ICE Raids, LA Riots, Strong Economic Data, Politicized Fed, Iran War with Tucker Carlson
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§01The Besties welcome Tucker Carlson!
Can I ask a question about the nicotine pouches? Yes. Does it melt in your mouth, or do you have to spit it out later?
You can spit it out, you can swallow it, or you just savor it. I mean, you throw it in like you would a dip of tobacco.
Okay.
But you just let it sit there, and then it suffuses your nervous system with life giving nicotine. Uh-huh. And it it really does feel like the hand of god is massaging you.
But does it feel like the high of smoking a cigarette?
It's simultaneously, if you can imagine the zen paradox, higher alertness accompanied by deep relaxation. So you you really are no. No. It it's a zen experience. You're, like, cat like in your readiness, but you're fully And how
long does it last?
I always have one going sometimes. If things are you know, if I need it, I'll I'll put another one in. So I've got eighteen milligrams of nicotine, but that gives me an unfair advantage.
You're banging eighteen milligrams? That's impressive.
I don't like to because it everybody else kind of recedes into the background and I become this kind of colossus when I do that and I feel guilty about Hubris is inevitable at that point. So I usually keep it to one.
I mean, I could use a new addiction. Oh, yes. What's the gateway drug level?
What would you prescribe? Sits between caffeine
and cocaine. Three milligram, but you Three. You know, there's a transition, like, all all great addictions. Like, it's not instant you you do vomit at but then but then your body acclimates.
It's kinda like heroin in that way. You know? Like, you get or Ozempic, You just you gotta power through Ayahuasca.
You you heat twice,
and then you're addicted.
And then enlightenment. Love, Tucker.
Let your winners ride. Rain man David Sides.
And instead, we open sources to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.
Love you, guys. Of Kinwad. I'm going all in. Right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world after Tucker Carlson's amazing podcast.
That's right. Tucker is back here on the All In podcast with Chamath Palihapitiya, your chairman dictator, and the czar, David Sachs. Not from the White House. He's from the suite, but he's here back on the program looking great. Look at the collar.
Brioni. I ordered three or four Brionis after last week's show. Guys, I did. I'm getting the brownie. Well, I have the all in expense accounts now.
What'd you call it? Brony? Brioni.
He'll be paying for it over seventy two months. The two monthly payments. The layaway.
You use Affirm or Klarna? Pray for that.
Hey. Tucker. Last time you were here, you famously famously gosh. We we it's been a year of feedback on your last performance. Thank you for coming back.
We got a lot of crazy feedback from the private equity housewives, but I got more feedback. I bet you
did. They love me.
Yeah. But you know what? You're in you're in deep. You're in deep because I am here in LA, and the Los Angeles studio wives group is really, really pissed off at you because they feel that they're the problem. They feel they're a much bigger problem than private equity housewife.
So Hollywood studio headswives versus private equity wives.
I know some of them, and they're absolutely a bigger problem, but they're fewer of them.
Got It's kinda hard to
get critical mass. Yeah. Exactly. They're they're a smaller threat. Kind of an elite unit.
You know what I mean? They're like delta force.
Got it.
They have less money too. You know, they don't get as much in the divorce as these private equity wives.
Got it. So they they're coming in like a SWAT team. If you wanna send them in to deal with a very specific issue, great, but they're not gonna cause as much bedlam globally as the private
They cause a lot of misery, though.
As one Mackenzie Bezos.
Exactly. Oh my god. Alright. Listen. Let's get a plug in here.
All in summit, year, Tucker's coming this year, I hope, September in Los Angeles. The goal, have the world's most important conversations, yada yada yada. Blah blah blah. Apply for a ticket. Allin.com/ yada yada yada or allin.com/summit to apply for a ticket.
Freeburg is out this week. So Tucker is here, and my lord, a lot going on in the news. Let's start with the immigration protests slash riots slash ICE actions in Los Angeles. I'm actually here. Last Friday, protests broke out after ICE raided Home Depot, a fashion wholesaler.
§02ICE raids, LA riots, immigration debate
In total, 44 people were arrested by ICE, 10 times as many, 400 and counting from the protests. They even ran into ICE, is, ran into a strawberry field in Oxnard to just randomly pick people up, it seems. At least a half dozen Waymo's were vandalized and burned, 20 plus businesses looted. And Waymo narrowed their area, and it's spiked to thirty minute wait times. So that's a world problem.
Riders throwing bricks, Molotov cocktails, shooting fireworks at law enforcement, completely unacceptable. Two men were charged with throwing Molotov cocktails at officers. Trump deployed the National Guard 2000, then 4,000 apparently. And, apparently, there's a battalion of marines here, 700 of them. Karen Bass instituted a curfew downtown LA, 8PM to 6AM.
And prosecutors, federal prosecutors that is, are trying to identify hundreds of people. Newsom, Bass denounced the raids, obviously, and, they're blaming Trump for escalating the situation. Trump and members of the White House responded by calling out California's weak leadership. And now we have protests popping up everywhere else, New York, Chicago, Austin, DC. Tucker, you grew up in Southern California.
Thank you.
I did. Yeah. LA and La Jolla.
I mean, are these riots more or less than a Lakers championship? How concerning are they to you? Who's to blame?
Well, as measured by violence, they're less profound than, you know, what happened in 2020 after George Floyd died. They're way less dangerous than, say, the Watts riot or the Rodney King riots in LA, but they're much more profound. I mean, it it really does they're certainly a bigger deal than anything that happened in Fort Sumter for sure, which kicked off the bloodiest war in American history. The federal government has, as a court duty, the right and responsibility to enforce immigration law and police the borders. That's what the government is.
That's what the federal government is, really. And so if you can test that, it is like a threat to disunion fundamentally. I mean, I think there's a lot at stake, and we reached this point because a series of paradoxically weak federal governments allowed sanctuary cities to continue literally for decades, each one its own form of insurrection against the central government. And maybe maybe you don't believe that the federal government has a right to pass laws restricting immigration. It's not in charge of the integrity of the borders.
You know, that that's a kind of philosophical or constitutional case, I guess, you could make. But most people accept that those are federal duties. And once you accept that, you can't allow states or municipalities to flout the law anymore than you could allow Central High School in Little Rock to keep black students out or whatever. I mean, certainly, federal troops have been called in for much less. And I think the longer this continues, the greater the threat of disunion, the greater the threat of reaching a point where you, I don't know, you can't drive from New York to LA.
We take a lot for granted in the country, and the main thing we take for granted, I think, is freedom of movement between states. But you could easily imagine that ending, like, soon in the same way that you can't drive from not because I've tried, from Sao Paulo to to Rio in Brazil, pretty world country. It's too dangerous to do that. You could easily see that happening here. So I think once the Trump administration commits to putting down the riots to enforcing federal law by force, it kinda can't back away from that.
Like, I you know? And that raises the question, who's funding these, etcetera, etcetera. And I think it's a really interesting question we should find out. I don't think the only arrest should be on the scene. I do think the drug cartels are involved flexing their authority in California.
They have a lot of control in California, as I'm sure you know, etcetera, etcetera. But the bottom line question is, does the federal government have a right to enforce federal immigration law? Yes. And if states are out of compliance with that, it doesn't have any option but to force the issue.
Tramatha, when you see this amount of paramilitary literal military coming in, the dragging of, you know, handyman from Home Depot as opposed to the strategic way this started, which was, hey. We're gonna go after the felons. We're going after the gang members, the really bad folks. And then this time now it seems like, hey. We're just gonna roll up to a farm.
We're gonna roll up to a Home Depot. Just grab everybody. We'll figure it out later if their, you know, papers check out or not. Are you in favor of the, hey. All 20,000,000 gotta go.
I'll call that the Steve Bannon position, or are you into in the 5% of alien illegal aliens who are criminals, they need to go, but maybe a path to citizenship for the other 19,000,000?
I think the president was asked a version of that question today, Jason. And I think what he said is there are people that have worked, for example, on farms for twenty to twenty five years, or they work in the leisure industry. And he said, we have to take a common sense approach to those people. Because if you do take those people, then it's creating a vacuum where these jobs could get filled by folks that are essentially criminals or other things. So I believe that that's a reasonable starting point.
What I would say is where do we go? There are seven and a half legal, not illegal, legal immigrants in The United States waiting for their adjustment of status. Those are doctors, those are lawyers, those are scientists, those are family members of existing American citizens. There's an entire body of people that I think we have to recognize that have been waiting in line, and their act in America was a legal action to come in and contribute. And every time we start this conversation, we go to the plight of people whose fundamental action was an illegal action without understanding that there has to be actually a more balanced approach.
So, yes, I think the president is right. Common sense for the folks that have now been here for a very long time, but we have to prioritize the people that started by saying, we're gonna wait in line properly. And then there's people in the middle. But I think that there needs to be a way to give those folks a chance to get their affairs in order, but they should be playing by the rules. Got it.
And I think it's unfair to reward not playing by the rules.
Okay. So some middle ground between the extreme, all 20,000,000 gotta go, and the
Let's call example that I saw online, Jason, was give folks a stipend and a year.
Yes. The stipend's been out there for a while. Right?
To get their affairs in order. Yeah. And then to go
said that.
Right? Kaizen. Kaizen said that. Exactly. And I think I think Kaizen's clip is actually the most the most rational for the middle chunk.
But I would really focus on these legal folks and say, what are we doing about those folks whose action was to raise their hand, stand in line, and say, I wanna contribute by the rules that America set out.
Reward them and then punish the illegal folks coming in
Adjudicate everybody else.
Adjudicate everybody else. Love it. Okay. Saxe, we're gonna play two clips here to level this up, and we can kinda look at this in a multi decade way. Here's Reagan on immigration and then followed by Clinton.
It is bold men and women yearning for freedom and opportunity who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream and over and over they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. But their greatest contribution is more than economic because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in The United States Of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world, the last best hope of men on earth.
All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before. We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.
Okay. Sacks, my question for you is, on a party basis, this seems to have flipped. We talked about this before on the program. Republicans wanted immigration, NAFTA, legal reg red even maybe an open border where workers could go freely back and from Mexico, kinda like the EU. And Clinton wanted to deport folks so that Americans get could have more jobs and that wages would go up.
