The Great Tariff Debate with David Sacks, Larry Summers, and Ezra Klein

looking forward to our thing in a few weeks yeah i don't know if I'll end up being there but I'm hoping to i'm hoping to it's been What do you guys You guys have like a liberal cuddle party or what are you doing yeah yeah larry Larry takes a bunch of MDMA and we all sort of go into the the corner and hang out together god that sounds incredible liberalism is wonderful man you should come try it that's not liberalism it's called something else sorry Nikki is our cryptozar joining us or no he's uh I'm talking to now it looks like he is oh zing this is going to be great this will be like ratings bonanza all right we do have David Saxs here david make sure you

have a quick time on look at Sax looking so presidential he looks thin doesn't he oh he looks fabulous all right here we go three two one let your winners [Music] we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it all right everybody welcome back to the number one podcast in the world i'm your host Jason Calcanis with my besties Chim Polyha Patia our chairman dictator and live from well the administration Mr david Saxs our ZAR for AI and crypto and amazingly two fantastic guests this week we have uh New York Times writer and host of the Ezra Klein podcast he's got

a new book with Derek Thompson Abundance and he co-founded Vox in 2014 and he's our guest here today before Trump ships him to El Salvador please welcome Ezra Klein how are you sir glad to be here in my final hours of freedom okay great good to be here sorry Saxs uh and uh with us of course Larry Summers economist former Treasury Secretary under Clinton former director of the National Economic Council under Obama and the president of Harvard from 2001 to 2006 thanks for coming Larry good to be with you okay we have a lot to get to here so we uh might as well talk about the big news of tariffs it's day 80 of the Trump presidency and a second

presidency his second term and Trump tweeted that he paused tariffs for everyone but China on Wednesday basically let me just ceue up the details Larry and then we'll get your take on all of this just one week after Liberation Day Trump announced on Truth Social that in effect he was raising tariffs against China 125% based on their lack of respect quote unquote instead of negotiating and that he was pausing reciprocal tariffs on all other countries for 90 days and markets ripped 10% after he posted this and today Thursday when we tape there's been a massive selloff on Wall Street so the roller coaster ride continues what it will be on Friday when

you consume this podcast is anyone's guess s&p is down 5% today for context the S&P was at 5700 pre-liberation day so about a 9% drop after these wild swings and uh in fact this has been historic volatility here are the top selloffs in history as you can see three of them came during Black Monday in 1987 three of them came during the financial crisis three of them came during COVID and uh coming in 11th is Trump's tariffs also in the gainers uh you have these big rebounds wednesday's 9.5% recovery was number three the administration says this was all part of a master plan we'll hear more about that later and that they

laid a trap for China they lit a trap bessent has been the spokesperson during this retreat or whatever we're going to call the uh pause and quote "This was driven by the president's strategy." He and I had a long talk on Sunday and this was his strategy all along i don't think we need to play the clip uh that's the gist of it the White House account then tweeted in all caps "My favorite way to tweet do not retaliate and you will be rewarded." Wall Street Journal on the other side posted a story about why Trump blinked they chronicled the decision as uh being affected by Jaime Diamond who went on Fox to express fears of recession while

saying the tariffs were valid and that he knew that Trump and cabinet would be watching him on Fox other banking executives who felt they didn't have a lot of influence in this administration according to the Wall Street Journal started lobbying Republican lawmakers that the Trump tariff plan would tank the economy the White House chief of staff Susie Wild started receiving calls from executives and lobbyists expressing concerns and uh the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump was influenced heavily by Bessant they were flooded with worried calls from Wall Street and that the president was uh lobbyed to find an off-ramp trump ultimately relied on his instincts

according to the administration larry is this 4D chess or is this something else what are your thoughts this is uh dangerous work with a sledgehammer on a pretty sensitive machine which is the global economy that's having really serious uh consequences first it's important to understand that there's more tariffs that are around than you described even after the big backoff there's a 10% across the board tariff a range of structural tariffs like on steel and automobiles and a range of new tariff threats like on uh pharmaceuticals here's a kind of market-based estimate of what the damage

that the market thinks this is all doing to the US economy is market's down let's take today's number 9% if that's right that would be about $4 trillion of course the at $4 trillion since Liberation Day of course markets were down coming into Liberation Day because of some anticipation of these policies so let's be conservative and say these policies have taken $6 trillion off the stock market now the stock market only measures the adverse impact on corporate profits not the adverse impact on workers not the adverse impact on consumers so you need to add to that uh stock market number uh

one way of thinking about adding to it would be to say that corporate profits were 10% of the economy so you could argue for multiplying by a factor of 10 but maybe that's being too exaggerating or too bold so let's multiply by a factor of uh five and what you get is a loss in the $30 trillion range as the present value as estimated by markets of what's being done now I know the Trump administration sometimes likes to say it's working for Main Street not Wall Street i noticed that they were pretty excited about the stock market rally yesterday in a way that wouldn't really go with uh not caring about uh markets so I think what markets are seeing what's is what's true which is three

things this is an inflation shock cuz you're adding to prices ceo of Amazon got it right the Secretary of the Treasury got it wrong increases in tariffs of this magnitude the overwhelming part of them will be passed on to consumers so you've got an inflation shock when you raise the prices of people and their income at least in the short run is the same they're poorer and that means they can afford less stuff and that pushes the economy down and so you've got higher inflation and you've got um more uh less demand and therefore more unemployment all of that's bad for the economy and companies and the last thing which I think is profoundly important is

we are trading like an emerging market country right now for serious countries for the United States the pattern is that when the world gets riskier the bonds go down in yield and the currency goes up in value because people come for the safe haven when you're a country like Argentina then the assets all move together falling stock prices go with higher bond yields go with a weakening currency and so because of our erratic behavior we have changed the zeitgeist surrounding America from the traditional zeitgeist surrounding America to the kind of zeitgeist that surrounded Juan Peron's

Argentina and that goes with all the other things that are happening the more protectionism denying the independence of the central bank fiscal irresponsibility breakdown of traditional boundaries between government and business substantial uh cronyism as a strategy authoritarian tendencies towards uh the opposition lack of total respect for uh the judiciary larry keep going Larry what we're seeing is a is a pattern of America being governed on the kind of Juan Peron Argentina model and that sometimes produces some benefits for some people in the short run that sometimes generates popularity uh for it peron kept coming back in

Argentina but ultimately it's extremely costly for our society uh you've you've heard uh Larry's uh take on all of this larry's giving it about a a B+ on the Harvard great scale which might be inflated i'm not sure sachs obviously in the administration you cover two things AI and of course crypto and you're a member of the pod so let's get your take on what happened this week with these tariffs even the most ardent supporters of Trump have felt this is chaotic not well executed not communicated well what's your take Saxs on how this was executed and could this have been done better well I think what happened if you go back to Liberation Day was only 8 days ago it

was April 2nd if I had told you on April 1st that Donald Trump would find a way to get the entire world to eagerly embrace a 10% tariff on the American market and not only would they not complain but they'd actually be relieved that it was only 10% you would have said that would be an April Fool's joke if I had told you eight days ago or nine days ago that Trump would find a way to accelerate the United States is decoupling from China which is something he's long wanted to do and that Wall Street would basically breathe a sigh of relief over that you would have said that there's no way that could happen if I had told you eight or nine days ago

that President Trump figured out a way to assert a presidential power in a way that gives America extraordinary leverage over virtually every country in the world you would have said "Well I don't believe it i don't you know what what is that power and he proceeded to do that and now basically every country in the world except for for China is coming to Washington seeking to negotiate a new trade deal for the United States on better terms for the US if you told me any of that few days ago I would have believed you and I would have thought the consequences would be a substantially deteriorated American economy and a substantially less secure i don't think

