DOGE unveils a roadmap, Unlocking GDP Growth, WW3 escalation, Fat cell memory AI transcript and summary - episode of podcast All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

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Episode: DOGE unveils a roadmap, Unlocking GDP Growth, WW3 escalation, Fat cell memory

Author: All-In Podcast, LLC
Duration: 01:10:07

Episode Shownotes

(0:00) Bestie intros! (1:54) Breaking down the DOGE roadmap (24:28) Milei's impact, DOGE's tight timeline, impact on GDP growth, "default sustainable," how to communicate DOGE (48:11) WW3 risk: Biden's recent escalation (1:00:43) Science Corner: Fat cells can remember being fat! Get tickets for The All-In Holiday Spectacular!: https://allin.ticketsauce.com/e/all-in-holiday-spectacular 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://www.wsj.com/opinion/musk-and-ramaswamy-the-doge-plan-to-reform-government-supreme-court-guidance-end-executive-power-grab-fa51c020 https://x.com/BehizyTweets/status/1859364239229821022 https://x.com/sfliberty/status/1858936359949304105 https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/1859946626271388068 https://x.com/realdogenews/status/1859233043686334791 https://x.com/popeye31jc/status/1859233598328492360 https://x.com/MattForVA/status/1859248996377612755 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NLzc9kobDk https://tradingeconomics.com/argentina/inflation-cpi https://x.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1858258226199818595 https://x.com/Pismo_B/status/1858018620456186221 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/31/world/europe/russia-gains-ukraine-maps.html https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/17/politics/biden-authorizes-ukraine-missiles-russian-targets/index.html https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08165-7 https://x.com/bryan_johnson/status/1860022160833806646

Summary

In this episode of 'All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg,' the hosts analyze the DOGE roadmap aimed at enhancing governance efficiency through regulatory reforms. They discuss its potential to boost GDP growth and stimulate political unity while acknowledging the challenges posed by skepticism and bureaucratic resistance. The conversation shifts to U.S. foreign policy, particularly the escalating tensions with Russia under Biden's administration, and how these decisions reflect voter sentiments on the Ukraine conflict. The episode further explores noteworthy scientific insights regarding fat cell memory, linking biological factors to societal health challenges.

Go to PodExtra AI's episode page (DOGE unveils a roadmap, Unlocking GDP Growth, WW3 escalation, Fat cell memory) to play and view complete AI-processed content: summary, mindmap, topics, takeaways, transcript, keywords and highlights.

Full Transcript

00:00:00 Speaker_02
Do you hear that free bird got busted looking at porn is computer.

00:00:13 Speaker_08
I lost it.

00:00:14 Speaker_02
I lost it. It was too good. I think he was pleasuring himself to that outfit.

00:00:19 Speaker_05
He was playing the skin flute. What happened? He had to go for a quick game of pocket pool. How'd you write it? Oh my God.

00:00:27 Speaker_02
It was too exciting. You were beating the bishop. Allison came in and just like wondering what was going on.

00:00:33 Speaker_09
She grabbed my computer and she looked at it and it was an essay.

00:00:35 Speaker_03
Rain Man David Sachs.

00:00:49 Speaker_07
All right, before we get to doge, we got a little housekeeping, a little housey housekeeping. You know, we're getting into the holiday spirit here. It's episode 205. We're in year four, and we're having a Christmas party. It's going to be great.

00:01:07 Speaker_07
The all in holiday spectacular is happening in San Francisco. On Saturday, December 7th, I think the VIP sold out. There's still some tickets left. Go to allin.com slash events.

00:01:20 Speaker_07
And if you can't make it to San Francisco, I think you can buy a ticket for $50 on the Zoom. I think we're going to have it on Zoom. Is that right? Do I have my facts straight there, Freeberg?

00:01:33 Speaker_09
Yeah, there's going to be a live stream. Thanks to zoom for setting this up for us. It's kind of interesting. They're doing this thing where you could kind of, you know, get access to live events. So they're helping us get this set up.

00:01:46 Speaker_09
You want to watch the stream live. on to anything's possible. It could be spiced up through that.

00:01:53 Speaker_07
All right, listen, best eat you on and bestie Vivek wrote an op ed, a barn burner in the Wall Street Journal about doge, the Department of Government efficiency, and they laid it out. They want to cut overbearing and unnecessary regulation.

00:02:10 Speaker_07
Obviously, they want to cut unnecessary administrative roles, save taxpayers money, they want to run it by founders, non politicians helping The Trump transition team find a way to hire quote, a lean team of small government crusaders.

00:02:25 Speaker_07
team's going to work closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. Here's the plan.

00:02:30 Speaker_07
First take aim at 500 billion in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress then fix the government's procurement process by conducting massive audits during temporary payment suspensions. This is an interesting playbook.

00:02:45 Speaker_07
that Elon has done before. So basically, suspend all the payments and hey, let everybody audit those payments.

00:02:54 Speaker_07
Drive change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than passing new laws and two SCOTUS rulings are going to play a major role here. West Virginia versus EPA.

00:03:05 Speaker_07
That's when SCOTUS rule that federal agencies can't impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress authorizes them to do so and looper bright versus Raimondo. That's from 2024.

00:03:19 Speaker_07
And that overturned the Chevron doctrine. We talked about that on a previous episode.

00:03:23 Speaker_07
So according to Doge, when combined, quote, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law.

00:03:34 Speaker_07
Doge will use software and legal experts to create a list of regulations that Trump can immediately pause. They're going to make some sort of a leaderboard, Elon said, and

00:03:45 Speaker_07
Vivek said he would do he suspended his existing podcast i didn't know he had a podcast but he's doing a doge cast a doge podcast and so freeberg this has been you know a major issue for you you've been talking about on this podcast that the unsustainable existential issue for our country is all of the debt we have what are the chances

00:04:10 Speaker_07
that this is going to occur, because obviously, we all know the machine is going to fight to preserve the machine chances that we are sitting here in four years, and we've seen meaningful cuts in spending and a meaningful reduction in size of the government.

00:04:25 Speaker_09
Look, it's Doge has probably 18 months to do what they can do before the midterms.

00:04:32 Speaker_09
And there's going to be an inevitable amount of recoil and backlash that's going to arise from the actions that they're going to try and take and President Trump's going to try and take under the recommendations provided by Doge.

00:04:44 Speaker_09
So they need to move fast and aggressively. And that's only going to cause the recoil to be harder and faster. There's going to be a ton of litigation, obviously, everything's going to go to court. it's going to be incredibly politicized.

00:04:57 Speaker_09
What is frustrating and challenging to me is that there is nothing that they said that doesn't seem obvious and right. I don't know how you can politicize the points that they're making.

00:05:07 Speaker_09
Put aside their party, put aside who they are individually, put aside how we got here. At the end of the day, this federal government needs to be run more efficiently, more effectively.

00:05:16 Speaker_09
It is unfair and it is a tax on every one of us to have money thrown away, to have wasted capital, to have bureaucracy that gets in the way of people being able to do their jobs. It is a tax on all of us and our kids and our future.

00:05:31 Speaker_09
It needs to be fixed. If it doesn't get fixed, as I've said countless times before, we are in an arithmetic debt death spiral. There is no way out of it.

00:05:40 Speaker_09
So by resolving both the inefficiency, reducing the bureaucracy, stopping the wasteful spending, having accountability in the government, we can actually get the United States another 50 years, 100 years, whatever long we want.

00:05:53 Speaker_09
But we were literally in a death spiral leading up to this moment. And I have no idea how we ended up on this timeline. I was over the moon and shocked when I read all of the progress over the last couple of weeks and putting this thing together.

00:06:07 Speaker_09
I did not know that this is where we were end up. I couldn't be more happy with what I think is going to happen with Doge and its effect on, if not actually making the changes, shining a light on the issues that need to be addressed.

00:06:17 Speaker_09
And I will say, it is unfair to Americans for this to be politicized. The Democrats shouldn't make this a Republican issue. This is not about Republicans doing damage. This is about doing the right thing for the government and for the country.

00:06:31 Speaker_09
And the Democrats had an opportunity to own this issue, and instead they've chosen to oppose it, which makes no sense. It is frustrating and challenging to me as an American to think that this is even a political point.

00:06:42 Speaker_09
This should be a what's right for America point. It's almost like we're going to war. War with ourselves, with our bureaucracy, with the morass that's been built up over the last couple of decades. And I'm thrilled that this is happening.

00:06:53 Speaker_09
And frankly, put the people aside. Maybe it's the fact that you need people that are as outspoken, as challenging, as difficult as these two particular individuals that are going to run this group.