Now it seems to have flipped. Obviously, you're inside the administration, disclaimer, disclaimer, whatever you however you wanna disclaim this. What's in the best interest of all Americans going forward? Because we have an interesting wrinkle here, which I'm sure you've been thinking about as the AI czar, which is jobs are going away in a lot of key areas where robotics and AI are coming in. So you have to contend with what the American people want and AI and job destruction or displacement that can be caused by it.
So so what are your thoughts generally? And and I obviously, you work in the administration, so I wanna give you that chance to explain personal versus administration position.
Well, my reaction is that you're doing everything possible to avoid the fact that LA is on fire right now and law enforcement is being assaulted by rioters who look like an invading army. They're riding under a foreign flag. Yeah. You're showing clips of Reagan and Clinton. What the hell does this have to do with the fact that there are riots in LA right now?
Oh, I was trying to level issue at hand.
Oh, I was trying to level up the conversation to talk about the big picture of immigration, but if we wanna
get down to the conversation. I think that No. I'm trying to extend
it, hold on. Hold on. If you're gonna accuse me personally of, like, having a scale here, I'm happy to discuss law enforcement January 6 or this one. I believe you should not beat up cops. I come from a family of cops.
You know that. We've been friends for over twenty years. My family is cop. My family is firefighter. We don't approve of throwing moral tough cocktails at cops, period.
Full stop. Am insulted if you even insinuate that.
I didn't insinuate that.
But we have
not discussed the issue at hand, which is
You can feel free
to go burning right now. By the way, if you don't wanna get deported, try not riding under a foreign flag. I mean, it's just a stupid way to advocate for your position if that's what it is. But that's that's the topic of the week right now. I don't know why you're trying to up level this and talk about what Reagan thought forty years ago.
It's just not relevant to what's happening in the news today. Now you asked what is the quote unquote American position if there is one? I can give you some polling on that. So of all, voters approve of the ICE raids in Los Angeles by 55 to 37. That's plus 18.
Voters support the administration's effort to deport illegal immigrants by 58, 37, that's plus 21. They approve of Trump deploying the National Guard by 20 points, 59, 39. Only 36% say the administration's gone too far, while 55% say it's about right or too little, so plus 19. And even the liberal Quinnipiac poll found that Democrats' approval numbers are at a new all time low of minus 49, whereas Trump is now up to plus six in morning consult and plus eight in Rasmussen. So I think the American people approve of what the administration is doing here.
And just to fact check, one thing you said in the introduction, you mentioned this fashion wholesaler that along with Home Depot, you made it sound like these raids were just happening willy nilly, like there's some big roundup where they were just busting into places and seeing who's illegal, checking people's papers. That's not what happened. This fashion wholesaler is a money laundering operation for the Mexican cartels. This is according to Tom Homan. And many employees there are involved in very serious crimes, drug, gang, and violence, murder, child rape.
And there were warrants for their arrest. So the way that this whole thing started is ICE was serving criminal warrants that state and local authorities have no right to resist. That's how this started. It wasn't random roundups. Okay?
Okay. I was just there's reporting that Stephen Miller specifically said just he was disappointed with the number of people being round up and deported. And he said, just go to a farm, just go to Home Depot. I'm just that's the reporting.
Okay. Well, I have not been able to confirm that reporting. I don't I personally don't believe it. I think that what Tom Homan said is that they were serving criminal warrants. That's how this started.
Okay.
Now, I think that part of the reason why the Democrats are so unpopular here is they're basically perceived as excusing the lawlessness by saying that it's only happening because the Trump administration's daring to enforce the law. And so once again, they're siding with looters, arsonists, and violent criminals just like in 2020.
Who's who's who's siding with?
This is Democrats.
Okay. Because the Democrats, they said no violence. So that was many times Gavin Newsom said no violence. Karen Bass said no violence. They've they've been tweeting that.
They also okay. Great. They also are saying that this is all Trump's fault, that Trump started this. Bassett Newsom said that the National Guard wasn't needed because LAPD had everything under control. But LAPD was at told to stay out of the protests, and when the violence erupted and that forced them to step in, they were, according to their own chief of police, Jim MacDonald, quickly overwhelmed.
So this is MacDonald. He said, quote, we are overwhelmed. Tonight, we had individuals out there shooting commercial grade fireworks at our officers that can kill you. They'll take backpacks filled with cinder blocks and hammers, break the blocks, and pass the piece around to throw at officers and cars, even at other people. So according to their own chief of police, they needed the help from the National Guard.
So that's the real issue here is that Bass and Newsom had this policy of of doing nothing and then engaging in denialism, pretending like there wasn't a problem, And then when the problem got too big to ignore, they pretend like it's Trump's fault for causing it.
Tucker, what's your thoughts on should the Trump administration have had such a show of force if the reports are true that they're randomly going, you know, to a Home Depot, if that is true, is that the right approach right now, or is it, you know, a little too provocative and they should do this more strategically in your personal opinion?
Well, considering that we have American troops in over a 100 bases around the world in countries most Americans can't identify, it's a little weird to be shocked when on that rare occasion they're used to keep the biggest city in the country from burning down. It seems like the point of having a military is to keep foreigners from burning your cities, and these are foreigners, as David said. They're foreign nationals committing crimes beneath a foreign flag. So that if there was ever a time to use the US military, it's then. And as noted earlier, you can't allow the states to be flagrantly out of compliance with federal immigration law.
And I have to say the core question for me as an American is really a fairness question. So the idea that people are breaking the law, but it's cool because they're doing essential services. Like, well, you know, I pay a lot in taxes. Maybe I pay 80% and that feels like enough to me. And, hey, man, do you really have a right to collect the the last 20%?
I mean, isn't 80% enough? Like, back off. I don't have the right to say that as an American citizen to an IRS agent. I went up in jail if I do that or if I break any law, by the way.
So rule of law, critically important.
Well, no. But not only that, it's a double standard. I live in a place where a lot of the population subsists on the food banks and where there are very few jobs, and it really is one of those places that NAFTA destroyed, whose economy NAFTA destroyed. And to see in the place where I live, immigrants get preference on housing, on jobs, which is actually true. And I know that liberals watch it and be like, that's not really true.
It is true, actually. And I and I wonder because the real number is not 20,000,000. It's closer to 50,000,000. I think that's true. Illegals in The United States.
Clearly, they can't all be deported by ICE. But I also think if you have a system that hands out meaningful grants in effect, cell phones, travel vouchers, housing vouchers, free education, food stamps to people who are here illegally or who are here legally as refugees, you are going to draw the world's poor. And I think it's fair to ask, do we want that? How do we benefit from that? And are we giving more to foreigners than we're giving to our own citizens?
And the answer is yes. And, like So dare you at a certain point? Like, you get a revolution if you keep doing that. That's too much. It's too offensive.
Got it. So I think we all agree. No violence on cops. Shut the southern border and giving crazy amount of hold on. Me just
say the national guards should never be brought in. You let me ask questions, don't you? I will the national guards should be brought in? Yes or no?
If the local police can't handle what's going on, of course, they should be brought in. Sure. I believe that during
I believe that are questioning that decision.
You asked me the question. I believe they should have been brought in for January 6 for BLM or for the LA riots if the local police can't contain them. A 100%, I believe the National Guard should have been brought in for January 6 when they were beating cops. I believe they should be brought in now if cops are being beaten, and I believe they should have been brought in during BLM when cops were being beaten. I am pro cop.
I come from a family of cops. So you you asked me the question seven different weeks.
So Newsom and Bass were out of line when they say that National Guard should not have been brought in?
I think well, number one, I think they should call the National Guard if they can't control it. I'm
not But that's their criticism of Trump is that he called in the National Guard. You agree that that was necessary? It's obviously necessary. Just look at the TV. The scene is still on fire.
Cops are completely overwhelmed. By the way, I find it comical that
Well, you're not letting me finish the sentence.
Well, let me finish this one point. Then you can speak. Yeah. Find it comical that Permission. The Massachusetts governor called up the National Guard when DeSantis sent remember when he sent the 50 migrants over to Martha's Vineyard?
Yes. And they all freaked out, and they literally called the National Guard in because 50 migrants all of a sudden have been flown into Martha's Vineyard?
Yeah. They did.
Yeah. Okay.
But Was that to
can have thousands of
them or because there was riots?
Well, that was when DeSantis was making a point about Okay.
But that was to process them. They weren't rioting on Martha's Vineyard. These were just
Nonetheless, the National Guard was brought in. And, you know, you can have thousands of people, though, rioting in LA, but somehow National Guard shouldn't be brought in.
I we we're in agreement, so you can try to force me to disagree with you, but I'm in agreement. Anytime the cops are overwhelmed, I think the national guard should be brought in, period, full stop. So we're in agreement on that. What I'm trying to get to is, Tucker, if you believe there's 50,000,000 people, let's say the number's 30,000,000. We we we split the difference between the two, thirty five million, whatever it is.
My question for you, how many should be deported by ICE at $20,000 a person, which is the estimate that, you know, both sides seem to agree is what it's gonna cost. Should we deport a million? Should we deport 10,000,000? And then how, Tucker Carlson, would you deport them?
Well, I think the goal has to be full compliance with the law for everybody within our borders, citizen or foreign born, illegal, refugee, green card holder. If you're in The United States, you obey our laws. And if you don't, we make a good faith effort to enforce them despite how powerful the political blocsody will
only be. 50,000,000.
So so of well, of by definition or else why wouldn't I apply that same standard to my taxes? Right? So So how do do it?
Path to citizenship. Yeah. Let's get into that. Yeah.
Right. So, well, that's a hostage situation. It's like we've got 50,000,000 here already. We've lied about the number for thirty years now. Wow, it's 50,000,000 or 35,000,000.
We need them. Everyone gets a path to citizenship. That's a kind of crime actually. But the step, and the phrase has been devalued, but self deportation, if you have a system where people come to The United States to make their own way and take advantage of the freedoms offered in the economy, and they're allowed to participate in the economy, then I think you could have a system where people really admire immigrants in the way that they did when I was growing up, and that I I still do in some ways. I mean, so my favorite people are immigrants, and they all tell the same story.
Came here with nothing, built this great life, but you make everybody cynical and you sort of destroy the idea of the virtue of immigration when you hand people stuff and give them preference when they arrive. And we don't talk enough about what that actually looks like if we send a lot more than $20 a person right now in subsidies
to people who aren't allowed to be here. They they also pay into Social Security too, right, to the tune of a 100 million years.
Oh, okay. Right.
