Jason Calacanis: Anarcho Capitalism

Transcript

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Speaker 75 All right, guys, real fast here, it's Wednesday, so a reminder, I'm over on the next level.

Speaker 76 We got the crew back together.

Speaker 77 Sarah and JVL, everybody's off vacation.

Speaker 26 We're going to be punchy.

Speaker 78 That comes out for you guys on Wednesday evening.

Speaker 81 So make sure you're subscribed on your podcast app of choice.

Speaker 77 If you haven't, this podcast, well,

Speaker 76 buckle in.

Speaker 5 I have been promising.

Speaker 85 And I don't know that I've fully lived up to my promise, but I'm working on it.

Speaker 39 I want to make sure we are mixing it up in the show on Wednesdays, bringing in experts some weeks, bringing in people that disagree with me from my left on a topic, hashing that out.

Speaker 89 We've done that a few times on foreign policy stuff, bringing in people that disagree with me on the other side.

Speaker 26 And when Jason Calicanis of the All-In podcast tweeted last week that he thought that Trump's first six months has been solid, I was like, well,

Speaker 6 that's a topic that we should hash out together.

Speaker 19 And so we do over the course of the next hour, talk a little bit about AI and crypto at the end.

Speaker 92 And

Speaker 26 I think that you're in for an interesting show.

Speaker 10 So stick around.

Speaker 88 Up next, J Cal, as they call him, from the All-In podcast.

Speaker 91 And we'll see you over on the next level and back here here tomorrow with one of our faves, Michael Weiss.

Speaker 95 Hello, and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Speaker 75 Delighted to welcome back a journalist, turned entrepreneur, and angel investor, turned podcaster.

Speaker 96 He co-hosts the podcast this week in Startups, as well as All In with Chamaz palhapatya boo david sacks boo and david freedberg it's jason calicanis what's up j cal

Speaker 97 it's good to be here good to be here i was just listening to our last conversation which was october 15th before the election and we we were uh we were going at it a bit how did it hold up

Speaker 97 i didn't re-listen yeah it's it's worth a re-listen i think you know

Speaker 97 You had a lot of questions at that time of, you know, how does Silicon Valley think about Trump? Because remember, that was when the preference cascade kind of had just started.

Speaker 97 They had done, Shamatha and Sachs had done their fundraiser. Elon came out in support of Trump.

Speaker 97 And I guess many people, I hear back channels that even the administration or people in and around the administration think that that was key to winning the election for Trump.

Speaker 8 Certainly didn't hurt.

Speaker 94 Certainly didn't hurt.

Speaker 88 All the Elon money, et cetera.

Speaker 79 And I'll be interested in your take on how everybody looks at it now.

Speaker 99 Like, what's that nine months later?

Speaker 84 But just really quick first, for people don't know Alin, don't know you, like, and who maybe you know, weren't listening to this last October, just give us, just give us a real quick reader's digest on what's your story.

Speaker 97 Okay, so it's a podcast, it's four dudes started during COVID. They're all venture capitalists slash

Speaker 97 business builders for the past 30, 40 years, or 30 years each. So,

Speaker 97 four incredibly successful in-business guys who would would talk about business, technology, media. One of them, David Sachs, is really into politics.

Speaker 97 He's part of the PayPal mafia, and he went all in for Trump. He originally started with DeSantis, I guess was, as he said, it his preferred candidate.
And then when DeSantis,

Speaker 97 you know...

Speaker 102 Flamed out.

Speaker 97 Yeah, flamed out, I guess would be a good way to say it.

Speaker 97 He went all in on Trump, so to speak. The podcast is regularly in the top 10 episodes.

Speaker 92 And what about you?

Speaker 81 How do you fit in?

Speaker 92 What's your like, you know, give people a little Jason background?

Speaker 97 Independent, moderate. Yeah, independent, moderate.
I hate politics. Don't care for politicians.

Speaker 35 You talk about it a lot now, though.

Speaker 97 I've been forced to, and so I've been giving it a lot of thought. And

Speaker 97 yeah, I bought some domain names, Mayor Jason, Governor Jason, and presidentjason.com. So I have the three domain names.
I'm the only American board member of the quartet.

Speaker 97 So if they need a Manchurian candidate from the all-in podcast, it's going going to be by default me.

Speaker 97 And I've been offered a couple of times to, like, they wanted me to run for mayor, not just them, but other folks. And they put up $2 million for me to run for mayor.
Mayor of what?

Speaker 97 San Francisco when I lived there.

Speaker 8 Lurie, you got to feel good about Lurie.

Speaker 6 I mean, he's a Democrat.

Speaker 97 Yeah, I met with him. I met with him before he was joining, and he was such a wet noodle.
And like, I was like, you have to go right at London Breed and right at security.

Speaker 97 All people care about now is safety in that city. Everything else is great.
Just go 100% at safety. And And that's what he's done.
And,

Speaker 97 you know, it's still dangerous there, but I think he's trying.

Speaker 8 He's trying at least. Yeah.
You can give him credit.

Speaker 6 You can just give him credit just because he's a Democrat now, you know.

Speaker 8 I mean, like he's doing it.

Speaker 97 No, I voted like we talked about last time.

Speaker 97 I think, you know, having been a New Yorker my whole life and lived in LA and San Francisco, now I live in the great state of Texas and Austin on a horse ranch.

Speaker 97 Like you, I fled the Bay Area for better pastures, quite literally, in my case. You know, I vote for the best candidate.

Speaker 97 I think most people would call me like fiscally conservative, socially liberal, I guess, which is how you would describe the entire Trump administration.

Speaker 97 In order to win the second term, this is how I tweak everybody.

Speaker 97 I'm like, in order to win the second term, a Clinton Democrat, Trump, had to hire like five or six and get the support of another two or three incredibly high-profile Democrats.

Speaker 97 Elon, Joe Rogan, Luttnick, Besant,

Speaker 8 Chamoth. Nutlick was a Democrat?

Speaker 76 I didn't know that.

Speaker 97 Howard was a New York Democrat, yeah. All of them are.

Speaker 97 I mean, I grew up in New York in the 80s, 90s, and into the 2000s, and they're all the same exact globalist, pro-economy, socially liberal, gay rights, legalized weed, you know, kind of cohort.

Speaker 97 And Trump just took over the

Speaker 97 Republican Party and then gave them those Clinton kind of, I think, vibes, which is why they all joined it.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 44 Okay, so this is what we're going to explore a little bit because I pick up different vibes and that's fine.

Speaker 88 And so I want just for a little context for people, I'm going to do a big wind up here.

Speaker 94 Sure.

Speaker 104 In November when we started this, I was like, I have a couple of pledges for this podcast of the next year.

Speaker 105 Not when we started this podcast, when we started the journey of having to deal with Trump 2.0.

Speaker 10 I was like,

Speaker 8 I want you to. Talked about that term.

Speaker 81 Yeah, I was like, I want to, I'm only going to talk about things I actually care about.

Speaker 91 I'm not going to do pretend outrage.

Speaker 105 I have to just, I'm going to care about what I care about.

Speaker 91 There'll be plenty to be actually outraged about.

Speaker 107 I'm going to focus on that.

Speaker 79 And I'm going to want to have people on to challenge me.

Speaker 88 I've done pretty good about that on finding people from the left.

Speaker 107 I would like to do even more, kind of more in the Zorun, kind of lefty camp.

Speaker 10 Socialist camp.

Speaker 103 Natural home.

Speaker 104 Yeah, socialist, or even whatever, a populist left, whatever you want to call it, like different, you know, sometimes I guess Zoran's actually explicitly socialist, but or folks that just have more lefty populist views than me on foreign policy in particular.

Speaker 93 But I've struggled to live up to my pledge of trying to get on people to hash out

Speaker 23 a more positive, if you will, view of what the administration is doing.

Speaker 29 And the reason for that is that, like, I refuse to have anybody on that is, that is going to be full of shit.

Speaker 79 Like, I do not want to argue with somebody that will not say the same thing to me on the pod that they would say if we were just hanging out at the bar.

Speaker 8 Right.

Speaker 85 And I just, I think that there are a lot of Trump supporters who there are genuine things they like about him, but like they're hesitant to say the bad things

Speaker 108 because of like the culture of intimidation around him or because of whatever.

Speaker 94 They don't want to to have him. He'll be exiled.

Speaker 82 Exiled. All right.

Speaker 8 So that isn't you, in my experience.

Speaker 13 You're willing to critique him.

Speaker 115 And so when I saw you sent this tweet a couple of days ago and I DM'd you, it was, it said, first six months has been solid, still work to do.

Speaker 5 And I was like, that's actually a good premise to have a podcast on.

Speaker 88 Okay.

Speaker 78 Because Jason thinks the first six months has been solid, which implies that not perfect.

Speaker 82 He has complaints.

Speaker 44 I think it's been like.

Speaker 2 close, like not the worst case scenario, but pretty disastrous.