00:07:03 Speaker_09
but that might be what it takes for it to happen in the small 18 month window that they have. So that's my rant on it.

00:07:09 Speaker_07
Yeah, great rant. And we had a Milton Friedman clip go viral. And he spoke exactly about his positions on what he would eliminate departments like agriculture, commerce, education, let's just play that clip.

00:07:22 Speaker_07
And then there was obviously the Malay interview by Lex Friedman earlier this week, keep them or abolish them.

00:07:28 Speaker_04
Department of Agriculture, abolish gone. Department of Commerce, Abolish. Gone. Department of Defense? Keep. Keep it. Department of Education? Abolish. Gone. Energy? Abolish. Health and Human Services?

00:07:43 Speaker_04
There is room for some public health activities to prevent the contagion. We'll eliminate half of the Department of Health and Human Services? Yeah, something like that. Okay, one half. There we go. Housing and Urban Development? Done. Done. That's gone.

00:07:56 Speaker_04
Department of the Interior?

00:07:57 Speaker_11
The problem there is You first have to sell off all the land that the government owns. But that's what you should do.

00:08:03 Speaker_04
But it could be done pretty quickly. It could be done. You should do that. Department of Justice. Oh yes. Keep that one. Keep that one. Labor.

00:08:10 Speaker_11
No.

00:08:10 Speaker_04
Gone. State. Keep. Keep it. Transportation. Gone. Gone. The Treasury. You have to keep it to collect taxes. All right, collect taxes through the Treasury.

00:08:21 Speaker_07
Sachs, you see that clip, you see the activity going on with Doge. Would you think that the machine will allow what Milton Friedman is describing there, what Javier Amelie is doing in Argentina, and what Elon is proposing with Doge?

00:08:38 Speaker_07
Do you think the machine is going to allow you know, the wholesale deleting of Department of Agriculture, Department of Education at a federal level and move all that stuff to the states. What do you think is going to happen here?

00:08:51 Speaker_07
And how hard will the machine fight back against this in your mind?

00:08:55 Speaker_07
Because, hey, you might have some Republicans, some Democrats, they fought really hard to get jobs to get subsidies to put in factories, whatever from the federal government, are they going to just give that all back? The clip is from 1998.

00:09:08 Speaker_07
By the way, sacks your thoughts.

00:09:11 Speaker_02
Well, that Milton Friedman clip, as great as it is, I mean, it really is outstanding, is setting expectations a little bit too high here.

00:09:19 Speaker_02
I mean, we're not going to be able to wipe out entire major departments of the government that are cabinet-level positions. I don't think that's in the cards.

00:09:26 Speaker_02
You know, what Milton Friedman is basically describing is a night watchman state, and I don't think we're going to get back to that.

00:09:34 Speaker_02
If you look right now at the opinions on the legacy media, MSDNC, CNN, all that kind of stuff, they are forecasting that Doge is going to amount to nothing.

00:09:45 Speaker_02
They're basically saying that the powers that be in Washington are going to reject it completely. There's somehow going to be a falling out between Elon and DJT. They're just very cynical.

00:09:56 Speaker_02
And then you have people who are not necessarily dismissive in that way. in the media, but just long-time Washington insiders who feel like they've seen it all before and nothing ever happens, so they're just very jaded and cynical.

00:10:11 Speaker_02
I would say that, again, I wouldn't have the expectations of the Milton Friedman level, but I think that the expectations for Doge right now are being set incredibly low by the media and by the Washington insiders.

00:10:24 Speaker_02
I think there are good reasons to believe that the results will surpass those low expectations Number one is, you've got Elon Musk running this thing with Vivek. Elon understands better than anybody the impact of deleterious regulations on business.

00:10:42 Speaker_02
He can really put a microscope on that. He's got the largest speech platform in the world with X, the largest account on X. He's also built a

00:10:51 Speaker_02
get out the vote operation that he funded in the last election that he's promised to keep around and potentially expand. So his influence, hopefully, is not going anywhere.

00:11:03 Speaker_02
He's going to be able to keep using that to help keep politicians on the side here. So that's number one is no one's ever made money betting against Elon Musk, and I don't expect that to start right now.

00:11:17 Speaker_02
Number two is you got Vivek, who is co-head with Elon of this thing. And I think he's a perfect partner for Elon because Vivek, first of all, he's a brilliant guy with a lot of success in business, but he's also a Harvard-trained lawyer.

00:11:31 Speaker_02
He's a brilliant legal mind. And I think you could see in that op-ed, I suspect the parts that were citing all those from court decisions, were his influence. And so they figured out a legal roadmap here.

00:11:43 Speaker_02
It's not just a matter of kind of going to Congress and hoping Congress acts. They've got a way here sequentially to do this through the executive branch, through executive orders, going through the court system.

00:11:54 Speaker_02
They've kind of got a game plan here that's not entirely reliant on legislation. So I think the Vakes influence and sort of legal strategic mind is a big asset here.

00:12:07 Speaker_02
And then I think the third reason to be optimistic is just the fact that this was printed on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page is suggestive in and of itself.

00:12:16 Speaker_02
What this shows is that this Doge effort is, I think, uniting both the kind of populist reformers and the establishment types within the party.

00:12:27 Speaker_02
If Elon and Vivek were trying to get a mandate for no more forever war, I don't think the Wall Street Journal would be publishing that, right? This would not happen.

00:12:36 Speaker_02
So there are reasons to believe that this will not actually divide the party, that the party could unify around this. It could be consensus building, yeah. Could be, yeah. Now look, every congressman and every senator is still going to advocate

00:12:48 Speaker_02
for their pork barrel project in their district or their state. And it's going to be very hard to push back on that.

00:12:53 Speaker_02
However, you could imagine a process like we had with the base closure commission when the United States needed to close a bunch of military bases and they created an outside commission to recommend the cuts and everyone kind of shared the pain equally.

00:13:06 Speaker_02
Maybe DOJ could somehow play into that.

00:13:10 Speaker_02
So I'm not saying it's going to be perfect, but I do think that if Republicans share a principle across, again, both these establishment and the populist side, it would be in reducing unnecessary regulation and the number of

00:13:26 Speaker_02
regulators needed, the number of government employees needed to enforce all those regulations. So I'm hopeful that they'll be able to get something done within the party.

00:13:34 Speaker_02
And since the Republicans have the trifecta, if they've got Trump's leadership, and they've got the leadership of the Senate and House backing it, I think they'll be able to get something done.

00:13:43 Speaker_02
Again, it's not going to be Milton Friedman level, but I'm optimistic they'll get something good and important done.

00:13:49 Speaker_07
I think the easiest thing for them to get done with Doge is the naming, the shaming, the auditing, the transparency of what we're actually spending, because so many of the audits, Chamath, are just not completed. People don't know what's being spent.

00:14:04 Speaker_07
And if you show Americans a $12,000 hammer, or people with job titles not coming into the office or coming into the office one day a week, one day a month, that's going to infuriate taxpayers. And I think there's a very easy way to navigate all this.

00:14:18 Speaker_07
You just create the leaderboard and you not only shame people who are wasting our tax dollars, you celebrate the people who are heroes, who start showing frugality and cost saving.

00:14:29 Speaker_07
And they're going to do this with the leaderboard of the heroes and the goats. This could be the unifying, not just the Republican Party, as Saks is pointing out, Shamoff, I think this could unify the whole country.

00:14:39 Speaker_07
Is there anybody paying taxes that wants to see money wasted that wants to see us pay people high salaries to not come to work? Chamath, what's your take on the sequence of events here? What are easy layups that they can actually get done?

00:14:53 Speaker_07
And then where is the machine going to fight and try to stop this thing?

00:14:58 Speaker_05
I think you are highlighting something that they can do right away, which I think is very powerful, which is just using these distribution channels that Elon has now to create a massive layer of accountability.

00:15:12 Speaker_05
I do think that Sunshine is a really incredible disinfectant. I think the best way that they could start, if possible, is to stop paying

00:15:22 Speaker_05
their vendors until you actually have some amount of accounting to figure out, as you said, how many $600 soap dispensers are actually being bought and sold now.

00:15:33 Speaker_05
That kind of, whatever you want to call that, corruption or grift, it's not going to account for hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars.

00:15:42 Speaker_05
But I do think that it is a very moral and symbolic win that says we're going to start to get much more rational and it starts to allow the average American to actually feel like they have a little bit of control and they have a more vested interest

00:15:59 Speaker_05
in how the government spends money. But I actually want to take a step back for a second. And before I talk about what DOGE can do, I just want to highlight something that's been going on in California, because I think it explains a lot.