That's just what was reported by our government. You if we wanna get conspiracy corner, that's not true.
Fake. I think those are fake numbers. Look. Does anybody really believe that 50,000,000 illegals is a net benefit to The US economy? Are you serious?
Have you been to our cities? No. Of course not. It's not.
And and probably a large number of them are in that benefit because they're working in jobs that Americans don't wanna take, and we're at 4% unemployment. So who's gonna take all those jobs if they get deported, Tucker?
Aren't but weren't you just saying that we're on the cusp of a of a labor revolution where some 20% of American jobs are going away in two years?
Could be. Yeah. So that's the that's the nuance in this discussion is five years ago, we might be actively dealing with labor problems.
It's like a brick wall we're about to hit at high speed. And I don't understand having accustomed an entire generation of tens of millions of immigrants to government handouts, what the social fabric is gonna look like when that stops.
Yeah. Can I say something? Because I I
think George Amo.
Tucker is saying something really important, which I agree with. What should immigration be in a highly developed nation like The United States? And my perspective is you have to come and say, well, what is the goal? I think the goal should be to maintain supremacy. The United States is the most vibrant economy in the world.
It's the most important military power in the world. It's the most technically advanced entity in the world. If we do not focus on maintaining our supremacy, I don't think any American wants to go through the process of going from to not And if you look back in history at all of the other countries that have had to go through that transition, that is where revolutions and chaos happen. So we should avoid that. So where does immigration play a role?
It needs to play a role and foremost in technical, military, and economic supremacy. The problem, as Tucker says, is when you have five or six times the number of illegal immigrants as legal immigrants, all of a sudden, the idea of using immigration as a cream skimming technique to reinforce the most capable people in the world to come here goes away because you can't have that conversation. We have people languishing for ten, fifteen, twenty years on visas. Okay? Their kids age out.
They all go back to India and other places. Why? Because we can't focus on that conversation, Jason, because we're focused on how do we give amnesty to folks whose initial action was breaking the law. Absolutely correct. And this is where the whole immigration conversation devolves.
We are missing the bigger picture. And you need to deal one second. You need to deal with the illegal immigration thing in an extremely foundational way where you can defend the decision. You started illegally, and you have to now go and conform to the law.
Which is where I'm trying to steer this discussion. Number one, we all agree on closing the border. It seems like there's a a breaking consensus here. Tucker wants to eventually deport everybody. You wanna do something in the middle like Trump.
Saxe, I'm not sure what your personal position is or if you wanna give it, do you feel we should try to have a path to deport as many of these twenty, thirty million as possible? Or do you believe we should have a path towards citizenship for them? What is your personal belief or do you wanna not give it?
Well, I I remember when you asked that question to now Vice President J. D. Vance at All in Summit, and he said that you basically address that problem the same way that you eat a sandwich, which is one bite at a time. So that makes sense to me. If there's 20,000,000 illegals, you start with the top million who are violent criminals and gang members, and you deport those.
And that is what ICE was doing. They were serving criminal warrants. And then after you successfully do that, then you see where you're at, and you can address the next bite of the sandwich. That makes sense to me. Now look, I think that we're not really addressing a really core part of the issue here, which is for a couple of decades now, conservatives were demonized, and Tucker in particular, I think you were demonized, for warning about the policies that have created the mess that everyone can see on TV right now.
And that mess is we have a large unassimilated population of military age males who are basically rioting right now under a foreign flag as if they were foreign invaders. We basically have allowed a separatist movement in The United States. That's what it looks like to me. And I remember when Tucker was warning about the policies that might create this on his show for years, you know, virtually alone, probably alone on Fox News. You know, you were called a racist.
This was great replacement theory, blah blah blah. How can everyone not look at what's happening on TV right now and say Tucker was right. You know, that was really dumb. And look, I say this as someone from a family. I'm I'm one of the people that Ronald Reagan was talking about.
You know, my family and I came over here. We're immigrants. But we came over here to assimilate. You know, we believe in the melting pot.
That's all good. Might get canceled for bringing the melting pot.
That's The melting pot's good. I mean, I think that was the classic American model.
Melting pot's totally good.
You speak to Mike. I'm just saying you can get canceled for even That's
what you're supposed to do. Like, why do why would anybody I came here because I wanted to be American and everything that American meant. If I was bigger, I would have played football. You know? Like, there's all these things that I would have done to assimilate more and more.
I believe in the culture of The United States. That's why people should come.
Right. So we came here. We assimilated, you know, high skill immigrants. Didn't have a lot, but had good education and willing to assimilate. That's very different than what you're seeing on TV right now.
And again, if the people on TV just wanted to protest immigration policy in the way that you're talking about, I mean, you're describing it in this like very nice, genteel way, they would be peacefully protesting under an American flag saying we wanna be here. We're willing to contribute.
Think the issue
was That's not what's happening. You see that, right? I mean Oh. Look like foreign invaders.
I would say
By the way, this is like the dumbest PR that, you know, if this debate is really about immigration, this is like the dumbest way for them to present their side of the argument. Yeah. You might to keep in this country a large unassimilated population that is proud to march, not just march, but actually protest and riot and burn and assault under the flag of another nation.
I would say dollars to no That's an intolerable situation. Of the people who are doing the looting and rioting are not actually immigrants because they have the ability to be deported. The people who are doing that are the bad actors that we saw during BLM, the bad actors that we saw, you know, in LA when the Lakers win. I've lived here for a decade, and I am here right now. I can tell you it's contained.
And though 90% of those people are not the immigrants. Immigrants are hiding right now for fear of being deported. But let's sort of talk about do the path but where do you where do you guys wanna go with it here? I mean, I can give you my opinion if
you want.
Well, Tucker, I mean, I like, I I don't know. I mean, I wanna speak for But I mean, I I I do think that, like, Tucker should feel vindicated on this issue for speaking about it.
Tucker, you feel vindicated? You feel vindicated?
I mean, I never doubted it. I grew up I was born in California in 1969, and I my family got there in 1850. I have some sense of what the state was like, certainly through my childhood, and it was an it was idyllic, and it's it's it's not. You know, the rich areas are great. Bel Air is great.
La Jolla is still great, I think. I mean, there are Mount Shasta is great. Lots of great places in California, but fundamentally, the state is a slum. It's a Latin American country, and immigration did that. And I say that as someone who is pretty pro immigrant, actually.
My best friend's an immigrant. I mean, I've I've always admired, like, immigrants. I'm hardly anti immigrant or anti immigration, but the way we did it destroyed the state. Immigration is what made California into a slum, and there's kind of no way around that. And so that's an argument against all immigration.
I I'm not making that argument. I don't feel that way. But it's an argument against what we did in California. And rather than learn from that, we're doing it in every other state, and I don't know why. And I think, you know, if the other side had a reasonable argument, they would proffer it, but instead, they call you names and try to turn you into some kind of thought criminal or whatever.
I don't care, obviously, but it's a it's a sort of measure of how little they have to say in response. They're not actually trying to make the country better. That's kind of the main thing. I have always thought immigrants are great because they didn't make the country better. Right?
I mean, I I think that's demonstrable, but the people pushing our current policies don't have that as a goal. This is a kind of punishment for something, and a lot of it's ethnic, actually. It's a it's a kind of attack on the people who were born here. I don't know where that hostility comes from. You can feel it, though, and I think it's foolish to deny it.
That is a motive. They're trying to hurt the people who live here. And I, again, I live in a place currently where I see that happening, and it drives me totally bonkers. And the last thing I'll say is if you think the way we once did immigration was good and a lot of immigrants are awesome people, and I do think that, this is discrediting all immigration.
100%.
And it's turning people into pretty radical immigration restrictionists who are like, look. I don't want any more immigrants. Yeah. You know? That's inevitable, but it's sad to see it.
By the way, what you're saying is is the most true for immigrants. Legal immigrants look at illegal immigration even more negatively than native born Americans.
Which makes sense. Right? I mean, they waited in line and other people didn't. You would be really upset if somebody cut the line.
Jason, what do you think?
Obviously, there's a lot of emotion around this issue. I think numbers help. And I always look to see what is the consensus amongst the group here and amongst, you know, Americans. Everybody wants the border closed. Trump won on that.
So okay, we all agree the border should be closed. Think eighty-ninety percent consensus in that. Eighty-ninety percent of Americans think we should deport violent criminals. Okay, we got consensus there. So then what's left is what do we do with high skilled recruiting?
I like to use the word recruiting, and we had that discussion with president Trump here. He promised to put a green card on every degree. I agree with him on that. I think we should be recruiting at least a million or 2,000,000 amazing people per year. One to 2,000,000 amazing people, we should match that to what the needs of the country are.
If we need energy, if we need doctors, we should match that. Where we probably disagree is, I think the Democrats and the Republicans share equally in this issue that was created that Tucker pointed out. Yes, there are forty, thirty, 50, who knows what the exact number is. That's part of the problem. Here's a chart we made.
This just shows you under each of the last, you know, fifty, almost fifty years of presidents, how many people net immigrated to the country. And as you can see, you know, it's been pretty consistent, you know, around 3,000,000 per, and Clinton and Bush had a ton of immigration. Both Bushes were paid for. A lot of their donations came from corporates who wanted free migration. America created hold on.
Let me finish my thought. There's an
outlier here, Jason, though.
Oh, well, yeah. Biden is
the huge outlier. We we all agree on that. Biden let it go YOLO. And I understand people have a lot of resentment for that, and rightfully so. If you bring in 10,000,000 people, you're gonna get a lot of bad guys.
But you put this all together. My belief is that this is a country of immigrants and that this country does great when hardworking immigrants assimilate. I think we should take this raw firepower of these incredible immigrants who have been here for decades. If you've been here for ten or twenty decades, pay a fine, pay some extra taxes, and we give these people a path to citizenship and we recruit the top one to 2,000,000 That's my belief.
You do that before or after the people that have been waiting in line get a fair shake? I think I would start Before or after?
I think you have to do it before because we created this. And I know that that's not something that people wanna take ownership of, but America created the situation. Bush created it. Reagan created it. Clinton.
America, yes, the country that we live in. Our government allowed millions of people here, and the Republicans did this specifically in order
to get cheap labor. Okay. Let me let ask you.
Let me be responsible for what we did with these people.