Speaker 105 I think it's been pretty bad across almost all the metrics.

Speaker 77 And so, I figured, let's just hash it out.

Speaker 92 So, I'm sure we have some agreements on the negative.

Speaker 77 So, we'll get to that later.

Speaker 83 What about the positive?

Speaker 79 Like, what do you think has been solid?

Speaker 97 What have you liked about it? So, from a business perspective, and I spend my, you know, every year I invest in 100 companies. I have a 21-person venture capital firm.

Speaker 97 You know, some of the companies, I was the third or fourth investor in Uber, one of the first investors in Robinhood, Calm.

Speaker 97 And one of the really difficult things of the past four years was the anti-business, anti-capitalism sentiment of the Biden-Kamala sort of administration.

Speaker 97 And they hired somebody named Alina Khan, as you know, and she basically froze our entire industry. No M ⁇ A.

Speaker 97 And she was going to magically, through

Speaker 97 being able to predict the future, like a pre-cog in minority report, predict future competition.

Speaker 97 I invest for a living. You know, the probably 10 companies I've invested in when they were under $10 million that became unicorns, I would never have been able to predict.

Speaker 97 I knew they were great founders, but you can't really predict these things.

Speaker 97 And I've done 500 investments. So the fact that she could do this was crazy.
Since she's been removed and the wrath of Khan has ended, we've seen a flurry of MA. We've seen a bunch of IPOs.

Speaker 97 The stock market has ripped. And you've seen regulation around, and there's many reasons for it, so we'll get into that.

Speaker 97 But you've seen regulation for my friend David Sachs, who actually joined the administration, as you know, which didn't see that company.

Speaker 44 I know.

Speaker 8 I saw that. I don't know if either.
We knew that was happening.

Speaker 84 I'm just happy he doesn't have the Ukraine portfolio, but okay, let's continue.

Speaker 8 Yeah, you and I, actually.

Speaker 97 It's so great. I troll him on that one all the time, as you see publicly, but we'll get into that in a moment.
So I think that that's been fantastic because entrepreneurs create jobs in this country.

Speaker 97 Innovation has got us where we are. And you need to have a very fluid MA market.
You need to have fluid capital markets.

Speaker 97 And, you know, the last administration had contempt for innovators, for entrepreneurs, and for business in general. And they threw up tons of roadblocks and they wouldn't meet with us.

Speaker 97 So, something like crypto is the perfect example. You know, there's very simple rules of the road you could create for crypto.

Speaker 97 And instead, what they did, Gensler in the last administration, they said, Oh, come meet with us, tell us what you're doing.

Speaker 97 And then you'd meet with them, and then they would file an action against you. So, you know, those two things alone, from a business perspective, now we have some rules of the road for crypto.

Speaker 97 and you have things like, if you know what stable coins are, I won't explain them here. This is going to be fantastic for America.

Speaker 97 And then just having a framework for crypto means the amount of people who are going to lose their money in crypto because they're going to be doing stuff offshore and there's no repercussions to that.

Speaker 97 There's no legal system. There's no way for you to try to get your money back.
Onshoring that now is going to be net net a huge benefit. In those cases, I think those are all solid wins.

Speaker 97 When I look at foreign policy.

Speaker 9 Let's just stick around economic for a second, then we'll go to foreign.

Speaker 8 Just like really quick. And we'll

Speaker 8 just

Speaker 8 crypto.

Speaker 88 So you look at the solid part on economic policy.

Speaker 84 You're saying, all right, it's the changes of the regulatory.

Speaker 105 You know, Lena Kant, people don't pay attention that much was really, really, you know, kind of dialed in on this antitrust issue, preventing big mergers, going after big tech on antitrust issues.

Speaker 106 And frankly,

Speaker 30 my cards on the table, I'm probably more sympathetic to you than Lena on that issue in particular.

Speaker 18 Like the idea that, for example, it's kind of funny, right?

Speaker 106 Like Google is, let's just use an example.

Speaker 108 Google's a company that people are going at is like a big antitrust massive case now. Seemed like a monopoly at the time, makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 105 It's that, you know, I understand why it seems that way.

Speaker 101 Like AI, ChatGBT comes out of nowhere and just like totally disrupts it.

Speaker 81 All of a sudden, Google, like it's kind of like silly to think that Google's a monopoly.

Speaker 97 And now everybody's like, this happens every single time.

Speaker 97 By the time a regulator can regulate what is thought to be a monopoly, and in Google's case, they do have a social monopoly, something in the free market's going to make it happen.

Speaker 97 In almost every case,

Speaker 97 these MA transactions result in lower prices, more choice for customers, because big companies tend to not be great at innovating. Some are good, most are not.
They're slower.

Speaker 97 So she wanted to block things like Roombas and being bought by Amazon, just ticky tacky tiny things.

Speaker 97 When she did actually do a good job, I'll give her credit, is she went after things like dark patterns, which is when you try to unsubscribe, they don't let you, or bundling of software, which Microsoft has a really great ability to do.

Speaker 97 They can just add something to the Microsoft Office bundle and kill. And that would be under the category of price dumping, which is illegal.

Speaker 97 So she wanted to change the law to be: we want to prevent future competition, as opposed to just, here's a rule set for this game of basketball. And, you know, here's how it's played.

Speaker 97 And we're just going to evenly, you know, administer those rules. And so that's been a huge win.
And I think you're going to see that pay off, you know, over the next couple of years. Yeah.

Speaker 37 We'll just say that.

Speaker 117 That's a Lena Kahn agreement.

Speaker 85 I should have Lena on, by the way.

Speaker 88 Actually, Katie, remind me, we should invite Lena to come on to give the other perspective.

Speaker 8 I would love to talk to her.

Speaker 85 Yeah, we should give her the other perspective on that if she wants to chat it out.

Speaker 74 So, I understand if you're a single-issue Lena Khan voter, if you're an antitrust voter, maybe you see some good things happening.

Speaker 8 We're some better administration.

Speaker 101 Like I said, we're table crypto to the end.

Speaker 106 I thought we had aligned on crypto, so we'll have to fight about that on the end.

Speaker 79 The thing that is really confusing to me, and that I asked Cuban about this when I had him on a couple of months ago, is like the business environment was booming under Biden.

Speaker 94 Yeah.

Speaker 78 Like, I mean, the market was flying.

Speaker 97 Unemployment at a 50-year low.

Speaker 80 The big tech guys, like all these big names we're talking about, people that ended up getting red pills

Speaker 34 or whatever, started tipping more towards the MAGA side. Yeah.

Speaker 79 Elon, Andreessen, every, and all of these guys were

Speaker 34 making billions.

Speaker 118 I'm making more money than anybody has had in the history. Like unimaginable gilded age type levels of money was happening.

Speaker 96 These companies were succeeding.

Speaker 26 SP, the biggest companies are succeeding.

Speaker 79 It's like the idea that people looked at that and thought, oh man, the environment was so hostile before.

Speaker 33 I just don't see it.

Speaker 80 Again, in a specific, if like I had an MA I was trying to do that got blocked by Lena Khan.

Speaker 19 Okay.

Speaker 108 But just broader in the economy, things were going very well.

Speaker 79 And then you look at Trump and now, and which we'll get into, and there you have all these risks with tariffs, with instability.

Speaker 29 Explain that to me.

Speaker 95 Like what it doesn't feel like things are better.

Speaker 97 So the contempt issue is partially the outward contempt and what they would say and their actions.

Speaker 97 So, we talked on the last episode when you and I talked on October 15th about not inviting Elon to the EV summit.

Speaker 85 I know. People's feelings get hurt.

Speaker 97 It's super disrespectful, and it matters, I think, to the business community because we take them at their word.

Speaker 97 When they say we should ban billionaires or we should look into that guy, which was Biden's big thing, when you see the Delaware courts taking away.

Speaker 93 I mean, Trump was just shitting on the Intel CEO yesterday, calling him like a Chinese crypto,

Speaker 123 like Chinese asset.

Speaker 123 So, it's not, it's not a one-way story.

Speaker 78 You know, if we're talking about people being a little mean to business guys,

Speaker 115 like Trump hasn't, it does.

Speaker 97 But the perception is, you know, if you wanted to talk to them, they weren't available to talk to you.

Speaker 97 And no amount of donations, lobbying, or even just, hey, I want to have a goodwill discussion were allowed. And that socialist Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, now

Speaker 97 Mondami, that whole group, I think, is how the business community, finance community, tech community started to look at the Democratic Party.

Speaker 97 This was their biggest mistake because Clinton didn't feel this way. Obama didn't feel this way.
This was like a kind of a new thing. And all the people I mentioned earlier, they all supported Obama.

