Antonio Gracias: DOGE vs USAID, Crypto Framework, Google's $75B AI Spend, US Sovereign Wealth Fund, GLP-1s

The episode opens with parody. One speaker lists four pieces of health advice (sleep, exercise, diet and meditation) and then attaches a product to each one. Another speaker interrupts: "What a grifter. He's just talking about his investments." The bit grows into a mock confession that USAID funded an "all in NGO" with 18,000,000 last year, money supposedly parked offshore for an "all in castle." This is a joke that sets up the episode's main topic. It is not a factual claim.

The formal introduction keeps up the self-mockery, claiming the show is now larger in health than Huberman, Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia combined. It also points listeners to a separate conversation with Ray Dalio, said to have drawn three or four hundred thousand YouTube views. One speaker says some of Dalio's recommendations seem to be becoming Trump administration policy. In particular, Elon, Besant and others have echoed the aim of getting the government deficit below three percent of GDP, which the speaker calls "the economic magical number" and says would bring rates down.

The guest is introduced as Antonio Gracias, CEO of Valor Equity Partners and one of the first investors in Tesla, SpaceX and Athena. Some banter follows about which funding rounds the participants joined. The discussion then turns to the first weeks of the Trump administration's second term ("seventeen days into the Trump two point o presidency"). The Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, is described as the story's main character, and USAID as the "little known agency" it has found. The discussion is planned in three acts, starting with what USAID is.

The background given on the show: USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, was created by an executive order from JFK in 1961. The Wall Street Journal is cited as summing up its purpose as:

make friends and influence countries in the American interest

The figures given on air: a budget of about $45 billion a year under Biden, put at roughly $150 per American per year; at least 10,000 employees; and programs in 130 of the world's 195 countries as of 2023. The speaker says the budget doubled under Biden, from 26 to 45 billion, and ran between 15 and 20 billion during Trump's first term.

Spending items reportedly surfaced after the White House and the DOGE team got into USAID, as listed on the show: - $2.5 million for EV charging stations in Vietnam - $2 million for sex changes and LGBTQ activism in Guatemala - $1.5 million to a Serbian LGBTQ group - $70,000 for a DEI musical, which the speaker places in Ireland - $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia

The participants trade jokes about going to see the musical, said to be titled "DEI, the musical." The items are presented as reported findings. The panel does not check them during this part of the conversation.

Antonio is asked for his view. The question notes that he, Sacks, Elon and the person asking all spent time at Twitter during the takeover, "where I think a lot of these techniques were first put into action." The answer that follows says the DOGE story probably starts with the Twitter takeover. It describes Twitter as "spewing the woke mind virus in the world," which it gives as Elon's original reason for buying the company.

The financial account: Twitter was "basically breaking even," with about $12.5 billion of debt coming and roughly $1.5 billion a year in interest that it had no money to pay. The speaker calls the turnaround the biggest of all time and the deal the second-biggest tech deal ever. About 80% of staff left, not counting contractors. As evidence of recovery, the speaker says the company is servicing its debt, that one of its bank deals had just priced at 97 cents, and that the debt then traded up to 98 and five-eighths.

Anecdotes about the company before the takeover illustrate the waste the speaker describes. Pens in the conference rooms had dried out; asked whether that came from overuse or no use, the speaker says they "were never being used." Fresh food was made three times a day for thousands of people and thrown away. The speaker sums up the causes as bureaucracy, bad incentives and people who did not care.

The speaker says the takeover had two goals: stop the "woke mind virus" (the transcript renders this phrase garbled in one place) and fix the company. In support of the first, they say the platform now runs extra brand-safety checks and has a 99% brand-safety rating. They first say three years have passed, then correct it to about two and a half, and say both goals have been met.

The speaker calls Twitter the "warm up act" for DOGE. They frame the federal effort as "the biggest turnaround of all time" and credit President Trump with the courage to attempt it and Elon as his ally. The arithmetic they give: the government spends about $6.5 trillion, takes in about $4.5 trillion, must find about $2 trillion, and pays about a trillion dollars a year in interest. They say bond yields had been rising because markets did not believe spending would stop, and that yields are now falling as DOGE takes effect.

The speaker repeats Elon's public framing of "fraud, waste, and abuse." They estimate that about 10% of the budget is probably fraud, say that figure "might be low," and claim that roughly a trillion dollars of waste out of $6.5 trillion would by itself fix the problem. These are the speaker's estimates; no source is given for them. The speaker also says they are "not there full time" and are "in and out a little bit."

What I'm afraid of now is we have a bureaucracy that is about to turn into a kleptocracy.

The speaker clarifies that they mean a "Latin American style kleptocracy." They argue that the items joked about earlier are "pure fraud." They also say the USAID data shows a lot of political contributions, including Politico itself being funded by USAID, which they call "pure corruption." They say DOGE arrived "just in the nick of time" and credit the "80 plus people" working there full time.

Chamath is asked for his view of DOGE's first fifteen days. The answer that follows pushes back on the idea that this kind of effort is new and offers two precedents. The first is the Truman Committee, which the speaker says was formed in 1941 out of fear that Defense Department spending was "completely out of whack." Over the next six or seven years it found large amounts of waste, fraud and abuse before and during the war. The speaker credits that work with giving Truman the standing to become Roosevelt's vice president.

The speaker's figures: the committee was budgeted only $20,000 to $30,000 and spent less than a million over six years, which they put at about 6.5 billion adjusted to 2023. Its estimated savings were 10 to 15 billion in 1941 dollars, which the speaker says is "a quarter of a trillion" in 2023 dollars. The spending figure looks internally inconsistent: less than a million 1940s dollars is unlikely to equal billions today. The speaker does not reconcile this on air.

The second precedent is President Clinton's National Partnership for Reinventing Government. The speaker makes three points from these cases. First, "We've done Doge twice before," and both efforts succeeded. Second, the Truman Committee was a Senate committee whose findings were all unanimous, so Republicans and Democrats both found the waste. Third, Democrats led both earlier efforts, which the speaker says today's Democratic critics fail to recognize when they argue that congressional committees or inspectors general should handle this work.

The speaker then argues that the older methods are no longer good enough, because early findings suggest "the rot is super pervasive" with "no accountability," so fresh eyes are needed.

The same speaker describes DOGE's role narrowly:

What they are are read only auditors of the truth.