Let's just say that you're an international let's just say you're an international mathematics Olympiad winner. Mhmm. You get recruited to come to The United States on a student visa. You crush it. Let's say you go to MIT, and then you go and do a PhD at Caltech, and then you get recruited on an OPT visa by Google, and you're just crushed.
Awesome. And and you're saying that that person
Oh, no. Sorry. That's a more subtle question. That person, we should recruit, as I said very clearly, recruit at the top one to 2,000,000.
They are currently waiting in line, Jason. Yes. So let's just
say saying, yes. Let them in. And yes, a path
to Who do you prioritize? You have one You can do both at
the same time. No, no, no.
No, you can't.
Of course you can. We could have one group recruiting a million to 2,000,000 highly skilled individuals of the type you're describing while having another group. We can do two things at the same time, Shammoth. Absolutely you can. You're giving a false question here.
Then we take the person who's been here for twenty years as a dishwasher, as a nanny, who has been an amazing citizen, who has been paying into social security, give them a path, a compassionate path, and we as America and Americans should take ownership of the fact that we allowed this and the people who allowed it were Republicans and Democrats. We allowed these people to come in to work in our restaurants and fields, which is what Trump said today. Trump is in agreement with me.
That's not what he said. He said something different.
He said he wants to not have those people leave.
It's just amazing to me that on this podcast during the Biden years, you were echoing this party line that the videos of, you know, mass migration, caravans streaming across the border, going through the holes in the wall, you said those were videos cherry picked by Fox News. You echoed the party line that there was no problem. Now all of a sudden, all a sudden you're saying it was a bipartisan problem.
No, no, fact check. I said we don't know because we don't have the metrics and we don't have a good system, which we all agree on. There's no good system
count these And anybody who went down the border was saying that it was wide open.
Right. And as we got that data, I said this data on the ground shows we should shut the border. That's
always been my became very empirical about the issue.
I've always been empirical about it and I've also been compassionate about it.
The whole, like, both sides are to blame thing kind of ignores the fact that you had the Trump revolution in 02/2016. There is some truth to the idea that both parties neglected the problem. If you go back far enough, like, you know, Tucker remember this when Bob Bartley was the editor of the Wall Street Journal op ed page, they actually supported a constitutional amendment in favor of open borders. I mean, they really believed in this whole idea of
Pull that up.
Free trade Yeah. Open borders, free free flow of capital and labor. Okay? But that was a long time ago. And, you know, with the rise of Trump in 2015, 2016, it became a different party.
Trump got elected on building a wall. Yeah. And what happened? The Democrats fought him tooth and nail. They tied him up in litigation.
He was able to build hundreds of miles of wall, but there were uncompleted parts of it. And when Biden came into office, there were large pieces of the wall that were still on the ground just waiting to be erected, and Biden sold them off as scrap metal for 2¢ on the dollar. Do you remember this? Then Biden and the Democrats proceeded
in favor of the liberation and closing the border,
so please
don't frame it as I'm against that.
Okay. Just forget about you. I'm just you you said Democrats and Republicans are blamed for this. In the last five years. Not in the last eight years.
No.
Oh, yeah. Donald Biden Trump's the outlier. Wall.
Yeah. Biden is
the outlier. Yeah.
Opened up the border, and Democrats supported him in that, and they thwarted every Republican attempt to close the border.
And they lost
years hold on a For three years, they gaslit and pretended it wasn't a problem. Then when it became undeniable, they claimed that Biden didn't have the executive authority, so they would need a new act of congress. That was also total nonsense. As Trump said in the state of the union, you didn't need a new law. You just need a new president.
Look. If you wanna go back twenty or thirty years, you can blame both parties. If you wanna talk about the last eight years, there's only one party to blame.
One party,
the Democrats. And that is why you look at the polling right now. Democrats, their party, all time low. It is let's get the exact number, negative 49. 21% approve the Democrats, 70% disapprove.
Because they know that Democrats caused this problem, and Democrats are the ones denying. They're the ones basically making excuses for the disorder and the chaos right now. The Democrat who's actually talking since right now is the one with the head injury, ironically, Fetterman. He's a lone voice here. I wanna put up this quote.
Don't make sense.
It's kinda funny.
Dude, that's shit.
No. Mean, it's amazing. Like, Fetterman. No. I mean, it's it's kinda sad, but look.
I'm agreeing with Fetterman. Fetterman says,
I that he hit his head.
I don't know what is about Democrats.
With your I don't what
it is about Democrats. It takes a head it takes a head injury for them to talk sense. Okay? It's like a bulwark thing. Anyway, Federman said, my party loses tomorrow high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law Yes.
He's talking about January 6?
Unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations of immigration, but this is not that. This is anarchy and true chaos. So kudos to Federman, but he's the only Democrat out there. He's a low voice condemning violence.
And Tucker's our guest. I'm gonna give Tucker the last word on this topic before we go on to the next one. And you are a 100% correct. Biden, 10,000,000 net immigrants. And Trump, 3,000,000, which sounds like a lot, but it's actually the lowest in, like, 10 administrations, the lowest since Reagan.
Tucker, you're our guest. Wrap us up here. What should we think?
I think that we should measure the health of a country, at least in part by the condition of its cities, including the cleanliness of its cities. And by that measure, our country is collapsing. Our cities are a disaster, and the the richest part of the richest cities are fine, and the rest of them are just absolutely awful. And so I think that has gotta be just job one. If you wanna renew The United States, you have to make sure its population centers are clean, safe, orderly, but especially clean.
There's something really important, and I know that the left just instinctively discounts that, but cleanliness is next to godliness, and your city is a reflection of your self respect, how you feel about your nation, your patriotism. And if you allow it to become like Paris or New York covered in graffiti and filth and random people from other countries selling fruit on the street and begging and having sex in ATM vestibules and just like the whole Midtown Manhattan Central Paris experience, like, that's a sign your civilization is going under. I think it's really, really important. And I do think, you know, that decay is not entirely caused by mass immigration, but mass immigration has made it much worse. And I just know that from walking around because I like to walk around cities.
I think it's a national emergency, and the riots are just the most florid expression of that. You know, a burning car is something you can't ignore, but we do ignore the condition of Sixth Avenue at 40 Ninth Street. Like, how can a self or the condition of Penn Station or, you know, of our airports. Like, how can we allow that? That's so true.
If I were in charge, I mean, I would make you go to Dubai or Doha or Moscow or some place that has a sense of itself.
When we got Soba in Tokyo, remember two years ago when we were talking about this exact issue, it just looks
how it is. I mean yes. Tokyo is the most radicalizing experience for an American. Everyone who goes there is like, I can't even deal with this. I'm so angry that we've put up with what we're putting up with.
I had to talk
it off the ledge
in Tokyo.
Did. Let's not overthink it, I guess, is what I'm saying. It's not even about the constitution. City bench. It's about litter.
Yeah. Tucker gets the last word on that, and now David Sacks gets to take his incredible victory lap. Economic data has been objectively pretty great the last two weeks. Tariff revenue spiked 23,000,000,000 in May, two x from February. So there we go.
§03Strong macro data: inflation, tariff revenue, GDP, jobs
We see the impact of a little bit of extra income. Inflation continues to come down. And what are we at? 2.4% across the board, there's some pluses and minuses in there. We'll get into it later.
GDP. Okay, this is the leading GDP prediction model from the Atlanta Fed could be as high as 3.8%. Again, this is a prediction q two. Q two is obviously not over, but this would be a pretty big jump over q one. Despite all this positive data, the deficit remains the sticky issue.
Some of our friends might have some issue with this and been vocal about it. In May, The US had $371,000,000,000 in revenue with $687,000,000,000 in spend. Not good. Big high burn rate. $316,000,000,000 deficit.
We paid $90,000,000,000 in May in interest on the debt, almost up to 100,000,000,000 a month. And if if there's a nice Sankey chart, which we all like, we could double click on that if anybody finds something interesting in here. Here's your deficit tracker. What I'll highlight here for you is those two lines, 2020 and 2021, you gotta kind of give a mulligan there for the COVID years. And purple 2025, we are a bit ahead of the last couple of years.
We're at 13 are spending now. And, you know, obviously, the debt service is a big part of this. 13% above 2024, 20% above 2023, and 65% above 2022. The balance sheet of The United States is really bad right now. Sachs, I'm gonna start with you.
This obviously has been an emotional issue. And, oh, apology, Chamath. I just noticed forgot to hit publish on last week's episode, but let's let that go. It won't happen again. Sachs, what are your thoughts here?
Well, I mean, you'll recall that back in early April, Jim Kramer predicted we'd see a Black Monday in response to Trump's tariffs, and that's all the proof that we should have known that we're about to get a bunch of good economic You were Kramer. And it wasn't just Jim Kramer. I mean, Larry Summers was on our pod with that big debate that we did, and he was predicting doom. And what we're seeing now is good economic news is breaking out all over. So Q2 GDP on track for 3.8% according to the Atlanta Fed.
The May jobs report was above expected, plus 139,000. CPI, you know, inflation down to 2.4%. So growth is back. Inflation is low. And what you saw over the last few months was the elites in both parties, I'll give you that, they were scaremongering on tariffs and predicting doom, they've been proven to be out of touch with popular sentiment and reality.
Mean, I don't wanna spike the football too soon, but things look really good right now.
Yeah. And, I mean, in fairness, when the Trump shock and awe with the tariffs so he came out pretty strongly, Zach, you will admit, and the market did tank massively for about thirty days. Tucker, what's your take on the economy today? Does debt does it concern you? And I'm wondering what because there seems to be a little bit of a rift inside of the Republican Party on the BBB, not build back better, but the big beautiful bill.
What's Tucker Carlson's take, I'm curious, on out of control spending, the deficit, and this bill in relation to that?
Well, I mean, I have the world's most predictable views. I believe in physics. So, you know, an unpayable debt tanks your country at a certain point. That was preexisting. It's accelerated, as you noted.
I don't know a single person who's got any kind of plan to fix it. I think we're just gonna ride it into whatever the point of oblivion is. But I would just say on tariffs, you know, my you've got the reverse Kramer, David was saying. That's his measure of economic forecasting. For me, it's the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
Whatever they're for is poison, generally speaking, and anything that drives them insane is a virtue. And I just can't imagine a policy more perfectly designed to just make them, like, explode than Trump's tariff announcement. And I and I have to say, I mean, I've been kind of pretty conventional republican my entire life. I remember when I decided the Iraq war was a bad idea that felt like an outlaw, you know, idea.