we know that United States i don't think we know that it's not any surprise there's nothing surprising about the fact that the United States has the power to extort Loto it's just and that's that's the country that was singled out in the Trump formula for the highest level of protection there is no surprise in uh that there is no surprise that capacity to isolate itself to Washington will be very very Japan's coming to Washington south Korea is coming to Washington everybody's going to try to cut everyone's going to come to Washington it never would have occurred to anyone with experience in government that the United States would

have any difficulty getting any major country to come send a representative to the United States to have a discussion and a negotiation with a United States on a matter that was of concern to the United States they never could possibly have commish any Let me let Sax reply to that and then Ezra I'm going to bring you in saxs go ahead you reply then why didn't they Larry do you think that all these countries were going to renegotiate their trade deals with the US if President Trump asked nicely if he said pretty please renegotiate our trade deals so you take down your trade barriers they would have done it if he had said pretty please with a cherry on

top that's not the way these things work he had to establish the leverage in the negotiation first and the fact of the matter is he's the first president in decades who's been willing to do that you don't get anywhere by just asking nicely and I think that what President Trump did over the last eight days is a establish the leverage and b get all these countries to now want to negotiate a new trade deal with the United States if this is such a terrific thing why do markets think it's so terrible for the American economy maybe there maybe the market's just completely wrong but at least another possibility is the question that the market's

judging this that the market I mean job of markets is to look forward it's to look past the immediate it's to see what the long run consequence are going to be and markets are making a pretty devastatingly negative judgment not true not true not true that feels emotional and nice but it's just not accurate so let's just establish a couple facts about quote unquote the markets number one there are two markets and they behave totally differently and sometimes inversely to each other there's the stock market and there's the bond market with respect to the stock market what they are debating and you're right Larry is what is the effective long-term rate

of return a dollar needs to generate in order to pay me back that dollar that is what the fundamental stock market does and what we've seen for many years with trade imbalances trade deficits and close to zero interest rates of which more of that happened under Democrats and Republicans we have allowed the stock market to inflate past historical averages what we've actually seen happen in the last week is what most people would call mean reversion the stock market is still way above where it was last year two years ago three years ago what has happened is that the forward multiples have compressed so that's

number one that's a fact you can debate whether that's bad or good and I'm willing to debate that with you okay now let's go to bonds and then with respect to bonds what we are seeing now is there are two very complicated issues and we don't know what the unknown known is and let me be very specific in the last two days we saw one part of the bond market totally get out of whack and what we know is that the yields changed materially in a very acute way which is atypical of how the bond market typically digests a philosophical change in approach to policy normally when you see an acute reaction in the bond market the

underlying reason tends to be some financial calamity in a participant what we heard in the last 24 hours is a lot of this move may have been attributed to an enormous levered bet on US treasuries by a Japanese hedge fund it will take three and four and five and 6 weeks for us to really know separately what we do know though where the structural complexity of the market and this is where Larry I agree with you is acute and important to observe is in the credit markets for private companies and that is where you have to pay a lot of attention okay Larry let me let you respond to Chimath's response to you and then Ezra I promise you're going to come

in next larry go ahead martha as you well know the vast majority of financial thinking emphasizes changes in the earnings prospects of companies associated with the strength of the economy as a major source of stock market fluctuations and if you look at dividend strips if you look at what's happening to analyst revisions that's got a lot to do negative prospects for the economy has a lot to do with why the economy why the stock market has turned downwards the foreign exchange market's very big and it's a big referendum on whether people have confidence in uh the United States and somehow tariffs reduce imports are supposed to reduce dollar selling and

make the currency go up and not only is the currency not going up it's going down substantially so we're seeing a pattern maybe it's all just due to one Japanese hedge fund but maybe we're seeing a pattern that really looks that looks pretty much like uh the Argentine pattern ezra you uh are hearing this debate i think there's no debate that this was done in a very extreme fashion at a minimum do you wonder if this could have been done in a more gradual or thoughtful way what's your take on the execution here by the administration of these tariffs and their response to the markets i I can't say I wonder if it could have been done in a more gradual

thoughtful way it could have uh I I defer to Larry on the markets i'm more of a a connoisseur of arguments and something I've been thinking about over the past very long 8 days is covering the 2024 election and covering Donald Trump's tariff promises and it was a thing that liberals like me were doing where we would do these shows and say Donald Trump is promising a 10% to 20% global tariff and then 65% tariff on China and if he does that it'll have this set of effects higher prices it'll create financial uncertainty etc and what I would be told like the the counterargument was oh you libs you always take him literally when you should be taking him seriously had

became Swami on my show he said he's not going to do that that's just a negotiating ploy and this was the the common line from Trump allies on Wall Street and then I watched as he began doing not just that but layering uh a series of then bilateral tariffs on top of that plan the markets began freaking out while they were freaking out a bunch of his defenders said "No no no actually these tariffs which we told you were never going to happen are actually a great idea we need to reset the entire global financial system and you can't uh shift those tectonic plates without creating a few earthquakes then the moment the tariffs paused with the 90-day pause on the uh tariffs on top of

the 10% and the China tariff then I heard "Nope that pause is genius haven't you read the art of the deal?" And what I would observe from this is it usually when an idea is good you don't need people jumping back and forth on it so often going between these tariffs are a bad idea but they're a smart negotiating ploy to these tariffs plus are an actually great idea and you should all calm down as Trump said you should all be cool back to know these tariffs are a great idea i I think something I'd love to hear from David uh it's very hard to break the the pattern being a podcast host i would like to hear what the measure of success in two years is right we can sit here and

speculate about the effect of these and I'm much more on on Larry's side than what I'm hearing from from Chimath and David but if what are your measures what in 2 years good question if manufacturing you know employment or whatever is below X will you be unhappy if GDP is what what is a a sort of uh objective yard stick where we could come back in 700 days and say did this work out or was this a bad idea go ahead i would say probably the biggest thing would be whether the US can re-industrialize to some extent so that we're not completely dependent for our supply chains on on a potentially hostile adversary and what is the measure of that is it the the quantity

of manufacturing we're making is it the share of manufacturing i think that's a hard thing to understand you know during co we learned point I am saying it concisely during co we discovered that we were horribly dependent on a supply chain from China for some of our most essential products for pharmaceuticals for other medical gear that we needed during co Sure so what would be if you were to put a metric on just as one example but we've also learned that our entire supply chain for all sorts of industrial products now is dependent on China and other countries so let's be more precise we have 4% unemployment at the record low of our

lifetimes and do you think Americans want to work in these factories and if so which factories obviously pharmaceuticals that's a dependency obviously building ships and weapons that's a dependency i think we can all agree on that and that might be hundreds low hundreds of thousands of jobs do you believe we should be making Nike sneakers here do you believe we should be making jeans here again what what would be the objective measure of success like a certain number of jobs certain number of factories certain types of factories because the other piece that I don't understand and maybe you can inform me here Saxs is number

one who's going to do this work if we're uh going to be deporting millions of people and we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetimes and we have automation coming to these factories and Americans don't want to take these jobs historically how is this all going to work it seems a bit farcable to me that we're going to bring these things back i don't think the the millions of Americans who lost their jobs in the heartland because we let China into the WTO which is something that Larry I think supported and championed talking about decades though right that's what started this whole thing yeah okay okay I don't think those millions of people want to lose their

jobs you're talking nonsense what are you talking about respectfully David you are Treasury secretary when we walk when we walk China into the WTO and you're just still defending it I was just watching an interview hold David Larry you just did an interview with Neil Ferguson answer why am I the only one who gets to talk for two seconds before I get interrupted you guys give 5 to 10 minutes finish your thoughts finish your thoughts i got to speak for two seconds then you interrupt me you speak for five or 10 minutes go right ahead larry I just saw you do an interview with Neil Ferguson where he asked you was it a

good idea to bring China into the WTO was it a good idea to give them permanent normal trade relations status basically MFN which is something that Bill Clinton did in 2000 and I admit it was bipartisan george W bush continued it was and you were defending this as a good idea for the country what was the result of that over the past 25 years millions of industrial jobs were lost or export to China millions of factories shut down the United States has a diminished and hollowed out industrial base we certainly can't make the products of the future like drones or semiconductors jason just to answer your question yeah obviously some industries