Speaker 97 They all supported Clinton. So we were essentially as a business community

Speaker 97 told, you know, need not apply, need not to be involved, and we're just going to

Speaker 97 make things difficult for you and there's no conversation and so yes you we will get into trump's uh mercurial you know shaking of the snow globe of business is the way i look at it and the impact that has but net net any business person you talk to any ceo behind closed doors will say this is a much better situation for business right now you think august 12th 2025 is better for business than august 12th 2024 100 no way 100 no come on with the with even with the with the uncertainty because of the tariffs.

Speaker 8 Absolutely. And the way you can know that, too,

Speaker 97 is the stock market is the backstop.

Speaker 8 Stock market's basically even since he's been in. I mean,

Speaker 8 it went up and then down.

Speaker 31 Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, it's up a little bit.

Speaker 97 It's bouncing along the ceiling. And here's the good news.
Trump wants to be loved. You know, I've been studying Trump now.
I met him for the first time two weeks ago.

Speaker 97 You know, and I've been studying my friends and my associates who cozied up to him or have gotten close to him. And,

Speaker 97 you know, I think he has a unique way of doing negotiations, but at the end of the day, he wants to be loved. I think he wants to be respected.
I think we all know this, right?

Speaker 78 Yeah, I've always said the thing that's going to save us from Trump killing the whole democracy is the fact that his dad didn't hug him enough, Fred Trump.

Speaker 88 Like, he does.

Speaker 97 Yeah, whatever the trauma is.

Speaker 78 He's got like a hole inside of his heart somewhere.

Speaker 29 And I

Speaker 88 fingers crossed on that one, I guess.

Speaker 97 I think, actually, you know, we're kind of goofing here.

Speaker 10 I'm

Speaker 8 serious.

Speaker 97 His biggest peak was being a reality star. I mean, you only become a reality star or a podcaster, no offense to the two of us, if you want to be heard, right?

Speaker 83 Yeah, no, I see it.

Speaker 88 I'm just saying, like, he's got it at the megalomaniacal level, you know, like we've got it at the podcaster level.

Speaker 8 Exactly, exactly. We want to have good conversations.

Speaker 97 He truly wants to be loved and he truly wants to be respected. And the stock market is his scorecard.
And so when he did his,

Speaker 97 you know, I call it shock and bore. I don't like the taco thing.
I think that's like trying to provoke him. And it's stupid to do that because then maybe he won't back down.

Speaker 97 I think he does shock and bore. I'm going to say something crazy outrageous.
I fill the void.

Speaker 97 I flood the zone, whatever term you want to use. It shakes everything up.
And then Howard Luttnick comes in and does a reciprocal tariff. Hey, you're charging us 15%.
We'll charge you 15%.

Speaker 97 And they try to negotiate something in between. And I think it's a way for them to consolidate power.
It's a way for them to get themselves involved in everything.

Speaker 97 So they get to be involved in everything with this tariff tool.

Speaker 8 And

Speaker 97 they brought in $125 billion in the last three months. It is completely possible, and this is their plan, that they could bring in an incremental $500 billion a year.

Speaker 97 So, you know, we could all say it's crazy and it's going to cause massive inflation. If they do the tariffs at about 15%, that's the just noticeable difference in psychology and perception.

Speaker 97 And it also applies to pricing.

Speaker 97 And so if you were to buy a million dollars worth of sneakers and the person selling it it to you has a 20% margin and you have a 20% margin, if you find 15% in there to split, it doesn't get passed on to consumers, which is what's happened to date.

Speaker 97 If it's around 50%, then obviously the tariff is greater than the profit margin. It's busto, right? You can't solve that.
So that's where they'll wind up.

Speaker 97 They will have hundreds of billions of dollars and they're on track to do that. And their belief is growth.

Speaker 97 Plus this tariff revenue, plus less regulations, which drives growth, plus M ⁇ A will, at the end of the the day, balance the budget slash not add to the deficit.

Speaker 8 That's crazy. I don't buy it.
That's insane.

Speaker 97 Not exactly my best strategy, but that's what they believe.

Speaker 8 That's insane, Jake.

Speaker 90 We can just say it.

Speaker 8 That's insane.

Speaker 92 They're not going to balance the budget.

Speaker 101 I mean, they just, they passed a

Speaker 83 bill that's going to

Speaker 106 add to the deficit.

Speaker 121 I mean, the tax bill, you guys talked about this.

Speaker 8 Friedberg, you guys are very good on this on your podcast.

Speaker 121 Like, look, between the tax cut for

Speaker 26 the extension of the trunks, tax cuts, whatever you think about them as a policy, the tax on tips, the fact that we have a shrinking base, really, tax base, because we're going to have net migration.

Speaker 116 We're going to get into that later.

Speaker 10 And just the numbers of the numbers, like there's no way that he's going to tariff our way to a balanced budget when they're adding trillions to the deficit.

Speaker 97 However, if it went from $2 trillion a year, which is what it's averaged over the last eight years across both, if you just look at 16 to 34, 35, 36, 37, which is kind of where we've been bouncing around, I do think they could get it down to a trillion, add it to the deficit each year, and they can cut it in half.

Speaker 97 That would be on the road to success. I have been pushing friends who might want to create third-party third parties or other things that America Party, maybe.
I call it the responsible party.

Speaker 97 I got the domain name. I like to buy domain names.
I think there needs to be a responsible party, but even more importantly, a pledge.

Speaker 97 So, like the Grover Norquist, you know, I'm not going to add to taxes pledge and how effective that's been.

Speaker 97 I think there should be a pledge that we lobby candidates through donations to agree to not add to the deficit and to, you know, unless it's a war and Congress approves it.

Speaker 97 So I think that there's a possibility that individuals who care and have their primary concern being the deficit, which is actually my number one concern, because I think the whole experiment stops.

Speaker 97 If we do $2 trillion a year for somewhere between two and six more years, it'll be busto. Like we'll, we'll flip the, the country will be broke.

Speaker 97 So I think we should, that's the best attack vector here to get people back to the middle.

Speaker 85 Okay, well, let me just give a different than breakdown of what how I see it because we're looking at the same.

Speaker 88 I mean, this is not on the top of my concern list.

Speaker 10 I have some other concerns that are higher than this, but it's a legit concern about just the substance of the policies he's put forth.

Speaker 10 You put together huge cuts in investment coming from government into key industries, into green industries, into batteries, and industries.

Speaker 104 Like Elon's was one of the things he was concerned about, about the one big beautiful bill.

Speaker 104 So, like, so you have huge cuts in that, cuts in just public public sector generally, like, which, okay, that is not creating jobs, that's contributing to the economy.

Speaker 104 And just, we're just adding all these things together. So, you've got that is

Speaker 10 putting limits on the growth of the economy, both of those things.

Speaker 107 On top of that, you got tariffs, which is also stifling the economy.

Speaker 11 On top of that, we're going to have negative, I think, population growth this year.

Speaker 97 The tariff thing you're saying is not true yet.

Speaker 8 So, you might think it's true. It's just a little, I was saying it a little bit.

Speaker 13 Like, they're slowing the GDP.

Speaker 86 I mean,

Speaker 85 the last report that came out, I mean, like the only areas that are growing jobs are like AI, data centers, and healthcare.

Speaker 97 Yeah, but GDP was on a tear in the second quarter. If you average it out with the first, um, okay, well, we'll see.

Speaker 8 It's kind of

Speaker 8 economists.

Speaker 10 TBD is the most economist.

Speaker 101 That'll slow the economy.

Speaker 93 Migration, we don't, we're going to have net negative migration this year.

Speaker 44 Uh, we're going to talk about that in a second.

Speaker 106 So, if you put all of that together, like, how are you growing in such a way to attack the deficit problem when simultaneously

Speaker 91 you're extending the tax cuts?

Speaker 97 $2 trillion added to the deficit minus, this is in their mind, $500 billion in tariff income, puts you at $1.5 trillion. They think the economy will grow.

Speaker 97 There'll be more efficiency in the economy through unleashing AI and unleashing more MA, and that that will make us create more Apples, more Ubers, more Airbnbs, more Coinbases, et cetera, and that that will ultimately create more jobs.

Speaker 97 And that tends to be true. So the good news, Tim, is that we can sit here and debate the finer points of it, but they have to live with their track record.

Speaker 97 And their track record is going to land at the midterms. We're going to know in six months what reality is.
Right now, we have three months of tariff data to look at. We'll have nine months soon.

Speaker 97 And we will also have the inflation numbers, unemployment numbers. That's fair.

Speaker 6 Totally fair.

Speaker 97 And they're going to have to sleep in that bed.

Speaker 97 And if you want Trump out of office or if you want MAGA out of office and they get this wrong, and they know that if they get this wrong, it's going to be cataclysmic for that party.

Speaker 97 So I think they're acutely attuned into it.

Speaker 8 That's fair.

Speaker 92 We'll see how that conversation turns out.

Speaker 91 I'm not autistic, but fair enough.

Speaker 26 What about just the management style stuff, though?

Speaker 79 Like, I just, I mean, this is not really an apples to apples analogy, but like, you look at what we saw with the job situation last month.