When did you get to that point? What what led you to breaking? Well, I
went to Iraq, in February to see where a friend of mine had been killed. And, so I was there right after the invasion, and I just immediately recognized this is not we're we're not a good colonial power because we won't admit that we are. We won't admit that we have an empire. Therefore, we can't administer it in a rational way. Just the obvious stuff.
But, anyway, the point is the last remaining kind of unexamined orthodoxy in my head was free trade, and I happened to be just by chance at the White House the day of that announcement. And I remember thinking, man, if this works, what a caper.
You know? I mean, I don't know if it's gonna work or not. Case scenario in your mind of this tariff negotiation? Obviously, there have been multiple rounds of it. I'm not gonna use the term taco, but it does seem like we've shifted from shock and awe to maybe kind of bore.
It's kind of boring. And that doesn't seem to be Trump's approach. Right? He in negotiations. Right.
Big bang and then fall back to a reasonable position. So I think we're in the reasonable position phase. Yeah. I mean, God willing
I I hope. I pray that's what we're seeing on Iran right now. But you're absolutely right. I mean, that's sort of the nature of negotiations, of course. And there is nothing in writing with China so far as I know, and it'll be reassuring, I think, when there is.
But in general, we haven't seen what Jim Kramer and Larry Summers predicted, and that itself is amazing. It's amazing. And it it causes you someone like me is sort of on the sidelines of the economic debate, but watching carefully, it does make you sort of wonder, like, what other absurd mid century orthodoxies about economics have I internalized that just aren't true. Right? Because that was the biggest of all.
Tariffs are you know, they caused the Great Depression. We know that. And and so what if, like, you can have a kind of mixed approach with some trade barriers that are tailored to your benefit, and that sort of works in a longitudinal way. If that's true, holy smokes. And it looks like it might be true.
Well, it's been true for the other side. Right? They have been doing that exact policy. If it's true for China and South Korea and Australia, why wouldn't it be true for us? It seems like we're the sucker at the poker team.
Well, I think you're right. I guess what I'm all I'm saying, I'm making a pretty pedestrian point, but I can't get past it, which is this is so far from what the Republican Party stood for ten years ago, which was neoconservative foreign policy, free trade, open borders as as you noted, maybe a little more than ten years ago, but fifteen years ago. Sure. This is this is the mirror image of it, and it just blows my mind, and it's it's such a better version. It's such a more reality based, flexible, thoughtful version than we had before, and I'm just really and most Republicans in the senate are not even aware this is happening.
They are the most recalcitrant people in the world, also the dumbest. So most of them, you know, don't accept any of this, but just as an observer, I'm thrilled to see it.
Alright. Shammoth,
you're Can I can I
Oh, yeah?
Sure. You want Saxx?
No. No. No. You can go. I mean, I know you like to go right after Tucker.
It's very engaging for
got me thinking about these
This is his dream. When you're on, he cannot the group chat, he's so excited, Tucker, when you're coming on. It's forty eight hours of Saks being like, when does when is the pod coming? Is Tucker really coming?
That's how I feel about David Saks. Trust me. If you do
me too.
If you
had a camera at my dinner table, you would hear something similar.
Oh, boy. Here we go. Go ahead, Saks.
It's great to have someone to the right of me on the podcast for once, you know?
It's not an easy task. We invited Alex Jones and Steve Bannon. Haven't responded.
Tucker got me thinking about these unexamined orthodoxies, And that is a good way of putting it. I mean, you know, because I studied economics in college and, you know, I learned that the Smoot Hawley tariff caused the Great Depression. And it's like, in hindsight, you're like, how can that even be true? Like, a tariff is basically a tax rate on foreign goods. And you're saying that, you know, increasing taxes on foreign goods all of a sudden cause a great depression.
It doesn't make any sense when you actually like to think about it. Now what caused great depression? Well, I would say when thousands of banks went under and there's no FDIC and everyone just got wiped out by that, and it's a systemic risk. So, like, one bank failure leads to the next one. That's so obviously what caused the Great Depression is nobody had any money left.
They all got wiped out when all the banks went under at the same time. Right? Well, and then
what how do we take something that happened in the twenties and thirties and apply it to a much more dynamic world like today? It doesn't make much sense.
Well, I think what happened is we had all these postwar, meaning postwar war two understandings that kinda got hardwired into the consciousness of our intellectuals. And if you think about the the era right after World War two, The US was like the last great power standing. It was us and the Soviet Union, but they kind of had a different system. They were not part of let's say, the free world. They're part of this communist bloc.
So in terms of the quote unquote free world, we were the only country that was relatively undamaged, and we had this giant manufacturing base. And so, yeah, obviously, that the the fewer trade barriers existed across the world, the better it was for The United States because it was our goods and our factories that basically were able sell all over the world. And so we proceeded to define a world order in which we just kicked down every single barrier to free trade because that's what benefited us. Now I don't know that that means that that situation always benefits us in all times and all places. I mean, the big issue we have right now is that you've got a rising China, and they have become the skilled producer in the world for all sorts of goods.
They now have this giant industrial base that we seem to have exported to them. And again, it was and we exported a lot of that because of this, free trade ideology that got so entrenched in our thinking that we just stopped thinking about under what circumstances this might not continue to be good for us. And so we've ended up becoming dependent on them for all sorts of goods that we now realize are highly strategic, and we're trying to figure out, well, how do we onshore these things? Because it seems really dangerous now for us to be single threaded you know, potentially Chips, know, rare earths or, you know, rare earth magnets and chips and pharmaceuticals and all these things. But, you know, our intellectual class just never seems to revisit any of its assumptions.
They just kind of have these dogmas.
Chamath, building on Saxe's sort of codification of truths, heuristics, and not getting questioned. How much of it is we just codify, hey. Trade good. You know? Open border's good.
Free trade good. And how much of it's just incentives? Like, I mean, rich people paying off politicians to have more free trade independent of party seems to be what's happened over the last ten, twenty years. It just made more sense to put workers and to send jobs to the lowest cost place to increase profits for American companies, which let's face it, although it may have followed out our manufacturing and created this weakness in the four or five areas you point out every week that we need to reinforce quite eloquently. The real issue is we did that because we wanted to make money, we wanted to have the most highly profitable companies and we did succeed, but maybe we succeeded too much and our companies benefited more than the middle class.
You got Josh Hawley out there saying, hey, we should go to $15 minimum wage federally from this.
The wrong people won. The early in the early two thousands, I think that there was a war of ideas and that there was a group of people that advocated for this reckless form of free trade and this globalist view, like every country is gonna meld into one mega monolith country organization that'll get governed out of New York by the United Nations and its sleeve organizations. And that worldview won, but it was the wrong worldview. And it didn't acknowledge that we have competing philosophies, competing priorities, competing ideals of what the future looks like. And I think that we need to go back and reset all of those things.
If you just take where we are, if you can just put the Sankey diagram back up, there's a couple things that are really worth noting that people need to fundamentally understand. I said a couple weeks ago that I thought the GDP print was gonna come in hot. I think everybody now is sort of where I am. So let me give you the next thing
that you, though, why is it hot? Do you have a thesis on why GDP spiked so much? Or potentially did? That's obviously a forecast.
I don't know the puts and takes yet. And I think when we see the print, we have I have a way of forecasting this stuff, which is a bunch of signals that my team and also many macro teams all around the world, the bond vigilantes to the hedge fund guys, they all feed it to me. And what I was noticing was that we were gonna come in, I said in the low threes. And I think if Atlanta Fed is right, I don't think they are, but I think it's gonna be in the low to mid threes. It's gonna be meaningfully greater than what people are expecting.
So let me just give you my next prediction. My next prediction are two really important things. What this Sankey diagram looks at, which is a snapshot of the balance sheet and the health of The United States in May, misses, in my opinion, two very important things that have to change. The and this is a positive for the Trump administration and The United States economy, is we are run rating 300 to $400,000,000,000 above forecast in terms of our receipts, meaning the revenues that we will take in. And you get to that number by looking at the last three months of tariffs and forecasting forward, assuming a reasonable balance here.
So back to Tucker's point, yeah, we all thought that this was like a boogeyman that you weren't allowed to touch it and that if you touch the stove, you were gonna get burned. The mathematical reality is that this is actually gonna work out much better for us than we anticipated, and it's gonna be somewhere in the range of 300 to $400,000,000,000 of extra revenue per year. That's a huge win. So why is that important? That then sets up this next cataclysmic thing that we're going to see over the next sixty days, which is what does Jerome Powell do?
If Jerome Powell stays politicized, his incentive will be to keep interest rates where they are. If Jerome Powell looks at the conditions on the ground, especially when you start to see inflation stay in the low twos and approach two point o, the real thing that he's gonna be under tremendous pressure to justify is why are you not cutting? And just to give you a sense of how important that is, if we cut by a 100 basis points, that's another $300,000,000,000. Now in that case, that's not money that we get in, but it's money we don't have to spend. So if you add these two things together, we are in the next sixty days going to have to reforecast the American balance sheet where this is, or we're actually gonna be able to positively forecast an extra 600,000,000,000.
300,000,000,000 of incremental revenue and then 300,000,000,000 of savings. Jason, if that happens, watch out. What does that mean watch out? It means that every single risk dollar is gonna run to America. Every single one.
Yum yum. Forget Japan. Forget Europe. There is no place to put your money except The United States. So I think that we have to figure out how to get Jerome Powell on the side of America versus on the side of what could happen politically.
Because I think that there's probably a version in his head that says, my gosh. If I do this, it helps Trump. And if I don't do it, it hurts Trump. Practically, that is true. But the reality is the conditions on the ground justify cutting.
Okay. So you're predicting this 300,000,000,000 two different ways in and out, 50,000,000,000 a month. It starts cutting this deficit pretty significantly. Your claim, I just wanna be clear here, is that Powell was playing politics, not working towards the dual mandate, which is very clear, controlled unemployment at the two point o rate and full employment. Your belief is that he's playing politics?
Yes?
I I believe that these decisions are political. I think that the Federal Reserve has veered away from actually controlling the money supply in the best long term interests of The United States and more towards what benefits the short term. And this ties back to how I started this. What is Powell's motivation? Somewhere in the February, Jason, we transitioned away from having the strategic twenty year conversation about what's in the best interest of America.