are more strategic than others do I personally care about sneakers or textiles no I personally don't do I care about semiconductors absolutely do I care about circuit boards do I care about drones do I care about robots do I care about EVs and cars absolutely okay those industries we are no longer in a position we are no longer in a position as a country to make those products because we exported our entire supply chain and manufacturing base to China i have three so how is that a good idea Larry okay I have three questions and then Ezra I'll go back to you and Shim go ahead i have three questions for you one can you name a single trade barrier that was reduced by the United States

associated with China accession a single restriction that existed uh in the United States that had not been in place for 5 years before that we removed during China's WTO accession can you name one i don't think we should have done any of it Larry we threw open our markets to Chinese goods what restriction your your thesis is that we threw open the market and therefore we exposed ourselves to all of this China thing and question I'm asking you is can you name any restriction on Chinese exports to the United States that was in effect in 1999 and was removed by our WTO accession in 2000 can you name any such restriction just name this was a policy

that built up over time and was basically made permanent hold on it was made permanent when we walked China to the WTO and gave them MFN status sorry i'm sorry David i'll ask the question one more time we had given them MFN status 15 years before no one they had MFN status they had it for 15 years there was not a single reduction in a barrier to Chinese trade so the way in which you're describing it is just bears no resemblance to what it was bring him into the WTO what was the point of bringing him into the WTO bringing them into the WTO was to use the leverage that we had to win a whole variety of concessions that enabled us to um Larry

more to China reciprocity this is an extraordinary history here let's move forward history you're denying totally denying history all right listen this is a bad deal hold on a second i want to Let's go back to this just a minute i just want to know the the whole argument you are making is about increased exports to the United States that had bad consequences and so I'm just going to keep asking you what barrier that previously existed okay I'll name them i'll I'll name them i'll name them go ahead let me get you number one prior to the WTO China imposed a bunch of export duties and taxes on a whole bunch of goods to control outflow okay that prioritized domestic supply as part of

coming into the WTO China said "Hey hold on we'll limit these export duties to only a specific set of products and then they cap those duties at agreed rates." Number two they eliminated export quotas they you historically had export quotas to manage the volume of goods under that WTO commitment they agreed to phase out all those quantitative restrictions on exports except were explicitly justified under WTO number three they removed the export licensing restrictions number four they ended state trading monopolies for exports number five they liberalized foreign trade rights the point is people thought that China was going to be a honeypot of economic activity and it

turned out to be a sucking sound a grand sucking sound of opportunity where the globalist corporations saw a massive labor arbitrage so it's fair to say that it was done with the best of intentions but it was a bad deal and they got one over on us want to say that rather than having 30 minutes of debate over something that happened in the '90s I would I would like to go back to this question i keep not hearing I will answer your question because that was a great hear from David um but I'm I'm I'd love your student i never got a chance to tendency to just begin talking in an anecdotal

way about aneot announces you are going to look for where if it's if in four two years it is under X I can come back and we can have a conversation here's the metrics ezra I'm so sorry here's the metrics for you okay let's go back to Bill Clinton's speech that was given at John's Hopkins on March 9th 20 he was asking about forward David forward-looking metrics what would you think would be successful two years from now not the history lesson wait hold on we haven't finished the debate about China and PNTR okay but my question predated that debate yeah we're trying to get Listen you're trying to change the subject let's just finish

up on this no no we're trying to move forward that's all I'm just trying to finish up on this topic okay we'll let you get the last word about this okay you can have the last word march 9 2000 Bill Clinton announces PNTR at John's Hopkins it's a very famous speech liam maybe you can tell us about how it got written anyway Bill Clinton promises several things he makes a number of arguments for PNTR he does not think that this does nothing larry your argument is that Bill Clinton didn't do anything you're saying that somehow it happened under Reagan or something like that that's not what Bill Clinton was arguing he said number one there'd be huge economic benefits to the US he says

quote by this agreement we will increase exports of American products he means to China that will create American jobs okay did that happen the way we intended i don't think so number two is he believed that when you looked at the data on export flows from the United States to China it actually did happen at a quite substantial rate but with huge trade deficits for the United States you're arguing that they they did not act in a discriminatory way towards our products this idea that Americans could just do business in China the way that they could do business here is ridiculous anyone who tried to do business over their nose you had to

create a JV you had to get a local partner give them 51% it was extraordinarily difficult we were discriminated against Larry it's ridiculous to try and claim that somehow this was an equal relationship okay and we imported far more from them than we ever exported to them so Bill Clinton was wrong about that number two he said that signing PNTR and and bringing China to the WTO would promote democracy in China that we would export one of democracy's most cherished values economic freedom did that happen i don't think so he said this would strengthen global trade by ensuring China adhere to international trade rules reducing trade

barriers and resolving disputes through WTO did that happen i don't think so and then he said on national security he said it would improve our national security to bring China to WTO and help make them rich he said quote "If we don't deal with China in this way we will increase the prospect that they will turn inward." That's not what happened we helped make China rich we've exported millions of jobs to them they built up their economy and their supply chain to the point where now they are a global competitor to the United States they're a pure competitor we turned that baby dragon into a Drogonsized monster that can now challenge us in Asia and

across the world for primacy why in the world we have done that just for national security reasons that was a very foolish thing to do okay so Larry I I guess I have to let you maybe self-grade how did you guys do is there any regrets as Sax is pointing out there obviously China has not magically become a democracy but I guess you could argue they do have a middle class now we haven't gone to war with them so I guess you could argue that this has been good for relations but to Sax's point they are incredibly powerful and they are our top adversary how would you grade the history of this so we can move forward iowa was a surging growing reforming

economy growing at double-digit rates that it was before there was any WTO agreement the WTO agreement did not change a single rule that represented a US restriction on imports from China it did change a variety of rules not as far as I would have liked that let the United States export more to China and that protected United States intellectual property in China and that brought China more closely into the international system you need a counterfactual for what would have happened if China had been excluded from the World Trade Organization that counterfactual is not that they would not have sold goods to

the United States that principle had already been crossed 15 years before not a single restriction was uh reduced so look anything you would have done differently i just don't get I I don't get the whole uh mindset uh here i understand that we should have done more as a country for the rust belt and invested in it much more heavily if I was worried about dependence and strategic and all that the last policy I would have wanted to abolish was the CHIPS act that's the largest boldest thing the United States has ever done to avoid dependence in a national security area great let me bring the Trump administration has killed all of that jimoth you heard Ezra's original

question and the history here from Larry and David looking at there are some industries that we need strategically pharma military cars these are fairly obvious rare earth minerals uh are obvious but we also have the lowest unemployment of our lifetimes and Americans probably don't want to work in factories on mass what is your take on going forward some metrics that this administration should not Sax is saying this you're saying it what what would you measure this success as in terms of onshoring and reducing dependencies if to Ezra's point two years from now we were degraded give us some specifics here Chama there is a major issue that the United States has that's much bigger

than China which can be framed in the lens of resiliency and the ability to fend for ourselves there are supply chains that have many single points of failure and independent of whichever country that single point of failure exists it could be an ally or it could be a foe or it could be a friendmy that creates risk and I think what we are learning and David's right it was really highlighted during COVID we are not in a position to take care of what we need so if I had to very precisely answer Ezra's question I would say that we need to measure and protect four critical areas everything else I think we can deal with some

inefficiency some single points of failure but the following four areas Ezra I would say are sacrosanked number one is all of the technology both the chips as well as the enabling technology around artificial intelligence it must be a robust largely American supply chain it must you cannot have single points of failure outside the United States because what you see is even in allied countries their posture towards things like free speech and other things can eb and flow their posture on trade their posture on defense okay so that's number one can change chips got it number two is energy we have a critical deficit of electrons in America we do not have the

