Jason Calacanis?

  You drove him out, right. Chelsea, when you said, um, you know, Trump's a masterful kind of communicator here. Biden.

• 1:28:38Speaker 02

  Listener.

• 1:28:39Jason Calacanis?

  Gave all these weapons to, to Ukraine under the auspices of what's called a loan lease. They have to pay them back. But Biden never communicated that well.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  Tell us.

• 1:28:49Jason Calacanis?

  And then Trump comes out and he's like, you know what? We gave them 180 million, 180 billion. They're gonna give us 500 billion back. We're making a 40. He, he basically described a 42% compounded return.

• 1:29:00Speaker 02

  Sounds good to me.

• 1:29:01Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, better than anything that's ever happened. I mean, he, he's out there in terms of his ability to communicate. Chamath, as we wrap here, any final thoughts?

• 1:29:09Chamath Palihapitiya?

  What do you think about Trump? And what he's, how he's doing and what he's doing so far? And what do you think about Elon and Doge?

• 1:29:18Jason Calacanis?

  Ooh.

• 1:29:19Speaker 02

  Okay, so, uh, Trump and what he's doing, how he's doing so far, like, I, I, I don't know. Like, in other words, like, I don't, I don't know if I can, like, assess it right away. Maybe I'm giving him a little bit longer, uh, like, landing strip or whatever than other people, because I have a little bit more hope or optimism. Again, if you don't like the guy, you go and see how horrible this is immediately. But I'm gonna give him a little bit more leeway to see. If it doesn't work out and it's really horrible, I'll be the first person to call it out. Like, I, I, I've, he's in power. We should definitely check the people in power. But I'm hoping that these actions in the short term are beneficial in the long term. Is everyone gonna work out? No. Um, Doge is like, I'm so depressed about, not depressed is stupid, but like, I'm bummed about because

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  I don't think there's any American that is pro-waste inefficiency and bloated. This should be a bipartisan issue. Like, all Americans should be coming together going, oh my God, the DMV is gonna get better? This sounds awesome. And I think, you know, I have a lot of respect for Elon, but I think sometimes on Twitter, he's like twisting the knife a little bit. And it's like, you don't need to twist the knife. Like, we all want this. This is something we can come together with as a country and support. This sounds great. Don't twist it.

• 1:30:37Speaker 02

  Just kind of let it be, show your wins. When you do something wrong, we can acknowledge the things that we did are wrong and we'll respect that. It bums me that this has become so partisan and I do understand there are a lot of people on the left that are making this partisan as well.

• 1:30:51Jason Calacanis?

  They're weaponizing.

• 1:30:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  There was this, there was this crazy clip between Rogan and Elon where Rogan was like, how does all this go down actually? And he's like, well, I can't really speak about the corruption because I'm afraid it would get me assassinated. He's like, actually, if I tell you what I know. It was the weirdest like two minute clip and then they just kind of left it and moved on. And my brain was like, what are they talking about? What, what must be going on?

• 1:31:15Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, there's a lot of money going out the door.

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, but who's killing Elon? Like, if we are gonna have World War III, don't you want the guy that has the rockets to go to Mars on your side?

• 1:31:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you kind of want the super genius on your side, for sure.

• 1:31:29Speaker 02

  Another thing that's like really interesting to me is like, people keep going, people keep doing these things like, what is Elon's play? Like, what is he doing here? Like, is he actually gonna take over? And it's like, Elon has been dealing with like, local government for so long, trying to push through. Like, he is not an American citizen, he cannot be present. He is at the highest position he will ever be in his lifetime in America. You can't get higher than being the right-hand man of the president, since you're not from America. You can never be president. So I think he's going to behave really well, because now he's in the most powerful position he will ever be in. If you want to talk about, like, power plays, you gotta watch out for JD. That guy's a, that guy's high emotional

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  intelligence. Like, that, that's somebody that I would be keeping my eyes on if I'm Trump. But Elon, he's gonna be a good, he's gonna be your best friend, because it's only downhill if he pisses Trump off.

• 1:32:23Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting, interesting. Little Manchurian candidate for JD.