And instead, we started to have these unipolar globalist conversations. And the people that got into these centers of power, the IMF, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve, the central banks around the world, they all worked towards an agenda that is now being undone. I'll give you an example of where this is now being undone. Just today, the World Bank undid a rule around being able to fund nuclear energy. And you would have thought, well, hold on a The World Bank steps in to backstop all these developing countries when they're in the middle of all this nonsense, right?
And if you think about a country that's developing, what is the single biggest input to that country? Energy. And you think for the last forty years of multi trillion dollar bailouts, we never demanded abundant clean energy in the developing world? Of course not, because it was a political decision.
Okay. Tucker, do you believe the Fed is playing politics here? It's kinda hard to believe if Powell was placed by Trump and Biden. He's there was consensus there, and his mandate is to get to two point o and full employment. He's kinda trending towards that.
He's made a couple of cuts. The markets predict he is gonna make a cut. Here's poly market for September showing 80% chance of a cut. Let's take a look if that's changed since the last time. So in September, no okay.
Well, this has changed. Three, two. Alright. So here's your poly market fed decision in September. No change.
53%, 25 bips, 43, 50 bips, 3.8. So you put those two together, you're roughly at 47% chance of a cut, 53% chance of no cut. So fifty fifty coin toss. Do you think the Fed is playing politics?
Do you think the Fed motivation? Who lives in who lives in Chevy Chase is a political actor?
I mean, are you serious? What's his motivation? What's his endgame? Why does he not wanna cut rates, or or why would he
not Well, mean, I think Chamath wants
to stick it to Trump or something.
Well, of of course. I mean, he lives in a world in which there is no one who doesn't wanna stick it to Trump. I mean, I know the ZIP code that he lives in very, very well. Know the club he goes to. I know the world that no.
No. I would no. Of
course not.
And I'm I'm not mad at him. I'm just saying I I I know the world well. And, of course, no no one in that world wants to be seen helping Trump, and Trump has attacked him, by the way, in public. So I don't think it helps either.
Pretty Yeah.
I think the structure of the Fed governance is very weird. I think I'm not exactly sure what the Fed is. I've asked this question to a lot of economists, including Larry Summers. Never really gotten a straight answer. Like, how is it that this is beyond political control?
I mean, I don't know. For for democracy, shouldn't voters have some say in how this is administered, but they don't. I mean, there's no direct mechanism for voters to be heard in this, the single most important institution in the American economy. How does that which is a crypto government organization. It's, you know, administering US dollars.
I don't I just don't understand it. I think it's very the idea that you're gonna depoliticize it by making its leadership immune from the control of elected officials strikes me as the kind of, like, mid century dumbness that got us NATO and a lot of other bad institutions.
The exact opposite thing happened.
The The
exact opposite The paradox. Exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. Sacks, what would the motivation of the Fed be here? I I've asked this two times. Can't seem to get an answer.
What what's the motivation of the Fed? Just is it to take a
two shot? Jason, let me well, let me give you another data point. Okay. Now let's assume let's just scenario play.
Yes, please.
What happens if Powell rips in a 100 basis point cut right now? I'll tell you. So one part which is mathematical is the interest on the debt goes down. We save 300,000,000,000, but there's something else that happens, which is the Fed does control the front end of the curve, meaning how do people borrow money for small amounts of time from one day to about two years? If you make that cheaper, we know it's a test that's truest time.
What happens is people borrow more money. That fuels more growth. That will end up in GDP. So what actually happens if you cut rates a 100 basis points is not just the 300, but you can get this reflexive positivity in the economy. What that allows you to do is even if that causes a little bit more inflation, you're actually growing yourself out of this whole thing.
So then you ask yourself, well, hold on a If the numerical justification is there to lower rates and it has all of these other positive externalities for The United States economy. Why don't I do it? The only answer is political. I I wonder if his Let
me explain else we can tell.
Let me let me teach you. Okay. So we're at 2.6% on inflation. He wants to get it down to two. Feels like we're in striking distance.
Maybe you could maybe give us a theory here, Sacks, of what would the political motivation be? I find it hard to believe that he's trying to sink Trump for some reason as opposed to maybe just being scared of inflation popping up above that three x handle, which then triggers them to, you know, raise rates. So what's what's your theory here?
If you're a pal, it's better to take the risk of being Paul Volcker than Arthur Burns. I mean, that's that's basically what it comes down
Unpacked for people who don't aren't
Well, because what happened is Arthur Burns led inflation slip the leash in the nineteen seventies, and he's remembered as horrible fetcher. And then Paul Volcker came in and jacked up rates to like, I think close to 20%.
17%.
And caused a vicious recession in 1982. But by 1983, the economy had bounced back and inflation basically was under control. And then the rate cutting cycle started, and that rate cutting cycle went for like twenty five years. And then Reagan got reelected in 1984. So, know, you'd rather be a Volker than a Burns if you're a Fed chair.
Now you raised the question, is Powell political? Yeah. Of course he is. If you go back to, was it 2021? So the summer of Biden's presidency, we got that shock 5.1% inflation print in May of twenty twenty one, if my memory is correct.
What did the Biden administration do? They sent Janet Yellen out to say it was transitory. And Powell got on board with the whole transitory narrative.
Exactly.
And as a result of that, he did not raise rates for six months. And worse than that, they continued QE. I think they bought like 180,000,000,000 of bonds in that time period. And that's what allowed inflation to get so out of control. Now why is it that Powell did that?
Because he wanted to get reconfirmed. And, yes, he was nominated by Trump originally, but Biden renominated him. And he basically wanted the reappointment by Biden. He wanted to get confirmed. And then the month after he got confirmed, all of a sudden, he shifted gears and started raising rates again once he was safely ensconced in his office.
So he did the right thing in terms of raising rates in the face of inflation once he was free from those political incentives. But for six months, he was intensely political, and that cost The United States dearly.
Dearly. Dearly.
So now if you're a pal, you've got PTSD from that whole experience, and you're gonna on the side of not letting inflation come back. I think what, with inflation down to 2.4%, I think it is time to cut rates, but he's fearful because, again, his incentives are to be a Volker, not a Burns.
Yeah. And, you wanna read a good book. Paul Volker's Keeping At It. Great, book about has Reagan going to him and trying to get him to cut rates. So this is a reoccurring story just on
But, you if if he had done the right thing in the summer of twenty twenty one, we would never would have had that bubble at the end of twenty twenty one.
Yeah. The remember the yeah.
That that basically created a huge crash in 2022. And we could have avoided a good part of that if he had done the right thing. You know, like the Fed chair, it's not a hard job most of the time. I mean, these guys sit in their ivory tower, and then once a quarter, they come out and do this, you know, and basically testify and say a bunch of, you know, things that no one can understand. But, like, once in a while, you gotta get the decision right.
And he totally screwed it up in that one time where he had to get it right. Yep. And I would say this could be one of those moments too where I think he's being a little bit fearful.
I think that there's a simpler explanation, quite honestly. Like, if you look at Powell's history, he was he was nominated as a governor by Obama. Then Trump picked him out of the Fed to be chair, but then he was reappointed by Biden. If you look at the vice chair of the Fed, Phil Jefferson, he was appointed by Biden. If you look at Michelle Bowen, who's the vice chair for supervision, she was appointed by Trump.
Michael Barr, appointed by Biden. Lisa Cook, appointed by Biden. Adriana Kluger, appointed by Biden. Chris Waller, appointed by Trump. So I think the point is that there is a balance of power here if you look at political affiliations that tend to favor a democratic view of the political landscape.
And let's be honest. What benefits the democrats more? A thriving economy and a shrinking deficit going into the midterms or the exact opposite? The reason I'm bringing this up,
and I'm just harping on it, is he's a Republican who Democrats have opposed. So I'm I'm just trying to reconcile this grand conspiracy that he wants to sink Trump don't think it's Republican.
I think it's just a general decision. I think these guys move the dot plots, and you can see it in the movement. Okay? They're going away from reading the actual data and moving in concert with the data to giving themselves a window to let the data play itself out beyond a reasonable point. And my point is the beyond the reasonable point is the key part because when you talk to the large sophisticated pools of money Yep.
Many of them are like, what is going on here?
Alright. Currently, the big beautiful bill is in the senate, passed the house by a one vote margin. Trump said he wants the senate to pass the bill by Independence Day, July 4. Senate math, Republicans have a 53 to 47 majority as you know. They can afford three nos on their side since Dems are united against the bill.
§04Big, Beautiful Bill update: State of the bill, Senate math, how Trump should handle dissent in Congress
With 50 votes, JD Vance can break the tie, obviously. So it's easier if they can get to 51. Seven GOP senators are either no or maybe no. Three likely noes, Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, Rick Scott. Four maybe noes over the Medicaid cuts, Josh Hawley, Susan Collins, Murkowski, Jim Justice.
None of those senators have committed either way. And Republicans are now falling into three camps on BBB. Hard yes, soft yes, no until it's fixed fixed. Obviously, some friends of ours were a little upset about the BBB, and we had a pretty chaotic week the last week. It looks like the reconciliation is in.
Your take on the last week and the reactions to the BBB and obviously, Elon and Trump's relationship, Tucker Clawson.
I hate the whole thing. This is not how to legislate. I you you shouldn't have a bill this big. It's impossible to get your mind around it. No one can read it.
No one understands it. It favors professional staff over legislators, and and it totally leaves the public out. It'll be a decade before anyone understands what it means. The lobbies love it. It's just it's Washington at its ugliest.
Not this specific bill, though. It is an example of it, but just this is just not the way to do it, and it's not the way it has been done throughout American history. I mean, there's no reason to aggregate it all together like this. It becomes totally unmanageable and totally undemocratic. So, know, I mean Yeah.
Well, it's insane. It's totally insane. Do you can I mean, can can you tell me what's in it? No. I mean, you know, like, all of us know, like, 11 things we've read on Twitter or whatever, but, like, the truth is even the professional staff that wrote it couldn't if you had dinner with them over three hours, really give you a comprehensive sense of what's in it.
And remember, when it passes, and I think it likely will, you know, it's it's the law.
So by design in order get it process.
Of course, it's by design. It's just packing. Well, I mean, look. It's, you know, it's just it's just overload. You can't I mean, every single part of this this is the economy of the city that I've lived in my whole life.
Every single part of this is there by design. It's been managed. It's been thought through. It's been written artfully. By artfully, I mean deceptively.