capability we need to make the energy we need quickly in many ways we have supply chain issues on nat gas we have critical supply chains that can be shut off by China around photovoltaics so whether you believe in coal whether you believe in that gas whether you believe in clean energy we are in a very we got to shore that up okay I think we're in agreement keep going number three are there are critical material inputs that drive the material science of the future rare earths are an example going back to chips things like gallium things like phosphorus even so we have a critical minerals and rare earths and m and

material science input problem and then the fourth Ezra are pharma APIs so that when American citizens get sick we have the ability to not just make it but also design it and manufacture it because some of these APIs the active principal ingredients for many of the drugs require very convoluted and complicated processes cold chains and the like and again there we depend on folks whose view of the United States can change in real time so if I had to say to Ezra what I would expect is if the United States government whoever was in charge would put those four things on a board then detail out all of the key inputs measure how much we can make ourselves versus import and then basically try to

level that playing field we would be in a very good place a couple things because I think I probably agree with all of that and what it sounds like is an excellent argument for Joe Biden's policies which were functionally maybe not the pharma side just literally that let's pull out semiconductors and the semiconductor supply chain let's pull out energy let's p a couple of things like that you know what was it a high fence around a small garden was what Jake Sullivan called it let's particularly try to restrict the supply chain export of AI critical materials to China um they had a whole set of policies about this now the Trump administration the thing we are in

theory here discussing is an extraordinarily broad-based set of policies um it is tariffs on not just China it's on Brazil it's not just on critical industries like Chimath is talking about but it's on you know mangoes and avocados and you know lumber from Canada and and basically everything else i I guess there's an argument I could sort of extract out of this that the Biden administration believed what they called French shoring which is that you want to create an integrated supply chain of of allied countries that we can work with and that we can rely on and the Trump administration I think

believes something depending on who's talking more like that the entire supply chain needs to be on to America specifically but one of the problems and the reason I I I'm keep trying to push people to be very clear about their arguments and very clear about their metrics is that I feel like there's this king's cup of what we're trying to achieve here where one day it's that we're trying to achieve the re-industrialization of the American heartland and the next we're trying to replace the income tax with tariff income and then the next we're just using it as all-purpose surplus leverage against any country that does anything we don't like and the next day we're you

know using it for uh an entirely third purpose and maybe we're just going to use it to to isolate China but to bring in our our friends but none of these you can't do all of these things at once and it needs to be very stable if you're going to get companies to do these long-term capex investment decisions that take decades to play out nobody I know in the market is you guys didn't want to change anything you guys didn't want to change anything about anything i wasn't in the I wasn't in the Biden administration number one I'm treating Ezra and Larry as a team i would love to change i just want to make sure to change all here you mean the Democrats

didn't want to see if we can cause Let's see if we can Larry won't even admit that PNTR did anything can we not keep doing PNTR for a minute let's look forward not backward look at the look at the chips act look at the IRA act they did the exact things we're talking about larry go ahead let's see if we can find a little bit of agreement please here i agree with Chamath's agenda i I may not agree in every detail but I broadly agree with Chamath's agenda and I'll go a little further than that Ezra i think Joe Biden's attachment to energy security was kind of selective and heavily oriented to green technologies not others i thought cancelling the

Keystone pipeline was a clear mistake i thought the stopping a variety of things involving liquid natural gas were a clear mistake so I think the Biden administration's approach to regulation that empowered every NGO with respect to stopping transmission lines with respect to constructing power plants because of the importance of democratic constituencies was a mistake so I think energy security is a central objective of policy and that there's a lot of room to move beyond what the Biden administration did i actually believe that very strongly and agree with Chimath and David what I don't

understand is chips absolutely right the chips act was all about making there be an American semiconductor industry with production in the United States as a central priority the Trump administration has declared war on that rare earths you want to have a strategic petroleum reserve for any rare earth you want to do more mining in the areas that Chamath says we should in the United States or in friendly countries i am all for that here's what I cannot understand chamath they don't see how your resilience agenda drives anywhere near liberation day and the emphasis on uh

tariffs it drives towards a set of specific industrial policies perhaps including tariffs in some particular product areas but steel from Canada anything from loto any natural resource uh product across the board tariffs on everything i think you are absolutely right about resilience and that traditional conventional economics has given it too little thought and that co pointed that up as a central issue what I can't understand is why Donald Trump's echoing of Liia Koko from the 80s about tariffs is responsive to any of that but but this is the point I'm trying to draw around Biden i'm not

saying I agree with every way the Biden administration defined its objectives i just wrote an entire book about the failures of Democratic policym in this specific era what I am saying is the bid administration's view of trade was that there are targeted industries we should be putting a lot of both uh domestic policy and international policy into play in order to protect and reshore or French shore and the Trump administration's view is that you have a generalized problem running all across the world that requires highly general policies that then when I ask people to defend it they sort of move to this targeted argument donald Trump's view we can I I feel like we end up making

something that is not that complicated um into something much more complex than it is since the 80s you know Larry's point about Liika Donald Trump has seem has appeared to hold the view that anytime the US is operating at a trade deficit with someone else that is uh evidence we are being ripped off and that is how you get at least the initial set of tariffs here that work off of bilateral trade deficits and try to correct every single one with every single country be it Loto or a collection of islands inhabited by penguins i I just I think it's really important to be connected to the policy that was actually announced and not sort

of projecting all of our own onto it like yes Larry's right that you could have a different set of critical industries than Biden did the Biden team was very focused on clean energy over other kinds of energy i also did not agree with like the liquid gas pause i thought there were some you know there and we did not do nearly enough on things like permitting reform right there's a lot you could have done that they didn't do but if what you have in your head is a targeted idea of reshoring specific industries or nearshoring or frenching or whatever which is kind of what I'm hearing from um from a number of people on this call then it seems like you would want

targeted policies and what we have is not targeted policies it's broad-based policies a 90-day pause on larger broad-based policies and a huge trade war with China i would like to hear a defense from somebody ezra and I agree specific policies i'd like somebody to explain to me why it's a remotely sensible theory to say that the United States is being exploited by any country where the overall pattern of trade is uh such that we are running a trade deficit and maybe in the process you could explain to me why my grocery store is exploiting me because I'm running a massive trade deficit with that okay trade deficit shimath or Sax

who wants to take it i can start the then maybe Sax can Saxon so let let me actually start by giving some credit to where Biden did do a few things right just in the spirit of finding some common ground inside the IRA i think that there were two things and I've said this pretty repeatedly but I just want to put it on the record again the ITC credits and the ITC transfer markets for those credits the tax equity markets are critical industries in America to support private investment in all kinds of very complicated markets energy markets being the most important and what the Biden administration did to their credit was remove the uncertainty

because those things had to be renewed over and over again and they gave us a very long window where we could underwrite investments to your point Ezra that was smart but it's important to also remember that in order to get Biden's budget done what they did was they had Mansion roll over on permitting reform and Ezra you know this probably better than all of us when you look inside of the chips act as smart as that initial policy was if you ask why has nothing actually happened why have no fabs actually been built other than grandio statements the answer is that which you speak to in your book it's just this complete malaise and inability to actually get these things permitted

and turned on even when it's right so I just want to acknowledge that that's there so Larry to very very importantly to your question the thing that we have to acknowledge is that in certain countries what you have is a very blurry line between private and public industry and they have this very tight coupling and again I hate to go back to China but it is the best example of this where what do they have choose one other country just for the sake of it we can use Korea we can use Japan we can use Germany okay there are instances where the government balance sheets support private industry they can support them in three different ways number one is the tax credits that they can use the

subsidies that they can use to build the things that they need number two is how then they can support that in the active selling and engagement in public spot markets to shape the demand curve of the things that are made and then number three is the taxation on the back end the terms of repayment and the capital cycle those are things that in the United States we overwhelmingly turn the responsibility over to the private markets to do we are the cleanest the purest form of capitalism in that sense but many other countries are shades of this and again let's not talk about China which is the So so Larry hold on a second so Larry so what you have is how