Speaker 105 BLS comes out. They fire the guy.

Speaker 107 They're bringing in some hack now.

Speaker 86 I mean,

Speaker 115 the guy. Your investors.

Speaker 100 They fired the woman.

Speaker 92 They're bringing in the hack guy. Yes.

Speaker 115 Thank you. Thank you.

Speaker 88 That was my internal misogyny show. I get corrected by Jason Calicanis.

Speaker 90 Happy to take it.

Speaker 105 They fire the woman who is the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, replace him with this guy who, by all accounts, is not exactly the most accomplished in the field, to say the least.

Speaker 78 You know, you look at these companies, if you look at the companies with a founder, and this founder is so erratic that numbers come out at the quarter.

Speaker 79 He shows the numbers aren't looking good for the P ⁇ L.

Speaker 9 And then they say, well, I'm just going to fire the CFO.

Speaker 34 We're going to bring in somebody that's going to put out better numbers next month.

Speaker 112 You'd be like, this is insane.

Speaker 114 And then they're tweeting all caps tweets at night about how

Speaker 114 the person is crazy.

Speaker 8 You'd be like, this is not. Yeah.

Speaker 97 So stylistically, and the timing is obviously ridiculous.

Speaker 97 But the intent, there has been a long dialogue about how terrible the government is at forecasting stuff and how we need to sort of innovate there.

Speaker 97 They should have just done this at the top of the administration and just said, hey, we need to get new people in there, new technology in there.

Speaker 97 The fact that they can't get these numbers correct and that they're lollygagging around getting them, they need to have a better system. So, two things can be true at the same time.

Speaker 97 I don't like the way he did it either. I don't think any reasonable person thinks it's the right way to do it.

Speaker 97 I would say the majority of the people who support Trump don't like his style, but they do like the action, right? And you've said this before on the pod. I listen to you once in a while.

Speaker 97 It comes up in my YouTube feed.

Speaker 112 It's erratic, though.

Speaker 83 I mean, I just think it's erratic.

Speaker 97 Just like Tariff, shock and bore.

Speaker 80 I just, I, and I keep thinking, like, look, if this was the print, look, my daughter's going back to school today, first day of school.

Speaker 83 Me too.

Speaker 108 It's like, I went in and I met the teacher, and then it's like, I started looking at their Twitter feed, and there's, they go home at the end of the day, and they start tweeting all caps about how stupid one of the students is.

Speaker 39 I'd be like, okay, I don't.

Speaker 96 Anyway, it's just, it's a judgment thing.

Speaker 34 One of the things stylistically, though, the Tim Cook stuff that you mentioned, the kind of the suck up stuff we're going in there.

Speaker 74 This is also a thing that I just, that.

Speaker 78 I really, it's hard for me to wrap my head around, which is like, you're like, we're mad at Biden that he doesn't invite Elon to the party.

Speaker 121 It's like, okay, all right, I get it.

Speaker 122 But like, on the other side of the coin, the Democrats are are not making, you know, they're not making CEOs come in and bring gold, frankincense, and myrrh in order to get stuff.

Speaker 8 Yeah, like, can you imagine

Speaker 119 the identity politics stuff?

Speaker 81 You guys all like all of the MAGA stuff, and I don't know your show, but also MAGA was to get mad at identity politics stuff.

Speaker 122 Tim Cook comes in and just does MAGA identity politics.

Speaker 115 He's just like, sir, we have this Maureen who made this for you.

Speaker 78 And I was like, you know, if Tim Cook had gone into the Biden Harris White House and said, you know, Kamala, Kamala,

Speaker 118 I had this indigenous woman of color make you a 24-carat gold plaque. And in exchange, I hope that you'll give me a break on the taxes.

Speaker 125 You guys would have lost your minds about that.

Speaker 97 Tim Cook's playing the game on the field.

Speaker 8 So as a matter of fact, isn't it crazy that he has to?

Speaker 47 Isn't it crazy that he has to do that?

Speaker 13 That's not a free capitalist country.

Speaker 8 It's a narco-capitalism. Oligarchy.

Speaker 97 Narco-capitalism. Yeah.
So I think we're between a socialist kleptocracy and anarcho-capitalism. Neither of those.

Speaker 8 That's bad.

Speaker 97 Both of those are bad things. You don't want Mondami, and you don't want the anarcho-capitalism.
We need to find, you know, somewhere in between this too hot, too cold temperature switch.

Speaker 97 I 100% concur.

Speaker 85 So you didn't like it.

Speaker 8 It made you uncomfortable. The Tim Cook thing.

Speaker 97 It was a little weird. I mean, I was fine with him going there, and I don't mind the president.

Speaker 24 It feels un-American, I guess.

Speaker 117 It feels a little bit more like it should be happening in like some banana republic.

Speaker 97 Okay, here's what I'll say. Getting invited to the White House as a business leader, fantastic.
The president encouraging you to invest in America,

Speaker 23 fantastic.

Speaker 97 Bringing a gold bar, super weird. If they did, in fact, if Qatar actually gave him that plane, no battle, right? So I think we have the emoluments clause.

Speaker 97 I think what we'll probably see with this warfare stuff is if the Dems win again, If any of this stuff is not tight, it's all going to be another wave of lawfare, just like we're seeing the wave of lawfare now from Trump to the Biden administration.

Speaker 97 And you're going to see a whole bunch of global pardons like Biden did for Fauci and his son. And then you're going to see Trump do that on his side.

Speaker 97 And so, yeah, neither of these two trends are good.

Speaker 97 And we have to really rethink when we have new leadership in the pardon power, because it does seem like we're now using that as a way to get out of jail before anybody has a chance to even look at what you're doing.

Speaker 83 Look, I agree with that.

Speaker 92 I was against Hunter Biden Pardon and went after it.

Speaker 83 But I just, just on the business side of this, because

Speaker 36 I'm sorry, this is why I'm just obsessed with this, right?

Speaker 96 Because it's like, if the complaint was that Biden was being too hostile to them,

Speaker 76 Trump is bullying them. Trump is bullying them.

Speaker 75 He's bullying them into doing stuff in exchange for better treatment from the government.

Speaker 96 Like that is not a free market system.

Speaker 8 That's how you

Speaker 8 can do.

Speaker 97 You're using the term bullying. I think.

Speaker 10 What else would it be?

Speaker 97 I think people would say negotiating and horse trading. That's how people look at it.
And And so, for somebody like Tim Cook, you want $100 billion in investment over the next 10 years?

Speaker 97 Sure, we'll do it. You want us to make something here? Fine, we'll make some chips here.

Speaker 10 Is that a bad precedent?

Speaker 75 Like, can't we see this starting to go wrong?

Speaker 34 It's like I'm going to attack Intel because they won't genuflect, and Tim Cook brings me the gold bar, and then some other competitor can't do, you know, doesn't have the resources to pay out the payoff to Trump, right?

Speaker 121 Like, yeah, I mean, I guess my point is, it's not capital, it's not the free market, it's and it's and it's anti-and And it's hostile to business.

Speaker 97 It's anarcho-capitalism.

Speaker 97 It's an anarchist version of capitalism, certainly.

Speaker 86 Well, I don't like that. All right.

Speaker 81 This will pivot us into

Speaker 9 the foreign policy.

Speaker 126 I would dial it back 20%.

Speaker 97 I like the idea of

Speaker 97 inviting Tim Cook. I don't like the idea of the gold bar.

Speaker 8 20%? Yeah, I'd dial back 80%.

Speaker 43 I think Tim Cook got invited to the Biden wing house, didn't he?

Speaker 8 I'm pretty sure Tim Cook was there.

Speaker 126 I mean,

Speaker 97 maybe for some DEI celebration.

Speaker 8 It certainly wasn't to

Speaker 97 increase investment in America. You know, definitely not.

Speaker 6 Well, I mean, Tim Cook, Apple did quite well during the Obama and Biden years, I think.

Speaker 97 Yeah, buying back $700 billion in stock.

Speaker 8 That's not getting an end to it. Certainly not releasing cutting-edge projects.
Like they did. Fine.

Speaker 39 Anyway, okay.

Speaker 100 The risk is he never had to bend the need.

Speaker 2 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, these words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

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Speaker 80 The Doge stuff, I want to do a little quick Doge reflection.

Speaker 38 So, we've talked about the spending side.

Speaker 110 You can talk about it more if you want.

Speaker 34 The foreign aid side is really bad.

Speaker 119 It just is. Like, the USAAD stuff is really bad, right?

Speaker 14 Like, it's just that corruption part of it or

Speaker 8 not sending food to people who are starving.

Speaker 125 Not sending the food to the people who are starving part of it.

Speaker 111 It's like this is such a tiny budget item.

Speaker 78 Sure, we could ref.

Speaker 5 I'm for reforms, but just going in there and just cutting it.

Speaker 96 And you've seen the stories.

Speaker 83 You're a well-read person.