00:16:13 Speaker_05
In California, and I'm just going to read this stat because it's incredible, the regulatory burden in California as a state from 1997 to 2015, this is when the data is available that I found, has increased by almost 50%.

00:16:30 Speaker_05
As of May of 2022, there are almost 61,000 individual regulations in the state of California. So what does that mean and where does it come from?

00:16:44 Speaker_05
And Nick, if you can just put out the tweet, it has happened over a period of time in which the government has been the absolute singular source of employment in the state.

00:17:00 Speaker_05
And we talked about this before where this is also a problem at the federal level when you look at GDP and job growth, because it looks like a lot of these jobs are actually fake manufactured government type jobs. So why is this a problem?

00:17:13 Speaker_05
You've seen in California, the issue that we have is that if you have A growth in the number of employees in this case, in California, all the job growth in recent memory has been state employees. What is the byproduct? Regulations go up.

00:17:29 Speaker_05
What is the byproduct of that? There are actually no private sector jobs and more to the point, the private sector fleas. So now let's bubble that up and look at the federal government.

00:17:38 Speaker_05
Nick, if you want to just show that chart that I, that I sent you, what is incredible J Cal is that the more people are hired by the government, Lo and behold, what do you see?

00:17:49 Speaker_05
The number of regulations issued by federal agencies has just continued unabated year in, year out. You cannot run a country like this. Because these accumulate, right?

00:18:04 Speaker_05
Congress is doing less and less of a job actually trying to frame how the country should work. That white space is filled in, as Freeberg said, by these federal agencies. It compounds and accumulates. This is not replacing laws.

00:18:18 Speaker_05
None of these regulations have expiry dates. As a result, I think what you probably have is an incredible restraint on the US economy. I think that the US economy could be growing at 4% or 5%.

00:18:34 Speaker_05
But the reason that it doesn't grow at four or 5% is in that one single chart. It is impossible to be able to live up to your economic potential when you have this burden on your neck.

00:18:46 Speaker_05
So I think the real opportunity for doge is to basically do whatever it needs to do using the law to wipe as many of these regulations off the books. We are better.

00:18:59 Speaker_05
cutting them all to zero and then finding the ones we really need and then repassing those, then we are going at this piecemeal. There's some incredible ideas, by the way, that this creates.

00:19:12 Speaker_05
Nick, I don't know if you can find this tweet, but Doge asked what people think of the IRS. There was an enormous amount of activity that essentially said, give us a flat tax and wipe out the tax code.

00:19:26 Speaker_05
And people were very flexible in the amount of tax that they were willing to pay. But could you imagine the simplification in the tax code and the implications of that? I was in Singapore, by the way, 10 days ago when I started my trip.

00:19:39 Speaker_05
Nick, beep out the name of the person I'm about to say. I had a long meeting with ... who is there. I was asking him the complexity of dealing with taxes. He's like, what do you mean? We pay a very simple tax system.

00:19:54 Speaker_05
There's no capital gains in Singapore. As a result, our filing requirements are de minimisly small.

00:20:00 Speaker_05
But as a result, people like him, meaning great entrepreneurs, can spend all their time thinking about what to build, not tax optimization or how to account for it.

00:20:12 Speaker_05
So could you imagine if these guys basically use doge as a mechanism to shrink the tax code, create a flat tax potentially? I know that that has to be passed by Congress. I understand that.

00:20:23 Speaker_05
But the idea of just cutting this all the way down and then finding through that process what you actually need, I think can find America 100, 200 basis points of GDP growth. It could be an economic renaissance.

00:20:39 Speaker_07
I mean, just to build on that, cutting all the regulations to zero, you might have throw out some babies in the bathwater.

00:20:45 Speaker_07
So why not put a clock on them and just say whenever this was enacted, plus five years, and then it rolls off or plus two years, whatever number of months and then you could have them come off, rolling off every month.

00:20:57 Speaker_05
I think that's a good idea, but it has to be quarterly. I think that's a good idea. But Jake, I think you first have to cancel all these regulations, and then say whatever we need, we will reenact

00:21:08 Speaker_05
your point on a five year shot clock that then has to be renewed in a new congressional period. And I think that that's extremely healthy.

00:21:16 Speaker_07
Well, because you know what people die, paradigms shift, and then nobody even remembers these regulations, you have to do archaeology to figure out who created this, what was the intent.

00:21:25 Speaker_07
And you would never do that you would never live sacks with all of these rules forever.

00:21:30 Speaker_05
Just one last comment, in fairness to these government employees, The one thing is that it's not their fault, right? Meaning in the sense that they were hired into a regime where the incentive was to regulate so that you had things to oversee.

00:21:46 Speaker_05
And so they did their job. In fact, I would say they did their job incredibly well. But the point is that now we need to pivot for them to do a totally different job.

00:21:53 Speaker_07
Well, Chamath, I'll hand this over to Freeberg. Freeberg, if you were to get rid of regulations as somebody working in the government, you might work your way out of a job.

00:22:03 Speaker_07
So the incentive is completely perverse and reverse to what we actually need in the country, which is less regulation, more thoughtful regulation and some process by taking these things on and off the books and adapting them to reality.

00:22:16 Speaker_09
Yeah, this is where I think I think we've talked about this many, many times in the past, but like all organizations have a natural tendency to grow. They want to grow.

00:22:26 Speaker_09
They're not like, find me one nonprofit or find me one university or find me one company or one government agency that's ever said, my job is to shrink myself. It's never happened. So why does that happen?

00:22:40 Speaker_09
Well, if you look at the like, day to day operating role of each individual, over time, like all individuals, they want to do more, they want to have a bigger impact, they want to have more scale, they want to have more leverage.

00:22:51 Speaker_09
So there's this natural set of incentives that drives a lot of choices and operating procedures on the ground. that create more structure, more scale, more leverage, and drive more hiring. Everyone wants to become a manager of people.

00:23:04 Speaker_09
They don't wanna just be doing the same IC job forever, individual contributor job forever. So if they wanna be a manager, they gotta find more stuff to do, and then they gotta hire people to do that stuff.

00:23:13 Speaker_09
So all of these organizations, whether, again, and we've all been on boards of nonprofits, I'm sure, and we've all been involved in this sort of thing, there's always this incentive to raise more capital, to hire more people, to do more stuff that sort of

00:23:25 Speaker_09
It's really unclear until you really dig into the psychology of each individual person working there why this is happening. I don't think that the federal government is any different. Each of these people feel they want to be more important.

00:23:35 Speaker_09
They want to have a bigger role. They want to have a bigger impact, make their job. So if your job direct directionally is to regulate, then what's the scalar on regulation, more regulation. So therefore, to do more, you have to regulate more.

00:23:50 Speaker_09
There's no regulator that says I want to regulate less over time, because we've created a system that's one directional. So you have to have these resets.

00:23:58 Speaker_09
If you don't have them naturally, they're going to happen unnaturally, in the form of social unrest and breakdowns of the economy, and collapse of social structures, all these other things that happen. way way down.

00:24:08 Speaker_09
Or as Chamath is pointing out in California in the economic structure of California, which I think is happening on a kind of national scale because of the outsized role the federal government plays in our national economy here today.

00:24:19 Speaker_09
So so you have to have these unnatural forces come in and do this readjustment from time to time. Otherwise, it's just going to break on its own.

00:24:28 Speaker_07
And Millay in Argentina has basically, I don't know, a year or an 18 month head start on us and has been doing this. He did a great podcast with Lex Friedman. They translated it, actually, they dubbed it, which is kind of interesting technology.

00:24:44 Speaker_07
And in this discussion, they talked about reducing the ministry's agencies from 20 to They fired 50,000 government workers 15% of the total workforce.

00:24:56 Speaker_07
There were 341,000 when he started, they implemented daily deregulation process to remove inefficient policy. So they just do that day in and day out.

00:25:04 Speaker_07
They ended discretionary payments to provinces and cities to restore market driven utility prices, no more subsidies, yada, yada, yada, right down the line. sex, your thoughts on how many months it will take to do this.

00:25:20 Speaker_07
And there's this this discussion, and I don't know if that's from inside the Trump administration of Hey, we got to get this done in 18 months, we got to get this done in 18 months, what can you tell us about the the sense of urgency about getting this done quickly?

00:25:32 Speaker_07
And why that's occurring?

00:25:36 Speaker_02
Well, I think Elon and Vivek have announced that Doge will be sunsetting or disbanding at the 250th anniversary of America, which would be July 4th of 2026. So they've only given themselves about, what's that, 18 months?

00:25:53 Speaker_02
Yep, which kind of makes sense, right?