do you defend dumping how do you defend that how do you defend spot market manipulation that drives American companies out of business how do you fight that and I think here's the problem if President Trump had announced a big broadening of anti-dumping law to confront a variety of instances of what he what the administration after careful economic analysis saw as inappropriate subsidy i might or might not have thought that they were doing that in the right way but we wouldn't be having this argument the front pages would not be about tariff policy day after day and the stock market would not be down by $5 trillion the central thing we are discussing is

not whether there are sensible modifications to trade policy to respond to bad practices in other countries or to promote resilience those are technical debates that frankly aren't that interesting to a large number of people the question is whether declaring that we need a whole new era of US economic policy around universal tariffs against everything is so I think is a rational step forward or using bilateral trade surpluses now we're talking about the Monte Carlo simulation of how to achieve the outcome and what I am saying is there is just as much as you and I want to guess the fundamental and honest

answer is none of us know the people in the White House what they know they will share a little bit at a time because the reality is if you what you wanted was a white paper or if what you wanted was paint by numbers I think back to David's point all that would do is just take any leverage that they had and give people the opportunity to shape their response and I think in traditional game theory and and again in traditional game theory I think the right thing to do is when you're playing poker you play street by street what's the flop make a set of actions what's the turn make a set of actions what's the river make a set of

actions and I think if you're going to play to win this is what they should do keep their cards very very close to the vest realize that you can't necessarily surgically go and attack the lithium market first then the rare earth market second because it all goes back to the same balance sheet it's the same actor over and over i think there's a useful analogy to draw here i think a lot about an article Mark Danner wrote in the New York Review of Books many years ago about the Iraq War and it's an article that has stuck in my mind forever because what he says about it is that one of the the difficulties of the politics of the Iraq war is there was no

one war there was everybody's private war that they were projecting on to the Bush administration you have the liberal humanitarian vision of why we were going to war and what that war would look like you had a realist vision for it you had a vision that was more about uh weapons of mass destruction and keeping the homeland safe from terrorism you had people believe there was an Iraq al-Qaeda connection there were really dozens of these which is how you got as broad a coalition behind as bad a policy as that together because everybody said you know they're being a little bit vague about what's really going on here

and why we're really doing this but I bet you if you go into their heart of hearts what they want is the thing I want even though the policy doesn't quite match what policy you would get from starting from my premises and that's really what I hear here i hear it on this show but I hear it in general in the discussion around this that there are a lot of different objectives being projected onto Donald Trump and his trade war the objectives do not fit the policies we're seeing the objectives are not uh stably articulated by Donald Trump or the people around him nor is any specific objective being articulated

in a stable way without contradicting objectives also being articulated at the same time and look maybe in the end and this is why I want to push you all on metrics you get something you like out of this but you're giving away a lot of clarity just on the trust that what is happening is people are keeping a good hand of cards with a good strategy of poker hidden from you as opposed to what's happening is what we seem to be seeing in public which is Donald Trump is a chaotic and erratic person they are making policy in a chaotic and erratic way that policy is having chaotic and erratic consequences and then they are operating and moving on the fly in a chaotic and erratic fashion sax you

heard Ezra say that they he feels this administration is being a bit chaotic in the approach here what's the counter to that you heard Shamant say "Hey this is a really thoughtful they're holding their cards close to the chest." Maybe you could clarify what your position is is this too chaotic or is this crazy what I'm hearing is a bunch of process objections to Trump's policy and I'm hearing a bunch of nitpicking what about Lutu or whatever okay look this is a very unrealistic view of politics when we've had a bipartisan consensus in Washington for decades that unfettered free trade is a good thing no matter how big our trade deficits got no matter how

rich and powerful China got no matter how unfair the trade practices got no matter how many millions of our jobs and factories got exported overseas this has been the bipartisan consensus in Washington and Larry you're right that it started before the Clinton administration and the George W bush administration definitely accelerated it but there has absolutely been a bipartisan consensus in Washington that this sort of unfettered free trade policy was good for the country now how do you change that now look you can nitpick this and you can make all the process objections you want but Donald Trump has changed the conversation i just want to let you keep saying I I've

offered a process suggestion when I'm objecting to the absence can I finish you were pointing to Donald Trump's views when he was a public figure in the 1980s and 1990s on trade as somehow he was wrong he was not wrong he was one of the few people and the few public figures in America who was right about this i think most people today would say he was right about this that throwing open our markets to these to these foreign products without thinking about the consequences was a mistake you guys have me completely confused really you do no I'm confused about the incurrence of your position larry Larry David you still believe that the Clinton administration let's call it a

bipartisan consensus of that era was correct while at the same time you're arguing that PNTR didn't do anything i think it is really telling that you are so much more loathed to defend what we are seeing than to attack what has been if you want to it's fine like I guess you could have It would be interesting to have you and to go if you'd be interested to have you and Larry go 12 rounds on the Clinton era you know when I say to you listen there is not a stable set of objectives that fit the policy here you say that's a process i just would like somebody to defend the thing they keep actually doing i would like somebody to explain to me here i understood Chimath Chimath resilience

central four sectors are we more resilient in the four sectors what's the answer in two years from now i got that i agree all that i cannot make any linkage between a 10% across the board tariff a tariff on steel a tariff on auto on automobiles and much of what the rest of the president says and your very valid objectives i hear David this free trade has destroyed America and we're gonna undo that and viscerated the heart and all this and I just want to understand how we'll know okay whether we have fixed okay look well I I can answer this too go ahead go ahead David all right look Larry and Ezra welcome to a political coalition

different people have different objectives just like different people had different objectives for the policy that we had in place 25 years ago okay there are some people who think that we should have an across the board 10% tariff to raise revenue because the country needs revenue and that that would be a better way to raise revenue than to say have income taxes or capital gains taxes stan Ducken Miller who's not a fan of tariffs nonetheless said that he would support a 10% tariff no more than 10 but up to 10 as a way to raise revenue okay that's his point of view there are other people and I would say I'm more someone who thinks about the

geopolitical consequence of this who think it was a huge mistake to throw open our markets to Chinese products basically feeding their economy to the point where they could become a pure competitor of the United States and threaten the US to threaten the US world order there are different people hold on there's different people with different objectives one more time because you're you are just not speaking truth want to know one restriction that the United States had on Chinese products that was changed in the year 2000 you've said seven times throw open our market to Chinese products i want to know one example in which the United States

opened its market in 1999 the point just one the point of Well the name one product where restrictions were reduced okay David Namon listen you're mischaracterizing what PNTR did we can play this like uh Grock game if you want people can go ahead and grock this question and they'll get this answer look the answer is that before PNTR China was granted MFN on a year-by-year basis by Congress correct pntr made it permanent what does that do it created a permanent new framework for trade relations between the United States and China so it it created permanence and it created a certain expectation what did that enable massive investment by US companies in