• 1:32:28Speaker 02

  I don't, no, no, no, I'm not saying that he's gonna do anything bad, but he is like...

• 1:32:31Jason Calacanis?

  Right.

• 1:32:32Speaker 02

  Don't tr- don't treat him lightly. We got this.

• 1:32:35Jason Calacanis?

  Don't sleep on JD.

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  New Yorkers, we do this all the time. We hear someone with like a southern accent. We think they're a goofball. And it's like, that guy went from like a broken home to Yale.

• 1:32:43Jason Calacanis?

  Appalachia to Yale and then the VP and he's forty. He's your age. He's like forty.

• 1:32:48Speaker 02

  He called Trump Hitler or something and he ended up as his.

• 1:32:51Jason Calacanis?

  He said, I'm a never Trump guy.

• 1:32:53Speaker 02

  He's so to say that he's not emotionally intelligent, to say that he doesn't know how to manage up or whatever that term is.

• 1:33:00Jason Calacanis?

  He's sappy.

• 1:33:01Speaker 02

  I would, I would, hey, keep an eye on him.

• 1:33:03Jason Calacanis?

  Keep an eye on him for sure. All right, listen. Andrew Schulz is playing at the Funny Bone on April sixteenth and seventeenth. He'll be at Chuckles on the twentieth and the twenty first. Drink minimum. Uh, by the V L. You know where to find them. Incredible, incredible. Netflix special.

• 1:33:20Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Who do you think, who do you, wait, last question. Who do you think is the funniest? If you had to just take a wild stab at who the funniest person? No, me, me, Jason or Freebie.

• 1:33:30Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, oh, of us.

• 1:33:31Speaker 02

  Between the three of you? Um, okay, so.

• 1:33:34Jason Calacanis?

  You can say me.

• 1:33:35Speaker 02

  Jason, so Jason is the most like naturally inclined to be funny. He's probably just the most funny being around. Uh, Chamath will probably get the biggest laughs when he says something funny because he's like, he's not asking for much. Like he'll just say something that's like a dart and it'll kind of like hit you and you'll be like, oh.

• 1:33:52Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  And then I think David will like structure something really funny and you'll be like, oh, that was a clever, I see how you did that right there.

• 1:34:01Jason Calacanis?

  I am, I was actually, when I was an astrophysicist, Schulz, I am.

• 1:34:04Speaker 02

  So that would be my.

• 1:34:05Jason Calacanis?

  Myself, I get summer stock.

• 1:34:08Speaker 02

  That'll be my take. Like I think if we're off the pod, I think Chamath says some like wild shit that everybody goes, what the? I think you say that the most. That's what I would say.

• 1:34:16Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm. There you go. All right. Andy Schulz picks me. Do you have it, mom? I would like to clip that and, uh, yeah. All right. Continued success. Come back anytime.

• 1:34:25Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I like the way Schulz pronounces, but I may go to Chamath. I like that.

• 1:34:28Speaker 02

  Chamath.

• 1:34:29Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, Chamath is too. It's too used actually. We should go to a different pronunciation.

• 1:34:33Jason Calacanis?

  I love Chamath. Chamath is just so incorrect.

• 1:34:36Speaker 02

  It's tough with the, it's tough with, I know it's Sri Lankan, but it's tough with the names from over there like my podcast co-host Akash, right?

• 1:34:42Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Akash.

• 1:34:43Speaker 02

  Everybody calls him Akash. Now, I, his name is spelled with two As.

• 1:34:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  As. Akash.

• 1:34:49Speaker 02

  So it's like Akash, you, if it's got two As next to each other.

• 1:34:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Yeah, you want to go there.

• 1:34:53Speaker 02

  After the K, you go there. But it's Akash. So it is tricky, but he said like his parents specifically picked a name he thought that Americans would be able to pronounce. They calculated that. And like.

• 1:35:06Chamath Palihapitiya?

  They were trolling him.

• 1:35:07Speaker 02

  I think that's like a, I think that's a really beautiful thing for a kid. Like you, you, you know, like how much.

• 1:35:12Jason Calacanis?

  They could have called it, they could have named him John. Steve.