00:25:55 Speaker_08
That's leading into the midterms, right?

00:25:57 Speaker_02
Right, exactly. You tend to have the most momentum coming off an election like this one where you have the trifecta.

00:26:04 Speaker_02
So I think that makes a lot of sense that they're going to be able to have the greatest impact, let's say in the first year after the new president of Congress gets sworn in.

00:26:14 Speaker_07
How do you get Democrats in on this sex? How do you push them to join the party to join the movement to be more efficient to be more transparent? Is there a possibility for us to get some coordination here with the other side or no?

00:26:28 Speaker_02
Maybe you might be able to get some support of particular Democrats on particular things. I don't want to say that it's not possible. Difficult, but not not impossible. But look, I think what Millet has done in Argentina is remarkable.

00:26:43 Speaker_02
I mean, that was a country that was a total basket case. Inflation was out of control. It's already because of the cuts he's made. They now have a more normal inflation rate, and they've gone from basically being uninvestable to investable as a country.

00:26:59 Speaker_02
Now, the United States is not the basket case that Argentina is, but we are on an unsustainable fiscal trajectory. Doge is also not going to have the power that Malay has.

00:27:09 Speaker_02
It's not going to have the degrees of freedom to act, but we also don't have as big a problem. What we need to do is just bend our fiscal curve from being unsustainable to being sustainable.

00:27:20 Speaker_02
And if we can do that, it'll have a huge impact on the economy. Specifically, what we saw in the last election, the thing that probably hurt the Democrats the most was inflation. Voters clearly do not like inflation.

00:27:32 Speaker_02
They do not like the diminishment of their purchasing power. But how do you stop inflation? You have to raise interest rates. And that's not good either, because that raises the cost of a mortgage, that raises the cost of a car payment.

00:27:45 Speaker_02
It's bad for investment, because if interest rates are higher, then that means the discount rate on stocks and real estate, on every investment class basically, is higher. hurdle rate for investments higher.

00:27:58 Speaker_02
So, high interest rates are also bad for the economy. So, how do you get out of that box where you either have high inflation or high interest rates? The only way is to bend the fiscal curve to that more sustainable path.

00:28:09 Speaker_02
And if you can do that, the bond markets will actually give you credit for it in advance, because they know that they're not going to be flooded with the need to keep funding all of this U.S. government debt.

00:28:23 Speaker_02
So, startups have this saying about being either default alive or default dead. We either get to default sustainable or default unsustainable. Right now, we're unsustainable. The bond markets know it. Inflation remains persistently high, around 3%.

00:28:38 Speaker_02
The Fed has not been able to cut interest rates the way that they expect it to. Remember, the markets were expecting seven cuts this year. We got basically three. We got a 50 and a 25. So it just hasn't been the cuts that people were expecting.

00:28:52 Speaker_02
And that's because inflation hasn't come down as much as people thought.

00:28:54 Speaker_02
So if Doge, working with the rest of the government, OMB, the Treasury, Congress, executive orders, can now convince the markets that the US financial picture is more sustainable, we'll get credit for that, interest rates will come down, and that'll lead to a boom in the economy.

00:29:13 Speaker_02
So it's all win-win if they can pull this off.

00:29:16 Speaker_07
Prebrook, any final thoughts here before we move on from Doge wishing Elon and Vivek as much success as possible? We've really I mean, everybody should be rooting for this. You want to give us your final thoughts?

00:29:30 Speaker_09
I feel like America is Neo from the Matrix, where there was like a thousand bullets being shot at America. And we literally had to dodge every single one of them in order to get to this point. Again, I am so shocked and surprised in a positive way.

00:29:50 Speaker_09
that we ended up on this particular timeline. Look, everything had to go the way it went for this to have happened. Biden decided to run for re-election. Biden stayed in too long. They didn't run a primary. They put Kamala in.

00:30:03 Speaker_07
Elon got off the fences, switched parties.

00:30:06 Speaker_09
Elon decided to throw 100 million bucks at the problem. Elon bought Twitter. China had a real estate bubble.

00:30:13 Speaker_09
I mean, you can go down the list of things that have to go right for us to get to this very moment where a small group of people have recognized the fiscal death spiral that the United States federal government has been in and have the authority and the capacity and the skills to be able to go and execute against a solution

00:30:34 Speaker_09
I have no idea how this could have been architected. Maybe Sax knew all along, and I convinced him two years ago that this was how things had to go, and he's been designing it like Emperor Palpatine.

00:30:43 Speaker_07
Maybe it's you talking about Ray Dalio and the end of the empire for three years on this podcast.

00:30:48 Speaker_09
Honestly, as we remember, when we talk with Dalio about this, he's like, there have been a handful. the relationship with China, which I think this is all very tightly related, we may have dodged a lot of bullets.

00:31:03 Speaker_09
And if the United States can get its house in order, reduce federal spending while increasing economic activity, it can be a tremendous unlock for the US and for world peace.

00:31:15 Speaker_09
So because again, I think that conflict arises when we don't have our own fiscal house in order. And so I feel very positive, more, more surprised and positive than I was a year ago, six months ago. It's just amazing. We're on this timeline.

00:31:28 Speaker_09
And I do think the United States as Neo dodged a lot of bullets here.

00:31:32 Speaker_02
I told you everything was proceeding as I had foreseen.

00:31:37 Speaker_05
You know what happened to the tenure and Elon and Vivek wrote that essay? I actually don't. What happened? Yields contracted by five basis points. You know what the value of that is? A couple billion. $15 billion per year.

00:31:50 Speaker_05
So I think that it was probably a $100 billion essay, just writing it.

00:31:56 Speaker_02
I think you will find that this doge is quite operational.

00:32:03 Speaker_07
I mean, I think it's got a chance. I mean, if you can't.

00:32:06 Speaker_09
I just wish it weren't political. Right. I want I want all I want all Americans and Democrats to stand up and say, this is the right thing for the United States.

00:32:14 Speaker_05
Forget about the fact. Guys, the problem is the essay saved us 100 billion. Just the essay.

00:32:20 Speaker_07
Here's the thing, you're going to need, you're going to have to be very strategic about how they pick, the DOJ team is going to have to be very strategic to pick things that are consensus building, that don't make people feel like

00:32:37 Speaker_07
This is going to grind the poor more and make the rich richer. That's the expectation.

00:32:42 Speaker_07
That's going to be the negative framing on this, I predict, which is just a bunch of rich guys making cuts, talking their books, making cuts for things that are their pet projects, their investments.

00:32:52 Speaker_07
They have to come out and not make it that they have to make it here's inefficiency, here's inefficiency, here's inefficiency.

00:32:58 Speaker_07
And a great way to do that would be to say the efficiency gains and the tax cuts are going to go to people making, let's say under $250,000. These are not these cuts are not being made just to make the rich richer. That's going to be the framing.

00:33:11 Speaker_05
But just my best advice. Don't you think that that's going to happen no matter what? What which part of it? that they're going to say that no matter what. So I actually disagree with the first part of what you said.

00:33:22 Speaker_05
I agree with you that the media, the mainstream media will try to characterize this as hurting the poor. I agree. And I'm not sure yet whether it's still or not.

00:33:31 Speaker_05
But I think the first part I disagree with is I don't think they should operate towards consensus. I think that they should do what's right.

00:33:39 Speaker_07
Well, you could do what's right. And you could start with things that are the most wasteful.

00:33:42 Speaker_07
Like, if you start cutting kids lunches, or Pell Grants, or you start cutting people's jobs to in healthcare education that people perceive are helping people, I think you're going to just feed into this narrative that it's a way to cut taxes on rich people.

00:34:01 Speaker_07
And you know what, you do need to build consensus.

00:34:03 Speaker_05
How does that sound rich people?

00:34:06 Speaker_07
If you cut regulations and a bunch of our companies benefit from it, just to be self-aware, the framing is already that this is an effort for companies that we invest in to have less regulation, to make the equity holders in those companies more rich.

00:34:24 Speaker_07
I have to make sure that the hold on it for all to make sure the savings is for all Americans and that all Americans benefit from it.

00:34:30 Speaker_07
And the way they benefit is the best framing they could do is your taxes are going to be lower because you're not wasting your tax dollars. If they can keep to that, not Hey, we're moving regulation so that our company needs to be honest here.

00:34:43 Speaker_05
Yeah, being a hairdresser requires more regulation than being any one of most of my companies. So I actually think it benefits. I think it benefits other people way way more than it benefits me.

00:34:53 Speaker_07
and you have to show it is my point. That's the point is you have to show people that you're doing this for everybody, not just for the people on this podcast and our friends. That's gonna be the key.