China so all the bean counters from McKenzie started talking about outsourcing and just in time manufacturing they started moving the factories over there in a much greater way you know the Mitt Romney and private equity hold on for a second we finished the Mitt Romney and private equity said this is a great idea let's move all of our manufacturing could we agree that whether or not it was the WTR the bankers on Wall Street got to financialize and securitize all sorts of new products okay that was the result of PNTR the thing we have to decide really right now as a country is if the thing that you all are trying to replace us

with is better right if it will work and so I want to go back to what you said a minute ago David when you're like "Welcome to political coalitions." Uh Larry has been in politics a long time he was Treasury Secretary i've covered politics for a long time i'm familiar with political coalitions in fact a lot of my book is currently about the problems in the way the democratic coalition with too many objectives all at once can end up destroying the ability of the policy to actually achieve a clear goal so this is this is precisely the nonprocedural objection I am bringing here this is why I think it is dangerous to be treating an upheaval

of the entire global financial system without a clearly defined objective that is connected to a policy and so the the question is if the idea is that there are all these different players here who have all these different policy objectives that would connect to all these different policies and everybody's getting a little bit of them and Trump is kind of flipping back and forth through different versions of them you could end up despite yes whatever mistakes are made in the free trade consensus which I do agree that we had you could end up with a bad next not even consensus just a bad next policy a unclear coalition that is fighting with itself and is making policy without a

strong process can create not like nitpicky procedural problems but actual damage and disasters shimoth let's look let's try to look forward here this obviously has been a cataclysmic chaotic intense whatever descriptor you want to use of the past week productive is okay sure and it certainly created massive swings in the market is this all going to cause a recession is this too violent of an approach to markets that is I think a valid uh criticism that people have including you know the majority of business leaders are saying "Hey I think I have to start layoffs." You had United Airlines say "We're not going to give any guidance." This feels to business

leaders Republican business leaders primarily and market participants as just far too chaotic and they can't plan and if they can't plan then they stop planning which then is going to cause layoffs it's going to cause bankruptcies and uh who knows what the second and third order consequences are going to be so what's going to happen here over the next couple of weeks and months so just on the recession question and then I'd like to give an answer to Ezra and Larry i think that and I've said this for about a year it was clear to me that we were sneakily in a recession before and the reason was the vast amounts of money and deficits that were being pumped into

government services that perverted the actual GDP picture in America so as Doge sort of slows down that money flow and as the consensus in Congress gets to a better budget I think that you're going to see that the government was probably responsible for 100 to 150 basis points of just waste and if you take that out you will technically be in a recession that was independent of these tariffs and I think that that's where the true economy Jason was and I think that we're going to just find that out so that's that on where we go from here i can give you an anecdote and I'll give you a projection the anecdote is this weekend my wife and I were in bed and a person called me very successful businessman

who was representing the president of a country saying "Hey I need some advice what do we do here?" And we walked through the three things that he and his government that they government were trying to figure out because they wanted an off-ramp they were like "I'm ready to cry uncle we're ready to tap out." And again he was calling me as a private citizen but I think this conversation was very instructive number one he's like "Look we have these really high tariffs on inbound American products we're happy to cut these things to zero." And I said "Well you should do that." Second while we were exploring he's like "Yeah you know we have a enormous capital purchase with Airbus."

I said "Cancel it swap it to Boeing." He's like "Done." And then the third which was interesting is he's like "We need to import an enormous amount of energy." And I said "Well who do you give that concession to right now?" And it was a non-American company and I said "Well why wouldn't you just RFP that to an American business and let them compete?" And he's like "We'd be open to that as well." So he said "You know we're getting prepared we want to find a way to talk to the Trump administration." And I'm like "Great however I can be helpful I'm help I'll be helpful to you." I got off the phone and I looked

at my wife and I said "If even 30 of these 75 countries do a deal anywhere remotely close to this this was an enormous win." So let me give you my projection Jason of what the art of the deal could be here what you do is you can rewrite Bretonwoods 2.0 what was Bretton Woods 1.0 it was fixing exchange rates it was setting up the IMF it was setting up the World Bank those were the conditions on the ground post World War II it made a lot of sense what would we do if we had to write the Mara Lago accords right now i think what we would do is work backwards from the question that Ezra asked and the answer that I gave how do we create resiliency in

these critical markets number one a framework for that number two is how do we create limits for government sponsored intervention against capital for-profit companies many of whom are American so that we can actually compete on a level playing field and then number three very simply if you can do business in my country why can I not do business in yours and I'll just give you that story for one second i was responsible i was the head of every single entity of Facebook outside of the United States i opened every market my team and I created a framework for dominating i figured we figured out how to crack Brazil India Russia you know the one

market that we never could ever make a single iota of progress say it Jason with me well China China China Russia no Iran we won in Russia so my point is in every single market except one is it that we were just lucky in 174 markets and one we were stupid no so I think that the moral accords this sort of Brettonwoods 2.0 is the outcome Ezra it will basically use tariffs as a way to get these governments to a table and allow us to negotiate a much fairer economic quid proquo here's my concern with with this theory and I want to leave out but I'll leave the the sort of question of what the real economy looked like to Larry this world in which what is happening is a business leader who

represents a country is calling you and saying okay what do we need to do to deal right they're coming to Donald Trump and they are going to come to Donald Trump as Larry said earlier there's no doubt that the US economic leverage is enormous and virtually every country faced with our might is going to try to cut a deal with us but then there's a call they're not making to you that they're making to someone else which is we have allowed or we have approached the US as a functionally benign partner for a very long time and now they're becoming a dangerous partner they are very very strong and they will use that strength

to crush countries smaller than them when it suits the whims of a personalist regime run by a person who his feelings even about people that the US or countries the US traditionally considered allies like Canada or much of Europe uh change and so yes on the one hand for the next year or two we want to avoid getting a big tariff slapped on us and so we got to figure out what is it that if we offer it to Donald Trump he will say to himself that was enough uh of a give that you know I can move on to someone else i can make them the the focus of my eye and on the other hand they're going to begin to build fortresses and deals and partnerships and approaches that make sure they are

less exposed to our ability to wield this power against them in the future but before I came on the show I had gone on X and I saw a clip of you going around where you were saying that one of the problems with the Biden administration was that you couldn't get anybody on the phone and in the Trump administration you make the call the deputy chief of staff picks up you say "Hey I need you to talk to to this company they I work with them they're freaking out about the tariffs the deputy chief of staff tells the company they they work something out." No no not that they work something out they listen they listen this this world in which we

are doing the dealm by individual relationships by who can get their calls answered not by rules that feel clear and stable that's how the Hold on a sec but that's how the Biden administration worked that's not what said that's not what I said well no Ezra you're trying to make it sound like corruption hold on it was George Clooney that was making the call who cares what George Clooney thinks didn't you just say on uh well I was very very critical of Biden I saw that clip Ezra and what Jamas said what Jamas said is simply that the White House listens when he calls whereas he couldn't get his calls returned by the Obama administration great i think we're

actually not saying something all that you made it sound like corruption well I actually think what Trump is working through is deal patronage based on how he sees the company i'm sorry the other country what happened ezra can I just make sure that this is clear to you this is a 150year-old American business i have no interest in that company except a friendship these are Americans hiring Americans trying to compete with China who were very negatively affected and all I said was why don't you have a chance to explain what's happening on the ground my point that I was trying to make and maybe I didn't make it clear enough so let me set the record straight the Trump administration what I have

seen as a businessman is willing to hear the conditions on the ground as a businessman when I was building Ezra just to be clear critical rare earth supplies for America under the Biden administration battery can materials to compete with China under the Biden administration AI chips to be the best inference solution under the Biden administration i couldn't get a call back that's just the facts not because I wanted anything just to tell them what was going on so fair enough insane okay fair enough i I am not telling you that the B administration shouldn't have returned your calls what I am saying is that the degree to which Trump first and then

everybody around him as an example of him because culture comes from the top is working off this kind of individual call and deal making worries me because I believe that you had every one of these calls you're saying and they went exactly the way you say they went and then the calls that you are not getting and they are two minutes ago Ezra you were saying that a 10% across the board tariff was too broad and we need to go industry by industry and now you're saying that it's going to be too particular and he shouldn't do country by country negotiations the word dealing people listening to people is not deal making Ezra it's just listening to people are you really going to be

tell me that the way Trump himself works is not individual deal making people with Is this really is this really the argument here i will tell you what I've seen and David's seen much more what I have seen from the president is he takes in hundreds of opinions and starts to figure out what the ground truth is and the reason is when you only listen to one or two every president probably deals with this you have this information asymmetry problem because you are the president of the United States and so how do you cut through it you talk to hundreds and hundreds of people and you triangulate what the truth is so it's not like he's giving