Speaker 25 You've seen what's happening in some of these countries.

Speaker 76 Like the most vulnerable people in the world, we can't feed them.

Speaker 92 That is not Clinton Democrat policy.

Speaker 79 This is like very harsh policies and that is causing real damage.

Speaker 97 I think there is a bit of a

Speaker 97 sadistic red meat trait of this administration, which is they're Achilles heel. And we saw it blow back on them when they started doing these raids at Home Depots, et cetera.

Speaker 97 And even, you know, the Joe Rogans of the world were like, yeah, no, didn't vote for that. Shut the border, yes.

Speaker 97 Drag somebody out of the country with no due process who's been here for 20 years and send them to a sadistic prison that Amnesty International can list 17 different torture violations there.

Speaker 97 That's their absolute Achilles heel, and it's blowing back against them. And

Speaker 97 that's why you see Trump, you know, I think dialing that back.

Speaker 97 And he even went to the point of saying, yeah, maybe we should do something for these farmers here and give them a work visa, which is like,

Speaker 97 that's something we had 20 or 30 years ago. Why do we have to go send a bunch of masked men?

Speaker 97 I mean, how could they possibly be allowed to wear masks into Los Angeles to take people who've been here 20 years, you know,

Speaker 97 putting people's ADUs in or cleaning their gardens or, you know,

Speaker 97 cooking and whatever, taking care of of people's kids. It's abhorrent.
They know it's abhorrent. And I think that Stephen Miller sort of part of the camp and the Bannon part of the camp.

Speaker 97 I think they're being contained.

Speaker 78 But the USAD cuts were you because we're just creating a little mental ledger here about everything because you were saying pretty good.

Speaker 87 And I'm like, that's a pretty big one on my bad list.

Speaker 97 I would say the Doge stuff. Overall, I think Doge was necessary.
I think probably Elon stayed a month or two too long there. He should have have been back at his companies.

Speaker 97 But I don't think the sit, I think what we learned from that is the system. There's so many people in on the take from both parties that the idea of cutting significantly is really hard.

Speaker 97 It's really hard. And to do it in a shock and awe kind of way, which is what we do in the capitalistic world, is going to face massive antibodies in

Speaker 97 politics and in that sector. Private sector, you can come into Twitter and be like, yeah, nobody's showing up for work.
Great. If you don't show up for work, you don't get paid.

Speaker 97 And And then, you know, at Doge, I think they were like, can you come to the office at least? And people were like, no, I'm not coming to the office.

Speaker 122 I was for the coming to the office.

Speaker 92 I'm talking about the

Speaker 102 plumpy nut for the poorest people in the world, the children.

Speaker 92 Like, that feels like a bad mistake.

Speaker 97 What I'll say is, I think how you treat the weakest people speaks volumes, I think, to character.

Speaker 97 And so I think, you know, while there was a lot of abuse in that system, I would have liked to see it be more thoughtful.

Speaker 97 You know, my view of Doge was cut 10% a year for four years and we're going to be at 50%

Speaker 97 or whatever it is. And that would be success.
I think they went in and tried to do the shock and awe campaign.

Speaker 97 And I think they probably learned some good lessons, but we shouldn't throw out the concept of Doge.

Speaker 97 The things the government's responsible for or they over-regulate tend to be the least efficient in our society and cause the most problems.

Speaker 97 If you look at housing, education, and healthcare, the less the government could be involved in those three things, the better off everybody in America would be because you would actually have competition to lower the prices of college, to lower the price of housing, and to make healthcare more efficient.

Speaker 97 And you're seeing it, entrepreneurs are doing it anyway. You know, Amazon doing telemedicine, HIMS, you know, selling people whatever directly, all of that is

Speaker 97 all of that's a reaction to trying to get around the regulation. The regulators and the government fight that, just like they fight ADUs.

Speaker 97 We've had you know, California fighting what they call in-law units, but accessory dwelling units like crazy. Just building here in Austin, like putting in a

Speaker 97 four-unit townhome. They fight that.
Same in the Bay Area.

Speaker 80 You know, it tickles my pickle.

Speaker 93 You know how to pivot a convo into a topic that I'm going to agree with you on.

Speaker 10 All right.

Speaker 91 We can just do red tape cutting all day long.

Speaker 86 We could do one hour of agreeing on red tape.

Speaker 107 Well, the healthcare thing is more complicated, but on housing and education, totally agree.

Speaker 3 We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union, These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 7 They're a reminder of who this country belongs and what we can be at our best.

Speaker 42 Same mission, new name, MSNOW.

Speaker 70 Start improving agent performance at pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 73 That's pendo.io slash podcast.

Speaker 106 The immigration thing, which you mentioned, you sort of said something interesting.

Speaker 108 We think maybe the Stephen Miller wing is losing a little power.

Speaker 91 You did a very interesting interview with the vice president.

Speaker 104 I encourage people to listen to that.

Speaker 116 I just want to play one clip from it.

Speaker 88 It really jumped out to me.

Speaker 97 Is this when he calls me an asshole?

Speaker 39 It's not when he called you an asshole.

Speaker 80 Actually, it's just, I thought it was very revealing about how he sees himself.

Speaker 10 Let's listen.

Speaker 120 Where the Trump administration, where we've been most wildly successful, is that we have, I think in 2025, we will have the first net negative immigration number in about 50 or 60 years in the United States.

Speaker 120 And so there has been a major, a major, major shift in immigration policy.

Speaker 120 Now, again, I'm like, you know, me and Stephen Miller are probably the two most hardlined people in the entire administration when it comes to immigration. So there's always more that we can do.

Speaker 120 And like I said, I think that there is more that we can do.

Speaker 9 It's a strange brag for me on both fronts.

Speaker 78 I don't think you want to be a country that has negative net migration.

Speaker 100 If you look at the list of those countries in the world, they're like the worst places in the world because nobody wants to go there and people want to leave.

Speaker 15 And so that's, I don't understand why that's an applause line.

Speaker 25 And I don't understand why you'd want to call yourself the Stephen Miller of the administration.

Speaker 110 But what did you make of the immigration stuff?

Speaker 97 So, you know,

Speaker 97 what I've learned watching the last, this administration, the last one, and, you know, being up close and personal to friends joining it is

Speaker 97 they really get you to speak with one voice and dissent is not encouraged. They might say it is, but we saw that with the cover-up of Biden's health and we see it now with,

Speaker 97 I don't believe. JD or anybody in that administration, with the exception of maybe Stephen Miller, actually wants to deport 20 or 30 million people.

Speaker 97 What everybody agrees on is nobody wants an open border. Nobody wants the suffering happening on the southern border.
So I always try to break immigration into like those three pieces.

Speaker 97 Close the border, path to citizenship for people who are illegally, they pay a fine, whatever. But there's just some.

Speaker 98 So they don't want that, though.

Speaker 97 Trump actually said he thinks there should be a well, no, no.

Speaker 8 Actually, I think

Speaker 8 we got to look at their actions.

Speaker 126 Trump says everything.

Speaker 98 Trump blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 8 Trump says a lot of people. Look at what they're doing.
I think

Speaker 97 when you see Trump come out and say, hey, we're going to look at... you know, farm workers and restaurant workers.
I think that's actually his true position. And I think the MAGA position

Speaker 97 to deport 20 million people is to get, to win the primary and get elected and to get people.

Speaker 8 He's already elected.

Speaker 6 He's not running again, right?

Speaker 10 He's not running again, right?

Speaker 97 No. And I think that's why he's willing to say that.
I don't think he would have said that in the first place.

Speaker 43 Well, why don't they just do it then?

Speaker 38 Well, they'll.

Speaker 98 They're just adding 10,000 more ICE members and their plans are to harass more people. They're turning it up.

Speaker 98 I guess I just disagree your assessment that you think that they're backing off.

Speaker 108 I think they're turning it up.

Speaker 97 I think they're playing both sides. And that's why it is unclear and there's ambiguity.
Right now, they're on a pace to deport less people than the last couple of administrations.

Speaker 9 So well, but the total on that, because JD corrected you on, or not corrected you, but corrected the record on this point, excuse me, on that same interview, where he's explaining why that was

Speaker 8 the boomerang stuff.

Speaker 109 So that's why I played that could be in specific.

Speaker 78 The stated goal of the administration is to have net negative migration in the country.

Speaker 76 Like, as you said, the three very successful people.

Speaker 78 Yeah, you guys should be the most pro-immigration people.

Speaker 97 We are. And you remember when I interviewed Trump, I got him to do that whole thing about stapling the blue card.
And I followed up that a couple times. That's actually how they all believe.

Speaker 97 They're scared to death of the MAGA base. They basically unleash that MAGA base.
They let that genie out of the bottle and it helped them get elected.

Speaker 97 But I do think they have a hard time containing it. So I think they throw them red meat.
They do this ice actions. It's performative.