00:35:04 Speaker_09
What Shamov just said is so important.

00:35:06 Speaker_09
There's a great interview, I've mentioned this in the past, between Tim Ferriss and Charles Koch from a couple years ago, where he brings up this exact example about how regulatory burdens make it difficult for women to become hairdressers.

00:35:18 Speaker_09
It's like $7,000. So they don't have the capital to do that because of the regulatory burden to get there.

00:35:23 Speaker_09
Think about building, building your home or, you know, like, let's say you want to change, put a shower in your bathroom, change the shower in your bathroom. You don't want to spend $15,000 on all the permitting regulatory stuff to make that happen.

00:35:35 Speaker_09
It's going to unlock value for everyone. That's a small example of kind of a regulatory problem, but this benefits everyone. And the cost of transportation will come down.

00:35:42 Speaker_07
And my point is you have to communicate that. You have to be able to communicate that. And that's where using Elon's platform perfect job of communicating this to people. And that's the playbook freeberg. That's my point.

00:35:56 Speaker_07
People are going to fight this, you have to convince them you have to show them that this is helping everybody just agree that they're okay, but that's different than how you started.

00:36:04 Speaker_05
You said only work on consensus projects. I know I didn't say that.

00:36:08 Speaker_07
I think you have those do them first, I said do those first, make sure that people understand this is to save them money. I'm not saying that you don't change regulations for spaceships and self driving cars as well.

00:36:20 Speaker_07
But you have to make sure you show people that this can benefit them, or else they're going to just fight it. And that's going to be the whole all this effort will be for not

00:36:29 Speaker_07
If you get a bunch of Republicans sacks who start fighting this and you have a splintering in your party because they feel like this isn't helping their local constituents, this whole thing could be for naught.

00:36:39 Speaker_02
that that's my story that you told is going to be told by the legacy media and all the haters and the enemies regardless of what you want. I don't think so.

00:36:50 Speaker_07
I don't think so. I think people when you show people, you show people on haters, you're not going to show I'm talking about the public who vote election.

00:37:01 Speaker_02
Now's the time to implement.

00:37:02 Speaker_07
when you show people $22,000, you know, hammers and wasted money, you will get 100% of Americans backing this.

00:37:10 Speaker_02
Yeah, 60 minutes, been doing that for 30 years, nothing's happened. We got to just act now.

00:37:15 Speaker_07
Yeah, act and bring people on with communications. I mean, if you got if you're trying to communicate poorly, great, not for it.

00:37:21 Speaker_02
Yeah, I'm not saying that communication isn't part of the job. In fact, this whole conversation started by us talking about an op ed. Yes, Vivek wrote, correct. And we're laying out right in which they're laying out their objectives.

00:37:33 Speaker_02
And they're doing podcasts. And yeah, Elon has the biggest platform in the world and biggest following. So I just don't think communication is going to be the problem. But you're also not going to be able to convince everyone.

00:37:44 Speaker_02
We've already won the election, and now is the time to figure out very strategically how to implement as much as possible.

00:37:50 Speaker_07
humble by 2 million votes. Keep it in mind, you have to bring everybody along.

00:37:54 Speaker_02
Okay, you know what, if the legacy media was fair, it would have been 20 million votes for Trump to have won under these circumstances. And he won the trifecta. It's impressive.

00:38:04 Speaker_07
Nobody's saying it's not impressive. I'm not minimizing it. I'm just saying, be aware, there's 74 million people who are rooting against Trump. And I think getting some of them on.

00:38:14 Speaker_05
That's not true. That's not true.

00:38:16 Speaker_07
I think there's a decent number of people who are probably very upset that Trump won, just like last time they were upset that Biden won. Including all Americans in this is the most virtuous thing you can do. Everybody should get on board.

00:38:29 Speaker_05
I think it's deranged, the idea that 74 million people are actually rooting against him. I don't think that that's true.

00:38:35 Speaker_07
I don't think they feel good that they lost. People don't feel good about losing. Bringing those people on board is virtuous.

00:38:42 Speaker_02
Dude, there's already been a huge vibe shift in the country. Have you seen the Trump dance? I mean, there's been such a vibe shift.

00:38:48 Speaker_07
Let's see it. Let's see it.

00:38:49 Speaker_02
I'm not going to do it right now, but there's been such a huge vibe shift. The energy is so optimistic right now. The energy right now is incredible, and I think people are feeling much more optimistic.

00:39:02 Speaker_02
Can you imagine what a downer would it be if we were expecting President Kamala Harris to take the oath of office on January 20th?

00:39:09 Speaker_09
It would be a downer to me if they were still pushing a $7.2 trillion federal budget next year. That would be a downer.

00:39:17 Speaker_09
And by the way, I think that there's a deeply linked relationship between social issues, economic issues, political policies, and foreign conflict. They all seem like they're four different things, but they're so tightly interwound.

00:39:32 Speaker_09
And it's interesting how everything kind of moves together with this shift in who ended up wanting winning this election cycle. And I think it really speaks to the relationship between the four.

00:39:42 Speaker_02
Well, by the way, there's a great meme that was floating around where it showed a photo of I tweeted that it used to be that that Democrats were progressive, progressive means progress, looking forward. And I tweeted that.

00:39:56 Speaker_07
And I tweeted that. And I tweeted that. And I tweeted that. And I tweeted that. And I tweeted that.

00:40:00 Speaker_09
And I tweeted that. And I tweeted that. And the last decade, the last couple of years in particular, I think a lot of people that I know that are former Democrats, Jamal, if you can speak for yourself, feel like the Democrats stopped looking forward.

00:40:16 Speaker_09
And it was all about trying to like, pessimistic, and grievance and vengeful. And all of a sudden, you've got guys like Elon, promoting themselves as Republicans highlighting that it's all this is the party that looks forward.

00:40:28 Speaker_09
This is the party that drives progress. It's an amazing shift. I don't know if there's been anything like it that's happened this quickly.

00:40:35 Speaker_05
I voted more to make America great again than I did vote for being a Republican. I think that the Republican Party is less important than it's ever been. And I think MAGA is more important than it's ever been.

00:40:50 Speaker_02
I agree. And I'd say the biggest risk to the whole agenda probably is not the Democrats. It's actually some of these old bulls in Congress who are anti-MAGA for some reason. Trump is the one who just won the trifecta. He just won this big election.

00:41:06 Speaker_02
If you stick with the old Republican message, you're just a surefire loser. So give Trump his due as the leader of the party, realize it's now a MAGA party, and let's get some things done.

00:41:18 Speaker_02
if the reform agenda fails, to be frank, it probably is not gonna be the Democrats, it's probably gonna be these holdouts in the Republican Party.

00:41:28 Speaker_07
Yeah, that was my question earlier. I think I asked it twice. I didn't get anybody to engage in it. How do you convince them? How are they being brought on board to this? If they have all this pork barrel spending? Is there a strategy there?

00:41:38 Speaker_05
Would you have a strategy? I think sax laid it out, which is that if you use the combination of the carrot and the stick, I think the carrot is creating transparency. And I think

00:41:51 Speaker_05
The other part of the carrot is you'll have now an extremely well-funded pack that can support people who are on board with this agenda.

00:42:00 Speaker_05
But the stick is, if you don't, I think that if Elon makes this a really concerted long-term part of his strategy, then I think you should run candidates who actually are aligned with the agenda that the Make America Great Again movement wants.

00:42:15 Speaker_05
So I think that's the carrot and stick, Jason, which is like some of these old Republicans will have to decide, do I basically help invest in a renewal of the American spirit or do I keep pushing back because I like the way it was and I want to go to war and I want to cozy up to these lobbyists?

00:42:30 Speaker_05
I think those folks are going to have a very tough four and eight years because I think you'll see a bunch of MAGA candidates rising up to run against them everywhere in the United States.

00:42:41 Speaker_02
As you can see, my young apprentice, your friends have failed. Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station.

00:42:51 Speaker_06
Man, I said be humble like three times. None of it's sinking in.

00:42:56 Speaker_02
No, I just explained, I explained the risks. I've been very clear. You're not going to get Milton Friedman. Okay. You're not going to get Javier Millet. What we can hopefully get is a bending of the curve towards sustainable.

00:43:06 Speaker_02
I mean, I'm setting my expectations to be realistic. Okay.

00:43:11 Speaker_07
I mean, breaking even would be great. If we just weren't adding to the debt, that would be amazing.

00:43:16 Speaker_09
Look, if the federal budget gets to three trillion, and regulation gets cut, if you get 50% of the regulations in federal agencies cut, I think you unleash an economic sonic boom.