any favor he's collecting information that is a good process you want the most powerful person in the world to get to the ground truth go ahead Larry i am all for information gathering i agree that the Biden administration did not do a as good a job as it could have of maintaining relations with the business community i agree that it's a good idea for there to be quite extensive connection i am also appalled by the halfozen phone calls I have gotten from prominent people in business who have said "I'm used to being shaken down when I try to do business in some parts of the world." It's a new experience to be shaken down

by representatives of the president of the United States what's the shake down when you have close connections you help us you contribute this way you no sense at all makes no sense what the president has been trying to do is encourage domestic maybe it is an erroneous perception to which I have been exposed repeatedly but it is total nonsense but it is a pervasive total nonsense you guys are very confident that your true and everybody else's aren't it is a perception that is shared by almost everyone who has experience in the conflict of interest area who has looked at the situation of Trump administration

officials and those working as special government employees in the Trump administration what are you saying so I just went through that whole process Larry it will be false but I can speak to this cuz I just went through this process it took forever it took like months okay i went through the same process everyone else goes through the OGE career staff have to go through all of your disclosures and they figure out what the conflicts are and then you have to devest them okay it's the same process everyone goes through so you're all over the place making all sorts of accusations here so if you have some proof or you want to accuse someone then why don't you just do it but otherwise

what you're saying is just not true it's not backed up by anything great they shut down Eric Adams that's my That's a direct accusation that happened in public they shook down Eric they shook down Eric Adams because they put him in his pocket that's a big deal y'all like that is the way they are doing business here you guys are all over the map making wild accusations first it was a second resations because of their discomfort with being overruled by your colleagues in the Trump administration so the suggestion over the map you have been held to the same ethical standards that I was held and that other members of previous administrations including the Bush administration were held

unfortunately is not right no that's that's false all right well there's two issues you may not be familiar but I had to devest hold on i had to devest a lot as I talked about on this show in any event you guys are all over the map making wild accusations two seconds ago the shakeddown was at the level of companies then all of a sudden it was OG and ethics then it was something about Eric Adams integrated business it's nobody's making I like that you're like "Who's Eric Adams?" We're not making I know who Eric Adams is i supported him on this show forward way that Trump does business at every level at which he operates and so it is happening at every level of his administration you know I

got to say I don't It's not that I It's not that I don't want to hear you i don't want to hear it you know how this started is because Hold on a second Ezra you misqued something Chamas said on another podcast where all he said was that I can get my phone calls returned by this White House where I couldn't with Obama or Biden even though I was a big donor hold on and you guys have somehow morphed that into some sort of like broad ranging accusations of corruption or something like that no evidence clear about what the accusation of the way Donald Trump works is ezra your accusation of me tried to infer some form of corruption or some form of dealmaking none of that happened what I

what I again I'll tell you I connected the White House so they could hear on the ground what's happening from a company who was very negatively impacted by the tariff so that they had the complexion of that feedback as well okay do you deny the possibility that your experience with the Trump administration might be different than people who they feel are less allied to them than you are ezra I'm will I'm willing a straightforward question what are you sure that you're a good sample i don't even know what we're talking about anymore also I think what we're talking about right now is that people who donate to politicians have unique access to politicians i think we can all agree

that's not true just to be very clear I give I have given way more to the Democrats than I've given to Donald Trump and you were disappointed about that i didn't say anything about your donations said about where your ally now and by the way like what what's crazy is I was the same intellectual person I was under Biden that I am under Trump it's just that it seems like the Trump administration is like "Well this is a smart guy with some opinions let me listen." Biden I And by the way and Larry you and you know this these were some very close friends of ours that we share mutually that would not even return my calls so it is a little

personal for me as well Ezra just to be honest with you i'm not going to go there but the point is that's fair i have never I have never seen a single iod of any form of anything other than just gathering information from the Trump they've never asked me for anything they've never tried to direct me to do anything they just want to know what's going on when you ask them hey can you talk to such and such a person i can assure you that your experience is not the experience of quite a number of the nation's major law firms it is not the experience of quite a number of the nation's business leaders it is not the experience of quite a number of um the nation's uh

universities that I am neither the first nor the hundth person referencing efforts at extortion to use the movie The Godfather as a metaphor for the for aspects of the way in which our country is uh being uh governed what a surprise democratic universities and Democratic law firms are making accusations all right let's move on we think we've the tariff issue and I think we can all agree that if you donate money you might have better access to politicians i want to talk about the future especially Jason if you give 10% to the big guy then you really get access listen we can

we can do these allegations if you you know yeah there's a long list of people who've made donations and there's a long list of favorable things that have happened to them after across all administrations and we can debate cause and correlation all day long here but I wanted to talk about the future of the Democratic party while we're here Ezra you have been on a tour talking about exactly how incompetent how terrible of a campaign they ran what is the future and I'll let Larry get you know his uh his two cents in here as well is there any saving this party and if so what would it look like well well there's a the problem of the party and the campaign let me bracket that cuz so my

book Abundance is more about how Democrats govern at both the state and and local and federal level and some of the pathologies of governance there they make it hard for for liberals to achieve their goals there are versions of this on the right but I'm not really writing about that in in this so my book Abundance Derek Thompson is about the tendency Democrats have to subsidize things where they are choking off the supply of the thing they want people to have more of so think about housing in California to get rental vouchers from the federal government but we make it incredibly hard to build homes clean energy which a lot of the B

administration's policies were about putting huge subsidies behind the building of more clean energy but they didn't really do anything to make the permitting the sighting the state capacity to do all of that uh capable of building that amount of of clean energy at the pace they foresaw us building it right that they wanted us to build it and behind this and and I can sort of go into a lot of detail here but is a a diminishment of state capacity that comes from wrapping the state itself in red tape and regulation i think we think and have an intuitive way of thinking about the idea of deregulation on the private sector right when the government

is imposing regulations on private companies and it's making it hard for those companies to act to do business etc but this happens first and foremost on the government itself one of my favorite examples I've been using lately there's a new Rand report that looks at how much it costs to construct a square foot of housing in California in Texas and Colorado and it does it on two kinds of housing market rate and it does it on affordable housing subsidized by the public sector and the cost of creating housing in California market rate is 2x in California what it is in Texas but when you get into that publicly subsidized housing where you have all

these new standards and rules and regulations being triggered by the addition of public money it goes up to about 4.4x and so you have this real problem I think in a way of governing that evolved in the 70s the '8s there's a kind of small government version of the Democratic party the new left more individualistic that was worried about too much exercise of government power and now that we are in a different world with different problems we're thinking about re-industrializing we have a housing shortage and you have things like the Biden administration which really are thinking about how to build a lot more in America but you don't have either a policy architecture or I would

say a governing culture that makes that possible yeah and and so a lot of this came from Francis Fukayyama I think uh and vto votocracy vtocracy how do you pronounce fukyama is a great sort of related concept of vetocracy which is that he also got another great concept since we're bringing up fukyama which is that neoliberalism which we've sort of been talking about here with the WT and other things he says people think about it as the veneration of the market but what it is first and foremost is the degradation of the state and I think that explains a lot more about the world we're in than people recognize ezra you can agree with this francis Fukuyama is probably one of the most polarizing

modern academics in America as you read him people end up in they're very pro- Fukuyama or they think Fukyama because Yeah i mean look cuz cuz what happened is I mean just to uplevel this for a second is that you you had Fukuyama write the end of history which basically said that democratic capitalism is the end- all beall and we're basically down to one system and the whole world's going to run on that system and that philosophy then animated I would say a neoliberal and neoonservative consensus in Washington for 25 years and there were three key pillars of that let's call it globalist consensus number one we'd have open borders free flow of labor in fact the Wall Street Journal

editorial page which you know is considered to be conservative actually supported a constitutional amendment saying that we'd have open borders number two we'd have open flows of trade and capital so basically the unfettered free trade agenda and then number three the third leg of it was Pax Americana we had deploy American troops all over the world to defend this consensus because they'd be greeted as liberators not occupiers i think all three pillars have been refuted and the the person who has represented the shift in this consensus to I'd say a new agenda of economic nationalism and geopolitical nationalism