Speaker 97 But at the end of the day, I doubt they're going to actually deport that many people because it's too expensive. And we need those people here.
And we need the economy to grow per our last discussion.

Speaker 97 So, they know the reality in the game on the field is they need more people working, and they need more productivity because they need more GDP.

Speaker 97 And if they want to, you know, build more fabs here in factories and they're not completely automated, which you know, they can't be all automated, we actually need to have more people.

Speaker 97 When I run for president, my position is going to be our stated goal should be to build five new high-functioning tech cities in the United States and become the most populous country in the world.

Speaker 97 We should try to become as big as a billion Americans, great. A billion Americans is my idea, yeah.
And we should try to, you know, make recruiting our number one pursuit.

Speaker 97 And we should never let people call it immigration when we choose to recruit somebody to our team. Just like if you want to recruit Dirk Nowitzki or Yao Ming, that's for the benefit of the league.

Speaker 97 We should be recruiting more Elon Musks, more David Sachs's, more Dave Friedbergs, more Trimath Polyapatias, and straight on down the line because they create lots of jobs. And so.

Speaker 119 Okay, so here's my question for you.

Speaker 92 So, and then I want to get to tech stuff after this, but this is like my main disagreement.

Speaker 97 Between you and I?

Speaker 8 Our disagreement?

Speaker 111 Well, no, well, between, as it's, I guess between you and I, we agree on the policy.

Speaker 92 I guess my main disagreement is about how you could assess the first six months as solid.

Speaker 111 Because for me, and I guess I get a little bit confused about why, and I promise I wouldn't make you speak for your colleagues, so I'm not going to, but why people that are actually immigrants are less upset about this than me, me and people that are i guess pretending that they they have a different position on this to appease the mega base because like everything else being equal if trump gave me exactly the tax policy i wanted exactly the regulation policy i wanted everything about ukraine that i wanted which he hasn't you know whatever everything on social issues that that i wanted and and he put in place the immigration policy they've put in place for the first nine months where they disappeared people to a foreign gulag where

Speaker 34 they're yeah exactly where they're harassing people outside home depot but i guess my point is that like that is a red line like to me it is so un-american and it is so wrong and unacceptable that there's no other policy that really could rationalize it and i guess i'm just confused by like why and and you have j.devance coming on to y'all's podcast being like i want negative net migration and then for them to be like well you know that's not really what that's not really the policy i i just explain to me why silicon valley of all places isn't more up in arms Oh, they don't agree.

Speaker 23 They don't agree.

Speaker 98 But last time there were protests at Google and the offices, there were protests in San Francisco.

Speaker 97 If you're asking why business people are not going to touch that issue, is they're probably just going to quietly say, hey, we need more of this immigration and they'll get it.

Speaker 8 Why? Why? Whatever. They're not going to touch that.

Speaker 125 It's the top priority of the most powerful two people in the White House, J.D.

Speaker 12 Vance and Stephen Miller.

Speaker 97 Well, you're looking at what they're saying, not at what they're doing.

Speaker 23 I am looking at what they're doing.

Speaker 76 They're harassing people outside Home Depots.

Speaker 8 They harassed Iranian lady in New Orleans.

Speaker 97 As abhorrent as you and I agree it is, I think it's performative. I think we're going to be sitting here in three, four years.

Speaker 111 They just added a budget to make ICE the biggest funded.

Speaker 29 ICE is going to have a bigger budget than the Israeli military this year.

Speaker 97 They know that if they

Speaker 8 just sit around, watch old Superman episodes?

Speaker 97 I think they're going to just try to find as many criminals as they can that they don't have anybody complaining about a violent criminal being deported, you know, a gang member.

Speaker 97 I really do think it's performative. That's my belief.

Speaker 8 I think it's crazy.

Speaker 8 I wonder if the next administration deported, I don't know, I don't know, let's say like a prominent supporter of Donald Trump decided to deport, take away their green cards, decided that they wrote some op-eds or said some podcasts that were wrong and then deported them.

Speaker 76 I don't know.

Speaker 78 I think the Democrat administration did that.

Speaker 105 I think that a lot of folks would be pretty up in arms.

Speaker 92 But that's what's happening in this administration.

Speaker 97 I mean, if your expectation is business people are going to put their personal beliefs and morality above their balance sheets, I think you haven't been paying attention.

Speaker 83 Fair enough. I guess I would just expect immigrant business people to want to make sure that they're safe, their families are safe.

Speaker 95 Because I don't know.

Speaker 91 I got to tell you, it's a pretty interesting prospect, the idea that writing a bad op-ed could get you to port it.

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Speaker 110 All right.

Speaker 19 I want to pick your brain on stuff you're smart about that I'm not out really quick.

Speaker 112 I'm pretty worried about the AI stuff.

Speaker 78 I want to be an optimist.

Speaker 77 I know that listeners of this show find that hard to believe because I have a lot of things I'm negative about these days, but I was kind of a tech dorky optimist for a while, not at like your level, but you know, I was into all that and I am not a Luddite.

Speaker 79 I'm always trying the new stuff that's coming out.

Speaker 118 The LLMs have me freaked.

Speaker 105 And I guess this does kind of relate to policy because a big Trump policy that you're touting and others are touting is that like they're not getting the government really too involved in regulation of this stuff.

Speaker 108 But man, you see this story just out this week, the one example of the ChatGPT going from four to five and people like thinking they lost their lover.

Speaker 10 They lost their

Speaker 98 AI psychosis.

Speaker 87 People not being able to understand what's real and fake is concerning to me.

Speaker 10 I understand there's going to be a lot of cool AI advancements in some other areas that, you know, maybe are in some of the portfolio companies of yours, but like in the public discourse stuff, I'm pretty worried about AI making things worse, not better.

Speaker 90 What do you think?

Speaker 97 Yeah, you're not wrong to have concerns, and there will be massive job displacement.

Speaker 97 For the audience who's not like super tuned into this, there's a really easy framing with two terms that people use interoperably, but are in fact very different, AGI and super intelligence. AGI,

Speaker 97 which is artificial general intelligence, that means the ability to write the docket, you know, or summarize a news story or do some basic legal work or make an image.

Speaker 97 Jobs that humans do, drive a car, work in a factory and sort boxes at Amazon factories or deliver those to you. That we're in the middle of, and that is absolutely in the end game.

Speaker 97 All of those jobs will be replaced with technology. Question is when and how quickly.
And then, how quickly do people ride in the streets, whether it's in Wuhan, where people are literally

Speaker 97 starting to protest over self-driving cars?

Speaker 97 And that's sort of their capital of it, paradoxically, of all cities to do it in. Maybe they're trying to recover the brand name of Wuhan.

Speaker 97 So you have to ask yourself about that job displacement. Now we go to super intelligence.
The bets that are being made now are not on AGI. That's kind of the table stakes.

Speaker 31 AGI for people who don't listen to.

Speaker 97 Artificial general intelligence. It just means your ability to play chess, be a lawyer, an accountant.

Speaker 88 It's a good Turing test kind of like an updated version of that.

Speaker 97 Yeah, it's not even being able to trick somebody or human. It's being able to do the human chores is how I look at it.
Do things that are chores.

Speaker 97 Do things that are not uniquely human, like have a conversation or make jokes or do art. So that's going to happen.

Speaker 97 And what that means is the number of jobs needed to accomplish a task is going to go down.

Speaker 97 One person as an attorney using this or a developer using these technologies and what's called a co-pilot to kind of assist them, they're going to be 10%

Speaker 97 better

Speaker 97 probably every two or three months, which if you compound that, you know, it means basically every two years, people will be twice as good as their jobs.

Speaker 97 That means you just need less lawyers at your company. You need less accountants, you need, et cetera.
Or you find more projects to do and more problems to solve.

Speaker 97 And that's the tension everybody's trying to figure out. How quickly do those jobs get displaced?

Speaker 97 How more ambitious do founders and entrepreneurs, which is 0.1% of the country, the people who actually do these things, certainly less than 1%,

Speaker 97 how motivated will they be to create more and more businesses and products and services? And that's what we've seen.

Speaker 97 We've seen an explosion of startups that are trying to address every possible problem. Now, when you go to superintelligence, which is like, that's the grand prize, right? That's the mega prize.

Speaker 97 That is an existential prize because super intelligence, the idea is it will be able to answer questions we couldn't even think of answering.

Speaker 97 They could figure out the secrets of the universe, figure out things in our chemistry or biology to solve aging.

Speaker 80 I was listening to the all-in a couple months ago, and David Sachs said that superintelligence was going to solve climate change, so we don't have to worry about it.

Speaker 97 I mean, solar is going to, despite this administration with their clean coal, and you may have seen me get into a little bit with the energy secretary about solar, solar is by far and away the best solution

Speaker 97 along with nuclear. Nuclear gives you great baseload, solar and batteries.

Speaker 93 Anyway, I'm sorry, I made a gag and got you distracted, but the superintelligence will take us to you.