00:43:32 Speaker_06
I'm all in on Doge. I think it's the greatest thing that could ever happen.

00:43:36 Speaker_05
My gosh, could you imagine America clocking in 4% GDP? Do you guys deal with regulatory?

00:43:40 Speaker_09
I mean, how much are you guys stuck with companies?

00:43:43 Speaker_05
Zero.

00:43:43 Speaker_09
I'm dealing with this issue.

00:43:44 Speaker_05
It's not a real issue.

00:43:46 Speaker_09
The regulatory stuff is brutal, man. I mean, it's like, it's legit.

00:43:50 Speaker_07
Brain like melting. Tell me your number one regulatory frustration. We can go around the horn. This is a great topic, actually.

00:43:58 Speaker_05
I don't have any. I think I'm very blessed to work in an industry that's very light with regulation. I think it affects many, many other industries that if they were unleashed could contribute to American real estate construction.

00:44:10 Speaker_05
I also think regulations are very regressive because they touch poor and middle income people way more than it touched folks like me. And so, rip these regulations out.

00:44:22 Speaker_07
Two regulations that do affect you, crypto regulation and capital formation. Both of those things are massive.

00:44:28 Speaker_05
They haven't hurt me. They haven't hurt me. This is my point of view. They definitely are in the economy, right? I can snap a finger and raise a couple billion dollars. That is not it's so I'm in a unique position.

00:44:38 Speaker_05
And I and I recognize that what is much harder is if you're trying to be an electrician, if you're trying to be a hairdresser, if you're trying to be a massage therapist, when you have to spend 15 2030% of your salary on licensure, why?

00:44:51 Speaker_05
Why do we need the rules? If you're if you're a person that's trying to like construct a home? Why does it take six and eight weeks to get permits approved? Why? And there are no good answers for these things.

00:45:03 Speaker_05
So forget about me, like it doesn't matter about me. But the mainline part of the United States economy, as I said before, is a coiled spring.

00:45:11 Speaker_05
If you get rid of those regulations, it disproportionately impacts middle income and lower middle income jobs. This is why if you if you see if you see GDP, if America clocks in GDP at four to four and a half percent, watch out, folks.

00:45:28 Speaker_07
Sonic Boom, watch out. I'll give you two really simple ones. Allowing everybody in the United States to participate in company formation would change everything.

00:45:39 Speaker_07
95% of the company cannot participate in investing in startups or any, you know, new company, which is crazy. The accreditation laws would be massive.

00:45:51 Speaker_09
freedom to operate, just freedom to do stuff you want to do.

00:45:53 Speaker_07
Well, that's what it is. I mean, you're free to go to Vegas and gamble. You're free to, you know, play, you know, online sports, but you're not free to buy Bitcoin. You're not free to buy. You are free to buy Bitcoin. You can buy right now.

00:46:05 Speaker_07
Yeah, but you're not free to create a token, right? There should be some clear path of regulation.

00:46:10 Speaker_05
I think there's many more traditional forms of economic growth that we can have before we need to make ICOs legal and easier. I want to say something.

00:46:20 Speaker_05
I think that the person that runs for governor in California should commit to cutting those 65,000 regulations down to 10,000 as needed, to replacing the DMV with a digital app, and to cut taxes to near zero, and to create school choice.

00:46:40 Speaker_05
Whoever does that will create a renaissance in California. It's the fifth largest economy in the world, folks. it can be a bellwether for the rest of the world.

00:46:49 Speaker_02
Well, you know, there's a lot of scuttlebutt online that Nicole Shanahan is going to run for governor of California. And I'd be all in favor of that. I would say that of all the political personalities involved in the election over the past year,

00:47:04 Speaker_02
She gets my most improved award. I remember when Bobby named her to his ticket, I was a little bit skeptical of that choice because of some of the causes that she had identified with or donated to in the past.

00:47:15 Speaker_02
But she, I think, has ended up being a star.

00:47:18 Speaker_05
She's pretty based.

00:47:19 Speaker_02
She's a star. Yeah, totally. I mean, she's red-pilled and ended up supporting MAHA and MAGA. And I don't think we're going to get anyone better in California. So if she's willing to do it and take it on, that'd be awesome.

00:47:33 Speaker_08
sacks. What about you? You don't want you don't want that that mansion?

00:47:37 Speaker_02
It'd be a significant downgrade for me.

00:47:39 Speaker_07
That's about to say the joke right out. I got to it. Damn it. That was such an easy one. Yeah, you could live in the governor's mansion, also known as smaller than your guest house. That'll be your backup man cave. Well, actually, that's happened.

00:47:53 Speaker_07
People have In New York, I remember one of the governors was like, yeah, you know, I'm good. I don't need to live in the mansion. Where do you want to go next, boys? We have other things on the docket. Would you like to go to our war correspondent?

00:48:05 Speaker_07
Would you like to go from Google breakup? Would you like to go Nvidia? Where would you like to go? World War Three, I think is important. Sax, you put World War Three on the docket. Would you like to tee it up for us? Yeah.

00:48:16 Speaker_02
Sure. Well, there's several events that have happened in reasonably close succession. The first thing to understand is what's happening on the ground in Ukraine. The Ukrainian has been losing territory at an accelerating pace.

00:48:27 Speaker_02
There's an excellent graphic in the New York Times that I'll put on the screen that shows this. It's not a stalemate. Remember, I said on this podcast, six months or a year ago that it was no longer a stalemate.

00:48:38 Speaker_02
It was a war of attrition in which the Ukrainians were now losing. And every single month now, the Russians are taking more and more territory. Again, the curve is accelerating. We'd all invest in a business who had a growth curve that looked like this.

00:48:49 Speaker_02
So not good news for the Ukrainians.

00:48:52 Speaker_02
In response to that, I think that's fundamentally the condition on the ground that's created the next set of actions, which is the Biden administration finally approved the use of long range missiles, attack missile storm shadows to hit territory deep inside of Russia.

00:49:07 Speaker_02
The Russians believe, and I don't know whether this is true or not, but what they say is that those weapons cannot be operated without Americans or British

00:49:17 Speaker_02
operators being there to, you know, they're too complicated for the Ukrainians just to use on their own.

00:49:22 Speaker_02
So, the Russians view this as not just a direct attack on their homeland, on their motherland, but also a direct involvement by the NATO allies, United States and Britain in the war. And that is a big escalation

00:49:40 Speaker_02
you know, a lot of people say that the Russians have all these red lines, we keep crossing, and they don't do anything. That's not true. If you actually listen to what the Russians have said, there's only been two red lines.

00:49:50 Speaker_02
The first red line was they said they would not accept NATO expanding to Ukraine. And they prove their seriousness on that issue by invading Ukraine in February of 2022. The second red line is they said that they would not accept

00:50:06 Speaker_02
American long-range missiles being used to target inside of Russia. And that line has now been crossed.

00:50:12 Speaker_02
So this leads us to the next set of events, which is Russia just used what may be, some people are saying it's an ICBM, but it probably is more likely to be

00:50:24 Speaker_02
not an intercontinental, but an intermediate range, ballistic missile that hit a Ukrainian city. And it's obviously it didn't carry a nuclear payload, but it's the type of ballistic missile that is used to carry nuclear weapons.

00:50:41 Speaker_02
There are a couple of features of this that I think are really important. Number one, it's a hypersonic missile. It hit the target at something like Mach 10. What that means is that it just can't be intercepted. It's too fast. The West

00:50:53 Speaker_02
and the United States in particular does not, as far as we know, have a technology to intercept a hypersonic missile like that. The second is that it had what's called a MIRV warhead or payload.

00:51:05 Speaker_02
MIRV is Multiple Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles. Basically, what it means is the warhead splits up, when it gets close to the ground, it splits into six separate warheads. And the reason for this, as I understand it, is diabolical.

00:51:20 Speaker_02
Again, it's just, if you're launching a nuclear weapon, it just makes it that much harder to now intercept it, because now you've got six warheads hitting you instead of just one. So, I mean,

00:51:32 Speaker_02
as I understand it, a missile like this has never been used before. And what the Russians are doing, obviously, is sending us a signal. And what that message is, is that they're saying, we have the means to hit any European city, or any European asset

00:51:47 Speaker_02
with a hypersonic missile that you can't stop, that may or may not have a nuclear warhead attached to it.

00:51:56 Speaker_02
And it's just a way of them expressing their seriousness, and displeasure and reacting to and escalating in response to the fact that we are now allowing Western missiles to be hitting targets deep inside of Russia.