• 1:35:15Speaker 02

  If they wanted it pronounced. They had to keep it real though. They still had to keep it real.

• 1:35:19Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I was about eight when I could really, when I could read and write English. Well, eight. Okay. Cause it was my second language. And when I saw my name written out, I was like, what the did they do to me here? What is this? My middle name, my middle name is like 15 other letters. My middle name.

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  A name that has math in it. Like they knew what they wanted.

• 1:35:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yes. They were like, if you can, if you can pronounce this, you can solve the Pythagorean theorem.

• 1:35:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  That's so true.

• 1:35:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. This is, this is harder than the Pythagorean theorem.

• 1:35:47Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Be an engineer.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  This guy's gonna be.

• 1:35:52Chamath Palihapitiya?

  He's going to figure it out. He'll get us to a model.

• 1:35:54Jason Calacanis?

  He's going to get us.

• 1:35:55Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Let me ask you a question, Andrew. Is it racist if I do an Indian impersonation? Cause I know I can do Italian and Irish, but can I do Indian?

• 1:36:02Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's funny, bro.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  I don't think so, but I think it's like.

• 1:36:04Chamath Palihapitiya?

  Is it the intent?

• 1:36:05Speaker 02

  I don't even think it's the intent. I think if you like, if you say certain things, like if you say bitter, right? Like if, if you say that, like, that's like my love. Like, you know, if, if you say little things that are more than just the sound, but if you tap into the culture, like to let them know, hey, I didn't learn this from The Simpsons. And I learned it from my buddy's family. Then I think you'll see people who are like Indians, Sri Lankan, and they'll be like, oh, he, oh, he got, he's got friends. He got, he's, you know.

• 1:36:38Chamath Palihapitiya?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and until I make my move to comedian, I'm not gonna do it. I'm gonna save it to when I get my, uh, Tony, uh, Kill Tony set.

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. What's your, what's your Korean accent? Can you do that? Like, can we go through?

• 1:36:50Jason Calacanis?

  I can do Korean because my wife's Korean and her dad, I'll tell you what my, I can because my dad, my, my father-in-law, I, I went to China, he's an industrialist, he's there. And I said, hey, listen, I'd like to marry your daughter. And he said, okay. Two, two conditions. And I said, okay. And he said, do it fast. And he poked me, Andrew, so hard, like a reinforced poke with his finger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On my shoulder, get a bruise. I'm like, oh. Yeah. And then he goes, and I said, what's the second thing? He says, no refunds. He says it just like that. And I was like, okay, okay. I'll marry your daughter, no refunds.

• 1:37:31Jason Calacanis?

  Do it fast. And I literally had to marry her within a year because he knew, he was like, listen, I got, he had four daughters. And he was like, I gotta move inventory. I love it. And I was the first, I married the oldest daughter. None, none of the other daughters could get married until I married my wife, which was the greatest thing I ever did. Three beautiful kids, you know how it is. And listen, good luck. You can have a second and third, Chelsea. I know you got some eggs. I hope so, man. God will. Three's the right number. If you want to go, if you want to do a half Elon, you can go with Chamath's plan. He's on six or seven. I'm on five, bro. I'm on five. Five, I mean, anything's possible. And then Friedberg's on four, I'm on three. I think three's the right number. I'm gonna catch up, boys. I'm gonna catch up. All right, listen, continue success. Thanks for doing this. Thank you so much for having us, guys. Cheers.

• 1:38:16Jason Calacanis?

  Rain Man David Sack.

• 1:38:20Speaker 04

  And instead, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

• 1:38:24Jason Calacanis?

  Love you, Wes.

• 1:38:25Speaker 04

  I'm the queen of Kinoah.

• 1:38:33Speaker 04

  Besties are back.

• 1:38:36Speaker 04

  That is my dog taking a licking on your driveway.

• 1:38:44Chamath Palihapitiya?

  We should all just get a room and just have one big U Georgie because they're all just, it's like this, like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

• 1:38:52Speaker 04

  What, you're the bee? What, you're a bee?

• 1:38:57Speaker 04

  We need to get merch.