So you can't understand its purpose or its benefit. And, literally, it is years before the ramifications become clear. And, again, this is why we have committees. You know? A committee masters a subject and then theoretically produces legislation that bears on that subject with, you know, knowledge and depth and hopefully wisdom.
The congress is not designed to pass legislation in this way, and we've evolved to this. And I guess I would encourage the White House to try and blow that up. I think it'd be better for everybody if, you know, legislation was passed piecemeal as it always has been. I think part of the problem is the leadership in the congress, and nobody wants to say it, is just embarrassing. It's totally embarrassing.
And I would say the conference isn't united either. I mean, this is part of the problem with Trump's agenda. It's the beauty of Trump's agenda in my opinion, but it's, you know, it's so different from what your average 65 year old Republican was raised believing. It's so different from what Fox News is telling you. It's the mirror image of what the Wall Street Journal editorial page is telling you that there are just not that many members of the house or the senate who are truly on board with Trump's message even now.
And, of course, they kowtow to the man, but when it really comes down to it, they hate his stated agenda. And And that's why
agenda unpack. What do they hate most?
What do they hate most is not even a close call. They hate his foreign policy views. They hate his foreign policy views. Because, look, out of 535 members of the house and senate, I would say 510 have given up on improving The United States through their jobs. Like, they they know they can't.
It's, like, intractable. This is their view. It's complex. It's boring. It's difficult, and it's super hard to solve, and the numbers in the house and senate make it practically impossible to move the ball on whatever issue they care about or were elected on.
And so they take all of that energy, and they apply it to making the rest of the world better, fighting for democracy. Or, you know, the the the the grander the description, the the less accountability there is. You know? If we're just, like, fighting for Churchill against Hitler, like, it's always a win because we don't know any of the details.
So it's a simpler yeah. It's a simpler cause for them to take on than looking at how to Exactly right. And what
would you like to see
Trump do, Tucker? What would Tucker Carlson advise if you were in the White House, which many people have requested that you do that? If you were at the right hand of the father, what would you tell him to do?
Understand the politician brain, which is reptilian by its nature. It responds only to pain. Period. Only to pain. So if you want a politician to do your bidding, it's a super simple conversation.
Do what I ask or I will make sure you lose your job. And by the way, Trump has the power to do that.
Which is what Elon said on Twitter. Just put it out there.
No. It's true. And I do think if there's, you know, number of criticisms of any living person, but one I would level at Trump is he is he's nice. Like, he likes to get along with people. He actually doesn't like to fight in person.
That is true. He likes to get along with people. No one will believe that, but I've seen it a lot. I believe that. I think it's tough for him to say it's easy for him to, you know, go after a reptile like Mitch McConnell, like, at a press conference.
He'll make fun of cocaine Mitch or whatever. But to really go to McConnell and say, yeah. Listen, son. You know, this is gonna hurt in in the following six ways unless you obey, you little bitch, which is really what he ought to be saying. No.
I mean it. I absolutely mean it. And be saying that to all of these guys. Tom Cotton, are you joking? How does Tom Cotton have a say in anything?
You know? And, oh, I'm you know, you're that chairman of the intel committee. I'm so impressed. Listen, Tom Cotton. You represent a state that likes me a lot more than you.
So if I find you undermining me yet again, and Tom Cotton spends an awful lot of time undermining Trump, like Tom Cotton hates Trump actually, of course. But if I find you doing that, I'm gonna take your senate seat away, and that's gonna be really easy for me to do. And I really wish he would do that. It would only take one cycle to clear out you know, to really get some discipline. Like the French in Algeria, you know, for the encouragement of the others.
The guy goes out of the helicopter, and then the guy is super talkative. If you did that in the United States Senate, you would have a much more coherent party, I think. Okay. In about a cycle.
A little more leadership, a little more stick than Carrot. Who wants to go next to Monter Sack? A lot more stick. Okay. Here we go.
Tucker says more stick. Sachs, what you're feeling?
Obviously talking about the big beautiful bill. What are we talking about?
Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, we're talking about it all. Everybody wants to hear, you know, about our takes on the kerfuffle between Elon and, Trump, obviously, in relation to BBB. So let's just tackle it. I'll me just tackle pass on it.
Yeah. Let's we gotta put it out here before you we're an hour into the episode. Let's just talk about it.
Let me speak to BBB for a So so listen. If the question is whether I can defend a system that produces $2,000,000,000,000 deficits every year, no. I I I can't. I can't even defend the senate rules that require you to get 60 votes for some things and 50 votes for other things. I mean, it all just seems kind of random when you're an outsider.
But those are the rules, is they've got these crazy bird rules. And once a year, you get to do this reconciliation bill where it only takes 50 votes instead of 60 votes to pass something, which means you can actually get something done without the Democrats, which is a rare opportunity. And, you know, you just have to basically come up with, a nexus to a budgetary issue. And so that's what the BBB has done. And as a result of that conduit, I guess you could say, that it's a way for the president to ratify many of his most important campaign promises from the twenty twenty four election.
And so you've got the tax cut extension in here. You've got full funding of of border security for four years. You've got no tax on tips. You've got drill baby drill. You've got the missile defense shield.
So these are campaign promises that are important to the president. It's kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity to pass these things. I think that Republicans will be committing political suicide if they don't. I mean, the polling on this, I'll give you some numbers. So of all, the bill itself is popular despite all the bashing of it.
I think that
Popular with who?
Well, this is a national poll by SIGNAL, which actually has a bias in favor of Democrats by plus 2.1.
This is with the with the public who who haven't
read it?
I know. Believe it or not. So What
does that even mean?
Is that support for a big beautiful bill plus six, increased funding for border security plus 35, that'll probably be even more now that what's going on in LA, work requirements for Medicaid and SNAP plus 38. So despite the Democrats carping on that point, people really like the idea of work requirements. And then permanently extending the twenty seventeen tax cuts support plus 19. So these are very popular planks of the president's agenda. It's the only chance they're gonna have to pass this.
Look, you know, I said this three weeks ago on the pod, last few episodes, that don't support the bill because it's perfect. I support it just pragmatically because it's better than the status quo. And my view is that we should take this now. We should get this done and then come back for more later. And there should be a big fight over the budget at some point in the future, but this is not the right time to do it.
We don't have the votes. We're not organized, and it would compromise these other promises the president's made. And the time to really have that battle is at the beginning of the new fiscal year, which is October 1. So we, at some point, do need to have a big fight over the budget. There does need to be resistance to the deficit.
We can't continue in this current state forever, but I don't think that's the hill to die on right now.
Shamath, your thoughts on BBB and the kerfuffle if you want to.
Here's what I'll say. I was sad at the end of last week. One is my friend and the other is my president, and it seemed like a really profound friendship. And so I was bummed. Here's what I'll say this week, though, on much more positive note.
I saw Elon on Tuesday, and I got to spend a couple hours with him at Tesla. He let me audit a couple of meetings with him, actually.
It's always fun. Yeah.
Yeah. One was Dojo, and then right after that was the Optimus team. One thing I'll say is, I've said this before, but he attracts these incredible men and women to work for him. They are inspiring. Just sitting in a meeting and hearing it, what they're doing was amazing.
And then to see Elon in action at scale in that way is like watching a maestro paint a masterpiece. It's it's really impressive. And then separately, I saw president Trump doing a couple of pressers, and he was in his zone of excellence. So it seems like they're gonna find some common ground here. They are better together.
And I'll just say, Elon, amazing. Tesla, incredible. And I would not be sleeping on this company is what I would say. Jason, what do you think?
So we're not the main characters in this story, obviously. And when I saw what happened last week, obviously, this is one of my best friends for many decades. And given the popularity of this podcast, my decision was I don't want to insert myself into this, have my quotes or my feelings about Trump, about the bill get weaponized. And that's typically what happens when you have a friend who's the number one story in the world. And now I'm not friends with Trump, but he is my president as well by default.
What benefit does it have to me to then speak about it and then have everybody weaponize it? So I know this is hard for the audience to reconcile, but sometimes it's better for me to just step back. That's why you don't see me commenting on Tesla or SpaceX publicly all the time because people weaponize what I say against my friend. And I just don't like that. And, you know, it it's happened in books.
It's happens in news stories. So when Elon is doing something and it's this intense, I like to just step back and maybe take a beat. That was my decision. That's why I didn't wanna do a pod last week. Everybody else can speak for themselves.
That's where I'm at. How do I feel about it? I think Trump is making a mistake with BBB. I think he should push back on it harder. I said that in a previous episode.
And I think Elon's a 100% correct about that. I also think if either of these parties can't control spending, there needs to be like the what was it? The Norquist you guys would know more about this, but Norquist pledge, Tucker, where you agree to not increase taxes. I think we need something like that where a reasonable party says, We should balance the budget. We have to control the deficit.
There should be some pledge like that, that we force our elected officials on both sides of the aisle to take. And I'm gonna start pursuing that myself personally. You can go to jointheresponsibleparty.com. And I'm just gonna start an email newsletter and just talk about it. I think there needs to be a pledge that these politicians take to balance the budget and cut the deficit over some reasonable amount of time.
But I wish them both the best. And I'm glad that the two of them have reconciled because that's good for the country. We can't have these two giants at war, the greatest innovator in our country, and a president who's got an agenda which I agree with two thirds of. I may not agree with how he's doing immigration on the margins, but I agree with everything else. So I'm just rooting for the both of them because it's so important that for America that they get along.
Great. So in summary, you're not centering yourself, but you have a website, www.ihaveanopinion..com.
It accepts Apple Pay. I'm not telling you to go to founder.university. It's $1 a month. But if you subscribe for a year, it's $6.
Yeah. You actually threw in a plug.
I have an issue. I'm throwing a plug in.
That was insane.
I I don't care. Listen. Also, sign up join jointheresponsibleparty.com. I'm gonna start my over my own your quest pledge, but also join Saks. It's insane.
You're insane. I'd also like to plug Chamot's Substack. It's a thousand dollars a year to get his reports, and you can, of course, buy David Sacks at tequilaallin.com/tequila.
I've never plugged Chuck, what plugs do you have? I've never plugged.
None. No plugs
from Tucker Tucker.
You got wait. What what's in
the merch store, Tucker? You gotta have something in the merch store.
Alp, America's greatest nicotine pouch. That's all I got.
Here we go. Plugs central. Fantastic. Alright. Breaking news here.