Speaker 97 So, the super intelligence is where things could get really nutty. And that's where, like, the doomsday scenarios, Terminator ones, kind of come out of that group.

Speaker 97 So, what happens if you know all drivers go away?

Speaker 97 Well, every self-driving car is four full-time jobs, and every humanoid robot in a factory is five jobs, maybe six, because those jobs you can only work for maybe seven hours as a just physical limitation.

Speaker 97 As humans who are driving, you you can work a 12-hour shift and those are those are going to be here folks and before 2030 you're going to see amazon which has massively invested in this replace all factory workers and all drivers the idea that when you order something from amazon a human would touch it at any point in that supply chain is insane it will be 100

Speaker 97 robotic which means all of those workers are going away every amazon worker all those jobs ups gone fedex gone all of those are going to be gone and those companies will be more profitable.

Speaker 97 And when you order something, it's going to come faster and cheaper and better. And your Uber will be half as much, but somebody needs to retrain these people.

Speaker 97 And that's actually a very valid fear that technologists will tell somebody like you, don't worry about it. There'll just be more jobs created.

Speaker 97 The question is, what happens to those people who get caught in the gap, right? And we had this happen in the Industrial Revolution. That happened over 40 years, 50 years.

Speaker 97 And, you know, the agricultural revolution, you know, again, that was multi-decades. This one will happen in a decade.
And so it would be very different. And yeah, you should be concerned.

Speaker 97 I wouldn't worry about the psychosis stuff. People always take new technologies too far.

Speaker 88 What about people not knowing what is true and what is fake? I'm pretty worried about that.

Speaker 91 That's already kind of a problem.

Speaker 97 That was a problem with social media and media. And AI is not going to solve that problem.
And there'll be bias in all of these systems. And in fact, you're going to be able to pick.

Speaker 97 or program in the bias. So you and I could say, hey, we're fiscally conservative, socially liberal.
Give me my answers based on this.

Speaker 97 And these these things are such sycophants that they will know what your preference is and they're going to literally target to you because I don't know if you've re-watched the movie her, but I'm watching some clips from it.

Speaker 97 Like they want to appease you. And I think actually Sam Altman is making this technology to be addictive and to be sycophantic so that he wins the race.
And so you have he's a pleaser.

Speaker 88 So it kind of matches him in a weird, creepy way.

Speaker 97 I think that's like a profound insight.

Speaker 97 I was at a dinner the other day and somebody was saying this exact same thing, which was, you know, you always kind of put your stamp on it whenever you see a great movie.

Speaker 97 You know, it's got some of Scorsese's childhood in it or Kurosawa's childhood in it, whatever it is. You know, they bring, you know, to their songs what they lived or whatever.
And

Speaker 97 yeah, he's,

Speaker 97 he's a negotiator and a pleaser.

Speaker 87 You are more of an optimistic person than me on this stuff generally.

Speaker 78 Like, do you have, is there anything cool out there in AI world you saw, like some neat technology I might not know of?

Speaker 88 Cause I'm not.

Speaker 9 Here's the thing.

Speaker 97 Yeah.

Speaker 97 The thing that's going to be amazing and you and I are dads our kids are going to be able to learn things with adaptive tutors that will be absolutely mind-blowing so I was in the car and I did a thing with my nine-year-old twins and a 15 year old where I said give us a slang keep it PG of uh like gen x slang Gen alpha slang, millennial slang, and quiz us.

Speaker 97 And then here are the four people in the car and then go around in a circle and give questions to people and then we'll answer them and keep score. And it did it perfectly.

Speaker 97 And then I was like, wow, you know,

Speaker 97 I want to benchmark my vocabulary. And so I started doing a vocabulary quiz when I was, you know, driving here in the hill country.
And my vocabulary is going up because it knows where I'm at.

Speaker 97 It gives me new words. It knows the words I got wrong.
It retests me on that. Which one are you using?

Speaker 97 I was using Grok is now in the dashboard of every Tesla. So you just press a button, it's in there, or you can use ChatGPT for it.
Claude is also exceptional at this, if you haven't used Claude.

Speaker 97 But all these language models are starting to hit parity. So they're becoming like cars.

Speaker 97 You might have stylistic differences or aesthetic differences of why you want a BMW or a Mercedes or an Audi or a Ford, but they're all going to take you from point A to point B.

Speaker 97 And the ability to learn anything quickly in an adaptive way is going to change education forever in a very good way if the tools are used well.

Speaker 97 And that's going to make it continuous lifelong education. And all of these pockets of education that are

Speaker 97 siloed or behind paywalls, they're all going to be free.

Speaker 97 And so you're going to be able to, as a person in India, get a PhD in physics or the law from an equivalent of Harvard or NYU or Yale and do it at your own pace and be as smart as any other person.

Speaker 97 And so I think you could see people having two or three careers in their lives. I think you'll see our health spans.

Speaker 97 You and I will be be skiing at 100.

Speaker 42 You know, if you're under 100, I'm going to be skiing at 100?

Speaker 97 100%. Yeah.
There's no doubt. I mean, unless something tragic happens to you, like random, you die in a plane crash.

Speaker 97 The health span will get you easily to 100 skiing because all the degenerative diseases are going to be slowed down and reversed.

Speaker 97 A lot of the issues we have is we just don't have enough humans to work on these projects.

Speaker 8 A little worried I'm on the wrong side of this age, of this age because I'm going to deteriorate a little bit.

Speaker 44 I'm going to go ahead and speak too much. Yeah, no.

Speaker 97 You You can get the peptides now. Get the Wolverine Protocol, BPC 157.
You're good.

Speaker 43 I don't know. I don't know about you.

Speaker 8 Don't take health advice from a pocket.

Speaker 92 You're going to have to DM me offline. Jake.

Speaker 83 Okay, I'm sorry.

Speaker 15 We're out of time, but I promised you we get back to crypto.

Speaker 4 Just so just as

Speaker 8 we could, my two favorites.

Speaker 15 Well, we have an agreement on Ukraine, and neither of us are really Ukrainian experts.

Speaker 80 So we'll tell you. I got Michael Weiss on Thursday.

Speaker 94 He can handle Ukraine.

Speaker 2 We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, These words are more than just the opening of the Constitution.

Speaker 38 They'll continue to cover the day's news, ask ask the tough questions, and explain how it impacts you.

Speaker 23 On crypto.

Speaker 92 Yeah, just on one particular point.

Speaker 116 We also agree on the Trump coin being a total scam, and that's outrageous. So that's just table stakes.

Speaker 91 I'm concerned about the stable coin.

Speaker 79 What I'm concerned about is that during this administration, crypto is going to get so entwined into the rest of the banking system that if there is ever a crypto crash, because the value of it is inflated, let's say, which is something I believe

Speaker 78 at least some of them are inflated.

Speaker 8 Yeah, sure, it could be a bubble.

Speaker 126 Yeah, Bitcoin could be a bubble, sure. That's a worry.

Speaker 27 And I think that, you know, yeah, we created some rules around stablecoins.

Speaker 79 It didn't create a lot of rules on the other stuff.

Speaker 106 And I think that the rest of the financial system is just kind of accepting it.

Speaker 23 You've been kind of skeptical of crypto at times.

Speaker 79 So I was surprised to hear you kind of felt good about that.

Speaker 118 Do you not share my worries about crypto getting intermingled?

Speaker 97 I would be worried if we didn't create regulations for for it and have people be responsible in American corporations with boards of directors and proper insurance and regulation in place.

Speaker 97 So the reason an FTX can happen is because it was offshore and they weren't playing by the rules.

Speaker 97 And when you start onshoring the stuff, then the board of directors is an American board of directors as opposed to, I was pitched on doing like a Panama foundation board and nobody would know who was on the board because of safety concerns.

Speaker 97 I mean, this stuff was seriously, seriously dark money scams, and who knows whose money is in tether, for example, an offshore stablecoin.

Speaker 93 They gave a lot of money to Donald Trump, by the way.

Speaker 97 Yeah, well, I mean, if you were trying to get onshored,

Speaker 97 you would want to clean up your act. And according to, if you look at their history of all the different actions that were taken, they've been banned in a lot of markets.

Speaker 97 There was a lot of accusations of human trafficking and know your customer KYC, knowing whose money's in there. And that

Speaker 97 now is going to face stiff competition from people like Circle, which I happen to know the founder of, but I'm not an investor in, because this is all onshore.

Speaker 97 And what this will do for the American dollar dominance is you're going to be able to move dollars so quickly and easily at such low cost or no cost that this idea that the BRICS, remember this whole dialogue, oh, the BRICS are going to create an alternative currency.

Speaker 97 It'll be like the EU or whatever. And then people aren't going to use dollars anymore.
They'll get off the dollar standard. The reason they're doing this is to ensure the dollar standard.

Speaker 97 And it will actually do that. So then the rest of crypto regulation is going to happen soon.