00:52:09 Speaker_02
So the bottom line is this war is escalating. It's escalating nowhere good. And at some point soon, yeah, it's really We're going to have to get off of this escalatory ladder, or we're going to end up in a really disastrous place.

00:52:22 Speaker_02
And just the last final point is, it's absolutely remarkable that Biden decided to take us to this place with, what, just six weeks left in his term? Completely.

00:52:33 Speaker_02
I mean, as a lame duck president, what is his mandate for doing that, for taking this extraordinary risk on behalf of the country? The voters just voted for Trump, who made it really clear he wanted to end the war.

00:52:45 Speaker_02
And Biden and his team have unilaterally now escalated this war. They did it without consulting with Trump's team. At least that's what was publicly reported, is there was no briefing set up for Trump's transition team.

00:52:57 Speaker_02
So you have here Biden and his team taking a unilateral action to expand and escalate this war, even when he's a lame duck president. And the question you have to ask is, why? What is the point of this?

00:53:07 Speaker_05
Well, I think it's just completely deranged because it's not just that. Forget Biden and Trump for a second. If you take a step back, what was voted in was to end this war and for the United States to get our hands out of it.

00:53:24 Speaker_05
So you couldn't have a clearer message to the sitting president in the White House, which is this is not what Americans want.

00:53:32 Speaker_05
so to basically ignore the will of the voters and to essentially go and push another country into the brink, I think is so incredibly responsible. And you know, other times we've said in the past, take Donald Trump seriously, but not literally.

00:53:48 Speaker_05
Russia, you should take seriously and literally. because they actually write it down for you and tell you.

00:53:55 Speaker_05
And so when they said every act of aggression from now on is going to be viewed by us on a look through basis to the actual country that is enabling this to happen, you couldn't be more clear.

00:54:08 Speaker_05
But Americans couldn't have been more clear, which is we don't want this war anymore. And I just think it's really deranged what the Biden White House is doing. It's incredibly dangerous. by the way, not to mention, it's incredibly costly as well.

00:54:20 Speaker_05
I mean, we've had like some last minute efforts to sort of tamp down on these last minute budget approvals and whatnot. But we're talking about 10s and 100s of billions of dollars that we're giving on top of the risk of, of nuclear escalation.

00:54:32 Speaker_05
I just think it's absolutely crazy. It's absolutely crazy.

00:54:35 Speaker_09
Putin is not a dummy. He has heard and seen Trump's campaign rhetoric and sacks. I don't know if this is this has been publicly reported that he had a call with with Trump after the election victory.

00:54:53 Speaker_09
Does Putin not see that in a couple of weeks, a couple of months, there will be new leadership in the White House and there's going to be a path to a resolution here?

00:55:03 Speaker_09
Like, does that not give us all a little bit of reprieve that this is not going to escalate because everyone's waiting for January 20th?

00:55:10 Speaker_02
Oh, I mean, for sure. I mean, thank goodness, I would say that we have a new president coming in who does not own this war. I mean, the problem with Biden is that he completely owns this war, and he does not want to admit defeat.

00:55:22 Speaker_02
And so what you've seen is that over the last couple of years, every weapon system that Biden said he wouldn't give to Ukraine because it could literally cause World War III. These are Biden's words.

00:55:31 Speaker_02
He said it could be Armageddon if we gave Ukraine F-16s. It could be Armageddon if we gave them Abrams tanks. It would be Armageddon if we gave them HIMARS and ATACMS and could lead to World War III if we let them hit targets inside of Russia.

00:55:45 Speaker_02
These are Biden's words. And He has basically given in on every single one of those points because he's so committed to this policy. He's in the quagmire. He can only double down. He doesn't know how to extricate himself.

00:55:58 Speaker_02
Now, we don't know exactly what Kamala Harris would have done, but I think probably she would have inherited Joe Biden's policy and likely continued it. And I think we have a wonderful opportunity here with Trump taking office.

00:56:08 Speaker_02
He doesn't own this policy. He can look at it with fresh eyes. And most importantly, he campaigned on ending the war. So he has the mandate of the American people to stop it. All I can say is, thank goodness.

00:56:20 Speaker_02
And we just need to get through the next two months. We just need to get to January 20th without there being some new horrible escalation in this war.

00:56:31 Speaker_05
he's Joe Biden is martingaling. That's his strategy for the Ukraine Russia war. Just keep doubling down and doubling down.

00:56:39 Speaker_02
Oh yeah. Do you want to explain what that is?

00:56:41 Speaker_05
Oh yeah. Sorry. Martingaling is a strategy in gambling where let's just say, you know, you start betting a dollar and you lose your next bet is $2. If you lose your next bet is $4.

00:56:50 Speaker_05
If you lose your next bet is $8 and eventually you'll win once is the theory. But there's many times where martingaling does not work.

00:56:59 Speaker_09
But you only won a dollar. So you could be betting, you know, 80, you know, 40 bucks, 80 bucks, $160, $320, and then you finally win and you win a dollar.

00:57:10 Speaker_02
Right. Or, or you go broke. That's a great analogy because you can also go broke, right? You can easily go broke.

00:57:15 Speaker_07
Well, this is why they have caps at the roulette table. One time I would do this as a joke.

00:57:20 Speaker_09
That's why all casinos have them, Max. Yeah, exactly.

00:57:22 Speaker_07
So I would do this as a joke with my wife or when I was at the World Series of Poker, I'd be like, I'm going to pay for dinner or lunch or whatever. And I put a hundred dollars on black, lose, put 200 on black, win, go pay for lunch.

00:57:34 Speaker_07
And I did it one time at the WSOP. And I went 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600. I ran out of cash. I got 3200 from my friend. I put it down. The floor man came over and said, that's your last bet.

00:57:47 Speaker_07
Oh, no, my buddy and I, my buddy and I would go play if you do this. Yeah.

00:57:51 Speaker_09
In our college years, early 20s, we would go to drink for free at the casino. You just sit at the blackjack table and just keep going.

00:57:57 Speaker_07
Yeah, I've been with you.

00:57:58 Speaker_09
I'd sit at the blackjack table and watch you drink. This was a long time ago. This happened last year.

00:58:02 Speaker_09
Well, I mean, if you bet a dollar and then you bet two bucks, you can just keep drinking for free for like two or three hours and then go out and enjoy your night. You've made 15 bucks and call it a night.

00:58:11 Speaker_05
Did I tell you about the losing a million dollars playing roulette? No. What? Me. Nick, you got to beep out the names. Me. It was me. Oh, you did tell me this. You did tell me this. Yeah, this is so good. Says, guys, I've developed a system. It's full. Oh, no.

00:58:30 Speaker_07
That's always what happens before you lose a million.

00:58:33 Speaker_05
And he says that. It's like we need to risk a million. We can win like two or three. And it's like ninety nine point nine nine six percent. So I say to him, so are you really telling me that we just have to fade 0.004% chance of like total loss?

00:58:51 Speaker_05
And he says, yep. Well, guess what hit? The 0.004% shot. Me, and it was devastating. I just kept looking at this thing, like what just happened? He's like, oh, we lost. And I was like, there it is, folks. Never again, I'm never gonna play roulette again.

00:59:09 Speaker_02
I think the gambling analogies are the right analogies. Because look, I'm not saying World War III is going to happen. I've never said World War III is going to happen. I'm saying that there's a risk of World War III.

00:59:17 Speaker_02
And I don't need the risk to be very high to be very worried about it because it would be such a disastrous outcome, right? Exactly. So I want to minimize- Risk of ruin. Exactly. I want there to be hopefully a zero risk of that.

00:59:31 Speaker_02
But you know what's interesting is, remember just like a week or two ago, President Trump made that trip to DC and he met with Biden in the Oval Office and Biden had this, he was like, all smiles. And everyone's like wondering, why is he so happy?

00:59:45 Speaker_02
And the speculation was that he somehow wanted a common to lose or something. But now you think back on this, he must have known he was about to authorize this decision. So what he's doing here, he's grin. He's Grin F*** Trump.

01:00:00 Speaker_02
He knows he's about to give Trump this horrible hand, right? He's about to make this situation in Ukraine so much worse so that Trump will have to inherit this mess. That is like the definition of Grin F*** Trump.

01:00:14 Speaker_05
Yeah, he definitely knew more than that picture let on. Because a lot of the interpretation of that picture was, they are getting along. He's being super gracious. What an incredible gesture.

01:00:25 Speaker_02
It just looked like very... Yeah, he promised a smooth transition of power. And then we find out that he didn't confer with his successor about this extraordinarily meaningful decision to escalate the war.

01:00:38 Speaker_05
Escalation, yeah.

01:00:40 Speaker_02
It's like, that's just crazy. It's crazy.