Foreign policy looks like a major escalation with Iran could be happening. Maybe. On Wednesday, it was reported some US personnel were being evacuated out of the Middle East. Partial evacuation of the Iraqi embassy. Okay.
§05War with Iran?
Oil prices move 4% on the news. Later reported that Israel is prepared to launch an operation into Iran. US thinks Iran could retaliate on spaces in Iraq, which explains the evacuations. Trump was asked about the evacuation, said the following, quote, they are being moved out because it could be a dangerous place. We'll see what happens.
The classic Trump will see what happens. And then he added, they can't have a nuclear weapon. Very simple. Okay. Polymarket odds are spiking on Israel action against Iran 50%.
Oh, boy. Tucker, can the West allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon, or is this more a WMD situation that we referenced at the start of the program? If Tucker Carlson was in the White House, which many of your fans wish you were, what would your advice be here?
Is it up to us? Do we have the power? Nobody wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon. I don't think the Iranians want a nuclear weapon right now, but judging by their actions. But could we prevent it is the question.
And if so, how exactly given that we just lost to Russia and the Houthis? I'm skeptical, but I'm amazed by how close we are to a military action against Iran. It's no defense of Iran. Of course, I'm not a Shiite for the record, but I think it comes with perils that people are not considering or willfully ignoring. And the main one is Iran is not Iraq or it's not Libya.
It's not isolated. It's a it's a central player in BRICS. 90 of of Iran's oil exports go to China. It just signed in a defense agreement with Russia in January. So it's not you know what I mean?
It has backup. It has big allies that represent the majority of the world's population and the majority of world's economy and land mass. So the potential for this to become something much, much bigger and unmanageable is is real. It's there. Their conventional weapons are fearsome and could do great damage to our allies, to Israel, and and to American assets in that area and also to energy production in countries that we we rely on.
So I think the downsides are are really kind of overwhelming. I think a protracted, meaning anything over a day or two, engagement with Iran would derail the Trump agenda and the presidency, and I think it could really sink this administration. So I pray this this doesn't happen. Think, By the way, I think the timetable is distorted. There is absolutely no reason to the president has said repeatedly, we will do everything we can to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
Think it's a completely reasonable goal. Nobody wants that. I certainly don't want that. And the Israelis don't want it, and the Gulf States don't want it. Nobody wants that.
But it doesn't mean that it has to happen on Friday, actually. And there are other forces exerting pressure on the administration to get this done quickly even before Steve Witkoff, god bless him, meets with his counterparts in Oman in a few days from now. So it's like, why in the world would you preempt a scheduled negotiation with airstrikes? Which Do you think
The US is driving this or is it is driving this, and we're just, you know, having information.
It's a it's a combination of both. And by the way, Israel is a country with 9,000,000 people in it. I mean, it's it's the Israeli government, but there are also elements of the US government. The head of CENTCOM, you know, is in favor of this. There are a number of Republican senators who are in favor of this who are lying.
For example, here's one, I think, interesting point that's a statement of fact. There's no American intelligence, this is a statement of fact, that suggests Iran is in the process of assembling a nuclear weapon or within months of doing so. There's none. And yet Tom Cotton of Arkansas, the chairman of the intel senate intel committee, is out there saying, you know, we know that they're doing this. Well, actually, you don't know that.
That's not true. Whether he believes it or not, I can't, you know, I can't say, but that's that's a lie. Our intel does not say that. Period.
So why lying because industrial, military industrial complex Yeah. I mean, I
think they're they're a whole it's not it's not as simple as, oh, BD wants it. I mean, I think this is a very complicated coalition of aligned interests. But whatever their motives, I don't even need to know their motives. This is not a timetable that we need to adhere to. It's a completely artificial timetable.
The president has done his best to resolve this diplomatically. That's clearly his stated preference. He said it a million times, and he's being bum rushed into making a very snap decision that could have bigger consequences than we're thinking through. So I'm very concerned about it.
Shmoth, what's your thoughts here? Can Iran have a nuclear weapon, and should The United States participate in, if they do have, one imminently, which is a big debate, obviously, Should we be involved in, stopping them, or should we be doing negotiations, soft power,
etcetera? I think this is where I'm glad that it's president Trump in the seat. I think he's shown a consistent desire to off ramp all of these conflicts. And if he and Whitkoff can hopefully hold the line with Beebe and everybody else, I think we're way, way, way better off. But you see this.
Like, every time we're on the verge of victory, somebody in the military industrial complex invents some, you know, escalation of something so that we can just go to war. It's the the answer always seems to be let's go to war or let's support a war or let's enable a war. And the bulwark to that has been the president. If we go to war, Tucker's right, this totally screws everything up. I mean, you could see oil double.
Double. What what happens to the economy of the world, of world GDP, of everything, of inflation if you have oil at a $100 a barrel, a $112 a barrel? It's not good. So you have to wonder, like, why would people want this escalation? Who wants this escalation?
And you see that it's deeply beneficial for America to avoid anything calamitous happening here. So I hope we find an off ramp, and I hope that the president gets his way.
One thing people should know about Iran is that there is a massive demographic switch happening. Here, you can see a chart.
Is this is this from
your paid newsletter site? This is yeah. This is from shamoff.subsect.com. Thousand dollars a year. $700 a month.
You get to have lunch with him twice a year.
Is this is this from chooseyourresponsibleparty.org? What is it called?
No. This is from founder.university. Application coming in for around the world. Here we go. Run.
Take a take your nicotine patch and come to Founder University. Iran 2020, if you look at the number of millennials, Gen Xers, this is not a boomer country, and they're going to have a revolution when all those 30 year olds you see there, that big fat middle, 30 and 40 year olds who are on VPNs right now and reading and watching what's happening in the West. You do not need to interfere with this country. You just need to let those 30 year olds become 40 and 50 year olds and take over the country. We need to negotiate heavily.
The idea of going in there and creating a war with Iran is exactly probably what those older people want. Demographics are destiny. And this there's an amazing actual Anthony Bourdain episode from Iran, and it was he said it was his favorite episode. Rest in peace, Anthony Bourdain. But the demographics here are just gonna drive this change.
Ability as a moderator to cover so much ground.
Thank you. Wow. Compliment. Alright. This is a hard turn to make, Tucker, but this week's All In podcast is brought to you by the Trump card.
Everybody go get a Trump card and use the promo code promo code JCAL. And I, just full disclosure, get paid $500,000 every time you buy a Trump card. But the Chartercard website is up. Use the promo code j cal, 10% off. Tucker, 12% off, and Sassy Pooh for 15% off.
You know, 30,000 people have signed up. That's $75,000,000,000 there if you convert them all.
Let's go. I mean, I I I'm an idiot because I proposed this years ago for $500,000. And you know what the genius of Trump is?
You are
He made a goal and added a zero.
You have you have consistently proven to your friends that you mispriced by an order of magnitude. Absolutely. Two.
Now I add a zero every time. Alright. Listen. Thank you, Tucker, for coming on. What's the website to get our nicotine Alps.
Alps. Alps what? I'm at the website. Alps.com.
Alppouch.com.
Alright. Tucker, you gotta get us in on this. We need alppouch.com/ all in. We need an all in branded one. Okay?
With the flavor of what's the flavor, Chamath, we should do here? What's the flavor of Money. Can we do a burgundy? Money. Money.
That's why I'm in. But how do we get how do we how do we get promo ing this? We need to get some we need to get in on this out. Let's say
like a it should taste like a 2,001 missetto.
You do that? Can you get the team on a missetto flavored brush?
It's a I'm I'm actually Tucker a bottle.
I am sending this in right now. I'm we're gonna start with burrata flavored and then go from there.
I would if you can
make a koolette steak, for me, a
rare koolette steak would be great as a flavor, a Wagyu. For Saxx, what do you got for a flavor here?
Just something minty, maybe.
A little minty.
Okay. Minty fresh. Because you wanna get the breath going. This is dual purpose.
Why chew gum when you can just go right to a pouch?
There there it goes. Clip that. I I
just texted I texted the factory, and I said we need specially branded ALP for All In.
Let's go. You know
what I'm doing? Not.
BD mode. In BD mode. We're not kidding either. We're in BD mode here at allin. Good.
Allin.com. Come to the summit. Tucker, why don't you come to the summit in September? What are you doing?
Wanna come? Done. It'd be fun
to hang
in there. It's not it's not the end is, grouse season, so I can't I'm not allowed to leave during grouse season because I've got dogs.
But
Yeah. No.
Is it before the September?
September 8 and July, I think it is. So
Oh, yeah. Oh, LA.
Browns. Browns flavored
pouch? Those that's a little gay it's a little gamey for a nicotine pouch, but I'll think about Yeah.
I think I'll take it under advise what you gave me. Alright, everybody. We missed you, sultan of science. We'll break your chops, but we wish you were here. David Sachs, the czar.
Miss you, buddy. See you in LA, hopefully, at the all in kilo lunch later this month. Jamal Palihopatia, great to see you. Good luck with your health. And for my guy, Tucker Carlson, alppouch.com/allin.
Get your promo codes going. This is the number one podcast in the world after the Tucker Carlson show.
My last shout out, I would like to thank Robinhood for sending me their gold
card.
You finally?
Yeah. Saxon and I have had it for a hundred days.
I shat on American Express because I think they're just trash. And then they they reached out to me, and it was so ridiculous.
For the black card?
No. They they didn't even offer me the black card. They said, here's a chance for you to apply for the black card. And I was like, this is this just proves
So insulting. So insulting.
They have no idea who anybody is.
They're nagging you. They're nagging I mean, literally, this is the number one podcast in the world.
Bro, I mean, I
I I disagree with the president.
If any of the four of us ran a credit card company and we decided that we were gonna have a $10,000 a year credit card for big spenders, what you would do is actually run a query to find who are the biggest spenders that you already have and upgrade them so that they're paying
you 10,000 a Who who wants to do the all in card with us? Email Jason@allin.com. BD lines are open. We're gonna monetize this brand. Alright, everybody.
Thanks again, Tucker. You're awesome. We appreciate you guys.
You bet.
Thank you. You're the greatest. See you next time. Bye bye. Love you, besties.
Bye bye. Love you, Saxx.
Love you, Saxx.
I gotcha.
Appetizer will meet me
at once. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.
Your feet.
Feet. What? Where did you get merch? I'm doing all in.