Speaker 97 When that happens, you're going to have to be either an accredited investor or take a test to be an accredited investor in order to participate in these things.

Speaker 97 And, you know, their approach is no crying in the casino, which is like, if you choose to go into this, you're choosing to go into a casino, you're choosing to, you know, use

Speaker 97 a sports book.

Speaker 8 Sure. Okay.

Speaker 97 You should know that if you're buying something that has no inherent value, then you could lose all of your money.

Speaker 97 I always tell people, only invest what you can afford to lose in this sector and keep it to low single digits. And in that case, you can't really get harmed.

Speaker 97 The people who are going to get harmed are the greedy, right?

Speaker 97 The pigs will get slaughtered kind of thing applies here.

Speaker 97 So for anybody listening, it will slowly become more regulated and there'll be a ramification for doing illegal things, which there hasn't been.

Speaker 44 A lot of people have gotten away with a lot.

Speaker 78 I'm skeptical of what you said. I'm open to it.

Speaker 81 We'll see how the Genius Act Act and whether future regulation happens.

Speaker 110 I'm open to your argument on that.

Speaker 26 But, like, objectively speaking, they've stopped enforcement.

Speaker 108 So, if something bad was happening and is already endemic in one of these companies, if there's another FTX out there, and the Trump administration has dropped all white,

Speaker 10 DOJ is not anymore looking into Coinbase on several potential issues that were they looking to before Mayo SpongeBob.

Speaker 8 They're not looking into Tether.

Speaker 92 Yeah. They're not looking into Justin's son, right?

Speaker 10 Like, there are a number of folks that have have that have bought into Trump's coin that are now off the hook, and that's not good.

Speaker 97 I think what you'll see is massive investigations of this when Trump's out of the way.

Speaker 111 Here's the problem with being the Democrats.

Speaker 15 This is why it sucks to be a Democrat right now, Jake.

Speaker 6 How we can end on this.

Speaker 78 It's like, they got to be the responsible ones.

Speaker 74 It's like, oh, great.

Speaker 3 We come back in.

Speaker 96 We investigate the fucking Chinese crypto scammers that are screwing people over.

Speaker 78 And what's going to happen?

Speaker 122 All-in podcast guys are going to be like, look at the Democrats coming after crypto.

Speaker 8 I mean, coming after the innovators.

Speaker 124 Nothing can stop.

Speaker 8 That's what's going to happen.

Speaker 97 The federal government, you know, not cracking down on stuff doesn't stop local attorney generals or any civil actions. And I think what you're seeing now is the crypto.

Speaker 97 I have an inside line to this because I invest in startup companies. They're all.

Speaker 97 very conservative now in the U.S. because they know the stakes.

Speaker 97 And if you were to, even now, if you were to promote like as a celebrity your coin or this, that, and the other thing, you could still get people suing you on a civil basis.

Speaker 97 So, you know, there's still ways this will be regulated. But overall, more regulation and more onshoring is better for crypto, much better for everybody.

Speaker 97 It doesn't mean I don't share the same concerns with you of don't put more than like 2% of your money in Bitcoin.

Speaker 97 Even if you're like a cab driver or whatever, like if you work at McDonald's and you want to put 5% of your net worth in it or 5% of your paycheck in it, I don't suppose, you know, working an extra 5% a week is going to change your life.

Speaker 97 So you can catch up, but don't mortgage your house to buy crypto.

Speaker 6 Last question.

Speaker 93 Trump came to the all-in podcast summit.

Speaker 2 We have the audio.

Speaker 84 We don't play his voice on here, though, because that triggers some of our people.

Speaker 91 So we're not going to do anything.

Speaker 44 I'll trigger that.

Speaker 8 Okay, fine.

Speaker 90 We'll put it in a post.

Speaker 27 I don't have it ready.

Speaker 112 We'll put it in a post.

Speaker 97 I want to also

Speaker 128 say hello and thank to Jamath and his wonderful wife, Nat. Thank you very much for being here.
Thank you very much. It was great seeing you again.

Speaker 97 Great couple.

Speaker 128 David Friedberg and

Speaker 128 even, as we know, Jason Calakanis.

Speaker 128 I say even. Thank you, Jason.

Speaker 97 Thank you, Jason. I appreciate that.
Yeah, he's a good person.

Speaker 124 As you heard, he says, JKL, a good person.

Speaker 48 Even Jason Calanis.

Speaker 124 He says, you're a good person.

Speaker 97 Yeah, he trolled me pretty hard.

Speaker 111 Even Jason Calakanis, you know, so it shows you that he knows you are the troublemaker, which we appreciate.

Speaker 13 I guess my question for you is, so is Donald Trump a good person?

Speaker 8 Is Donald Trump?

Speaker 111 Is the president of our country a good person?

Speaker 97 Wow. And I can't see into the man's heart.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 97 I think if you looked at his behavior, you would find a lot of behaviors that would be suboptimal.

Speaker 122 Is there something that you got the three kids we talked about?

Speaker 77 Is there something you would look look at the three kids and say, you know, I wish you could really you could really model yourself after Donald Trump on this.

Speaker 97 I mean, he's quite charming. I will give him that.

Speaker 97 He is, that guy is a charmer. I mean, I have seen him take very, very

Speaker 97 strong men and just.

Speaker 15 Oh, he's going to like this too much.

Speaker 8 All right, that's the end of the show.

Speaker 15 He's going to like that compliment too much.

Speaker 78 We're done with this. Jason Calcanis, thank you, man.
I appreciate you doing this.

Speaker 81 I genuinely do.

Speaker 124 Some of your other guys.

Speaker 83 And I love your pod. You do a great job.

Speaker 30 I'm welcome anytime.

Speaker 8 I don't.

Speaker 97 Let's just do it like a regular check in every six to nine months. We'll see if any of our predictions or hand-wringing turns out to be true or false.
It's going to be exciting.

Speaker 14 I look forward to it.

Speaker 23 We'll see you in January. Maybe we'll do it.

Speaker 8 Maybe we'll go skiing.

Speaker 26 Maybe we'll do it in a mountain town in person in January.

Speaker 10 We'll talk about that.

Speaker 8 We'll figure it out. All right.

Speaker 83 That's Jay Cal.

Speaker 100 See you back here tomorrow.

Speaker 100 White shirt now red, my bloody nose sleeping. You're on your tippy toes creeping around

Speaker 100 like no one knows Think you're so criminal

Speaker 100 Bruises on both my knees For you don't say thank you Oh please I do what I want when I'm wanting to my soul so cynical

Speaker 100 So you're a tough guy Like you're really rough guy Just can't get enough guy Just always so puff guy

Speaker 8 I'm that bad type make your mama sad type. Make your girlfriend mad type, might seduce your dad type.

Speaker 8 I'm the bad guy.

Speaker 8 I like it when you take control. Even

Speaker 8 if you know know that you don't want me I'll let you play the role I'll be your animal

Speaker 8 My mommy likes to sing along with me

Speaker 8 But she won't sing this song if she reaches all the late She'll pity the men I know

Speaker 8 So you're a tough guy Like you're really a rough guy Just can't get enough guy Just always a puff guy

Speaker 8 I'm not bad type, make your mom a sad type. Make you go for a mad type.
My seduce your dad type. I'm the bad guy.

Speaker 24 The Bullard podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Speaker 8 She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding.

Speaker 129 Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard. But then we found out she had something called agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease.
And that was a different kind of difficult.

Speaker 129 So we asked her doctor for more help.

Speaker 130 Seeing symptoms like these in a loved one, it could be time to ask their doctor about Rexulti, Rexpiprazole 2 milligrams, the only FDA-approved treatment proven to reduce the symptoms of this condition.

Speaker 130 Rexulte should not be used as an as-needed treatment.

Speaker 130 Elderly people with dementia-related psychosis have increased risk of death or stroke, report fever, stiff muscles, and confusion, which can be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent.

Speaker 130 High blood sugar can lead to coma or death, weight gain, increased cholesterol, unusual urges, dizziness on standing, falls, seizures, trouble swallowing, or sleepiness may occur.

Speaker 130 Learn more about these and other side effects at RickSulty.com. Tap Ad for PI.

Speaker 97 I'm glad her doctor recommended Rick Sulte.

Speaker 130 Talk to your loved ones, doctor. Moments matter.

Speaker 52 If you can't compare your users' workflows before and after adding AI, How do you know it's even paying off?

Speaker 61 Pendo Agent Analytics is the first tool to connect agent prompts and conversations to downstream outcomes like time saved so you know what's working and what to fix.

Speaker 131 California has millions of homes that could be damaged in a strong earthquake.

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Speaker 131 Visit strengthenyourhouse.com to learn how to strengthen your home and help protect it from damage. The work may cost less than you think and can often be done in just a few days.

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Speaker 132 Get prepared today and worry less tomorrow.

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Jason Calacanis: Anarcho Capitalism

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Transcript

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