01:00:44 Speaker_09
You guys want to do science corner? I got one for you.

01:00:46 Speaker_07
Yeah. All right. Your super fans are desperate for a science corner. Give them one free bar. Give them something.

01:00:53 Speaker_09
All right. I will give you guys something here. Here's a depressing paper that was published in the journal nature just this week. Research team out of Switzerland.

01:01:05 Speaker_09
Going over to the Swiss, where they are conducting extraordinary research in the epigenetics of fat cells in obesity.

01:01:13 Speaker_07
Oh, so we're going to fat shame me on the science corner. Go ahead. Great.

01:01:17 Speaker_09
No, we're actually going to understand perhaps why it is difficult for people that have been overweight

01:01:23 Speaker_07
Yes.

01:01:24 Speaker_09
To keep the weight off.

01:01:25 Speaker_07
I did read this and I think it's fascinating. Yeah, explain it.

01:01:28 Speaker_09
It is, it is really incredible.

01:01:29 Speaker_09
So remember, we've talked about this many times in the past, but every cell has your whole, all your DNA, all your genes and certain genes are turned on or off in different cells and those genes being on or off differentiates those cells and causes them to act differently.

01:01:46 Speaker_09
That's the difference between an eye cell and a skin cell and a heart cell is they have different genes that are upregulated, downregulated, turned on and turned off.

01:01:54 Speaker_09
And even when you have different kinds of cells, you have certain genes that are overexpressed or underexpressed or overregulated or upregulated or downregulated.

01:02:00 Speaker_09
So that means that those genes are pumping out certain proteins that do certain things in that particular cell.

01:02:07 Speaker_09
So what these folks did is they wanted to understand what is the epigenome, meaning what are the genes that are turned on or off or upregulated or downregulated in fat tissue, in fat cells. And does the epigenome change?

01:02:26 Speaker_09
when an individual loses weight. So once they're obese and they lose weight, do the fat cells actually change their epigenome or do they have an epigenetic memory?

01:02:37 Speaker_09
Meaning that those cells, even though the person has lost weight, those cells still continue to act as if that person were obese. So I'll tell you, in humans, they basically took five individuals that were obese and lost more than 25% BMI.

01:02:52 Speaker_09
and they looked at the epigenome, they looked at the markers of what genes are upregulated and downregulated before and after they lost the weight.

01:02:59 Speaker_09
After they lost the weight, there were a set of markers that were still upregulated that are associated with poor metabolism and increased fibrosis and increased cellular death. So these are inflammatory genes.

01:03:12 Speaker_09
These are genes that are associated with the cells being inefficient, that utilize a glucose to create energy. And so these cells continue to act like slow dying cells, even after the person lost weight.

01:03:24 Speaker_09
And they did the same thing in mice, and they found similar results, that they caused these mice to gain weight, looked at the epigenome of the fat cells, and then looked at the epigenome after they lost the weight.

01:03:35 Speaker_09
And again, the mouse epigenome continued to act as if the mouse was obese. And what this means is that the metabolism remained reduced, fibrosis remained elevated, and likelihood of cell death remained elevated.

01:03:48 Speaker_09
So now they applied glucose in a petri dish to those cells, and they saw that the glucose had a harder time being appropriately utilized from a healthy fat cell that hadn't been obese.

01:04:01 Speaker_09
So it actually permanently alters and creates an epigenetic memory in the fat cells after obesity. And this could explain

01:04:09 Speaker_09
pretty significantly why when people that have been obese lose the weight, they are more likely to gain the weight back and have a hard time keeping the weight off.

01:04:18 Speaker_07
You're referring to, yes. And that makes total sense because anybody who's added weight, Chamath, if you add butt You know, you eat one extra Oreo a week, that's 3,500 calories.

01:04:30 Speaker_07
You do that over 20 years, all of a sudden you wake up one day, you're 20, 30 pounds overweight, like I was three or four years ago.

01:04:35 Speaker_07
And this is why I think Ozempic and Wachovia and Mangiorno and all these things are so great, because it does seem like it breaks you through that, no?

01:04:43 Speaker_09
Well, the problem what we do see in all those results that when you go off of the GLP one agonist drugs, you gain the weight back very quickly. This is some amount of weight.

01:04:53 Speaker_07
Yeah, no, it's not the total amount.

01:04:54 Speaker_09
It's a pretty significant bounce back effect. So and this is pretty well documented. And so I think that it speaks to the why. Now, it also introduces an opportunity.

01:05:05 Speaker_09
There are molecules that can turn certain genes on or off, can now be identified and utilized to change that epigenetic memory.

01:05:12 Speaker_07
So now there's a- So you can flip that switch in addition to taking- Flip that switch. Yeah. Exactly.

01:05:16 Speaker_09
This could arise from things like increased exercise. It turns out that when you do significant amounts of cardiovascular exercise, there are certain genes that are expressed that trigger other genes to switch on or off.

01:05:27 Speaker_09
And so we can start to identify those particular molecules and produce either supplements or additional drugs or combo therapies that can both knock the weight off and keep it off by changing the epigenetic memory in those cells.

01:05:44 Speaker_09
And so it introduces a whole new class of opportunity for folks to explore how do we help folks that are obese lose the weight and then flip the switch that they can keep the weight off.

01:05:52 Speaker_07
I've been doing rocking. This is like the old man activity that Peter Atiyah and these guys are all talking about. You put weights on and you like go walking? I started with a 10 pound weight vest. Now I'm at 35 pounds.

01:06:04 Speaker_07
I do a mile and a half hike every day with 35 pounds on. Man, I fall asleep immediately. And the amount of intensity that puts on your body... So you do it right before you go to bed? No, no, I do it anytime during the day.

01:06:17 Speaker_07
But I'm just saying it's, it's, I'm focused on four things right now with my health, diet, sleep, exercise, meditation, and I try to do all four each day.

01:06:26 Speaker_07
But the rocking specifically in the zone two stuff is what they say 40 50 year olds should focus on. So that's what I'm focused on. But that rocking man, does it make your whole body strong? I highly recommend it. It's really transformative.

01:06:39 Speaker_07
My meditation is reading those essays. For Chamath Palihapitiya, German dictator, 1890. He's running a software company, services company, great. Look at you in the driver's seat.

01:06:51 Speaker_07
David Friedberg, your sultan of science, working on a hollow and the architect, the rain man. Yeah, definitely David Sachs from craft ventures and? Maybe it's going to be involved in Doge.

01:07:04 Speaker_07
I wouldn't be surprised if we see a Sax Doge hookup in the future. I don't know. I'm taking a guess here. I am your host here, Jason Calacanis. We'll see you all on December 7th, live or in person.

01:07:18 Speaker_05
By the way, did you guys see this? Did you see this tweet from Brian Johnson? He tweeted out all of his blood levels. This is incredible. I love this guy. Look at these results. They're incredible.

01:07:30 Speaker_05
If he can break this down into like a turnkey thing that normal folks like us can follow,

01:07:38 Speaker_07
For people who don't know, what this kid's doing is he is spending like $3 million a year or something to that effect on his own personal health, documenting it, sharing it. Everything from sleep to his bone density, everything is an open book.

01:07:54 Speaker_07
And he's made some products out of it as well. So you can you can eat his pudding, too, if you're interested in it. But I don't think it's as good as how do you follow his regimen? You know what I mean? Like, it just seems too hard. You can't have a job.

01:08:05 Speaker_07
I mean, he's doing, it's like he's got two jobs right now doing all this stuff. His biomarkers are showing he's 10 years younger than his actual biological age.

01:08:13 Speaker_05
Dude, look at some of these results. His speed of aging. He says his birthday now happens every 19 months. What the f**k?

01:08:24 Speaker_07
Freeberg, I mean, Freeberg, you look at these things. What do you think here, science, from a science perspective, any thoughts on all this?

01:08:32 Speaker_09
Well, I think his nighttime erection rate is pretty impressive. Not three hours and eight minutes for a nighttime erection.

01:08:37 Speaker_02
How does he know that? Wait, is he reading Elon and Vivek's op-ed column? He's reading it very slowly. Wow, he's got a 240-pound bench press and an 800-pound leg press.

01:08:53 Speaker_05
Jesus he looks like he's dead though.

01:08:55 Speaker_07
That's the only problem guys.

01:08:57 Speaker_02
I gotta go.

01:08:57 Speaker_07
He's so pale sax has gotta go djt online, too We'll see you all next time in love you boys.

01:09:05 Speaker_03
Bye-bye Let your winners ride rain man david sacks And instead we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love us queen

01:09:44 Speaker_00
They just need to release their album.