is Donald Trump okay wow i was going to guess that when you have listen when you have violence end of history and the last man is a much more complicated question at a very high level let me finish the point here cuz I'm kind of on a roll here yeah keep wrap bring it home when you have a bipartisan consensus that included both Bush Republicans and Clinton Democrats around these three pillars of globalism and then I'd say that country turns against that that's not going to be a smooth process that is going to be potentially a violent process it's going

to be a disruptive process and you guys want to raise like all these nit objections and pro or whatever donald Trump is bringing that realignment but the real question the real question is was that consensus correct or was it a failure i would argue as a failure larry let me ask you a question then when you see something like Doge happening and people start taking a bit of a a more unilateral a quicker a less veto based approach is that encouraging to you Larry do you think that's the right way to do it because we haven't been able to get the government smaller since Clinton so are you pro Doge not Doge and do you think this sort of objection to hey we're

going too fast too violently maybe that's what we need to do at times and then I'll go back to you Ezra to answer the same question i think that Ezra is broadly right about the pro promiscuous distribution of the veto power he's broadly right that we need to be able to do more things more quickly in the state if we're to be an effective government i think we need much more reform i think Democrats have allowed themselves excessively to become hostage to particular groups particular traditional uh concerns and have lost touch in important ways with an American mainstream and I think that in so far as

the election outcomes in recent years have not been what they wanted that is an important contribution to how that has happened and I agree with David that Donald Trump represents a transformative and profoundly different ideology than has been present in governing America before i do believe that it is fundamentally not new under the sun just new in America that it is the Juan Peron approach which is very familiar to students of Latin American uh history in particular and that the general experience of that approach is that its leaders particularly when they have galvanizing

personalities can be very popular for a substantial period of time but that they are very rarely remembered well by historians of their countries and so my best judgment is that this project is going to end in disastrous failure despite having put its finger on some important concerns and issues of course there should be much more aggressive reform of the government than there is but that does not excuse or mean that it is likely to work out well for some of the mindless savagery that the Doge is bringing to traditional American institutions uh is

going to work out Well and to take just one example my belief is that the revenue loss from the Doge's destruction of significant part of the functioning of our nation's tax collection system is likely to exceed in terms of contributing more to the deficit than any savings realized what do you mean by what do you mean by that what is this they've identified the right thing but they're executing on it too much go ahead Shim no no I have two questions Larry just tactically what do you mean by the destruction of the revenue collecting mechanism that's question number one which was just I just want to understand what you meant a second

question which is more broadly if Larry if you were president for a day just give us the Larry Summers plan like what is the counterfactual to what's happening now you can include tariffs you can include Doge i just want to understand how you would frame the solution to what hils us so maybe tactically just talk about the the collections part because you referenced it and then just more strategically what the Larry Summers 2.0 plan is we are firing on mass people whose job it is to audit people like you and the result of that is that we are losing revenue directly we are losing revenue further

because people once audited go straight in subsequent years and we are losing revenue because more and more people are playing the audit lottery engaging in problematic practices in the expectation can I burst your bubble on this that they will not that they will not be caught let me tell you my experience i get audited every year automatically and the reason you get audited every single year is typically the way that you acquire your wealth creates complexity 700 800 900page tax filings now you don't do that yourself what happens is you typically pay a large big four accounting firm millions of dollars to do it deote PWC Anderson etc every year that I've been audited

the biggest delta has been about a thousand bucks in this case I actually was owed a,000 by the US government last year which was what you spend it on incredible i'll spend it everywhere so Larry just so you know I'm well aware of everything you just said and I have no doubt about your personal integrity fact you think it is less than a quarter of people with incomes over $10 million are audited so it's just it's just not true let me ask you that everybody not true that everybody is uh that everybody is audited i get the sense Larry you're you like Doge but you don't like the execution got it ezra you talk about your book we got to move faster we got

to do things faster we got to take more risk so are you pro doge or not and if you look at the Democratic if you look at this administration I'm going to call it Trump 2.0 for clarity these are I would say two out of three people around Trump whether it's Chamont Joe Rogan Bessant Howard even uh Trump himself are Clinton Democrats so it's basically the Clinton you were going to say yourself what i don't matter ezra are you happy about Doge your book seems to be a plan to do like things i think building state capacity is two dimensions one is what the state can do and the second is the rules under which it doesn't doge seems to me to be fundamentally destructive of state

capacity first and this goes again to my endless frustration that I feel like goals are not clearly laid out in the Trump administration what are the measures we are looking at and how will they achieve them is it just trying to cution they've been very But that's not efficiency right i could save a trillion dollars no I could save a trillion dollars in ways that will make the it let's put it this way what Larry was just saying right if you cut everybody at the IRS right just cut every single one of them on the Doge measure of how much did you save in headcount that will look like it counted up towards your save a trillion dollars goal but in

terms of what Larry is saying which is the long-term efficiency of US tax collections you'd have just made the IRS much much much less efficient no no we get that but they've also cut all these software and consulting nonsense stuff i am not going to tell you that there are zero Doge cuts that made sense but I am going to say that what I see them doing overall is highly destructive state capacity or similarly a lot of things happening around USAD and say PEPAR funding um is PEPAR efficient i mean yes you save money by not giving HIV retrovirals to children in Africa but I think it is good that you do that right so that's not the kind of efficiency I'm looking for i am

interested in state capacity that is connected to achieving specific goals i've talked to a bunch of the people around Doge and again here you get a lot of different ideas of what the goals are some people say well what we're trying to do is save money but if what you wanted to do is save money you could say go to Congress and do a very big bill there was a lot of interest in Congress people like Roana who wanted to work with Doge to identify big spending cuts that both sides could agree on defense being a big being a big piece of this and then they decided not to do it so Doge to me uh is a it would be great if somebody tried it but I see this as much

more of a destruction of state capacity and a hacken slash operation larry Summers we're going to thank you for coming i know you've got to uh drop off right now thank you wait what about Larry Summers 2.0 would you like to do your Larry Summers you're Yeah before you leave I want to know what the counterfactual is yeah what's your plan Larry counterfactual is focus on necessary strategic investments in infrastructure in making America the leading country unambiguously in the world in technology particularly disseminating in large scale artificial intelligence for collective uh benefit building a larger network of alliances

so that we are in a position to counter China both with hard power in the form of increased military expenditures and with moral strength and the world as a whole uh as a whole behind us as a central organizing theme of uh foreign policy and reinvent our education system at uh every level to pick up on Ezra's notion of being about results and doing all of that while you're doing the abundance agenda as uh well of freeing stuff up so that we're in a position uh for governments to get things done i believe the country is best governed from the center not best governed from a radical fringe and I believe moving to a

transactional model of leadership is the approach of Latin American strong men and history does not find it to be a successful model and so I would venerate rather than denigrate the rule of law as part of governing the country all right there you have it folks larry Summers appreciate you coming on the pod thank you Larry spicy spicy episode here sax you wanted a chance to respond on the Doge issue as as we wrap wow pretty productive episode yeah let me um let me partially agree with Ezra here i mean I think that uh he's trying to introduce this idea of an abundance agenda to the Democrat party i think that's a good

thing you know I I know you've talked about permitting reform and not tying up projects and so many hoops and so much environmental regulation and you know even DEI and all this kind of stuff so I think that is all well and good i mean we should we should do those things the thing that I take issue with is that you're on the one hand saying that there's way too much process around just getting things done right when you're talking about public works but the objection you're making to Elon is that he's not following enough process you know it's not enough nicities larry called it mindless savagery this is the problem is how do you expect anything to ever get done the

reason why your public works projects don't happen is because there's too many special interests who get organized and they stop it okay what Elon is trying to do we have a $2 trillion annual deficit he's trying to figure out how to cut it every single program that gets cut the interests who receive that money and we found out that it's hopelessly corrupt you know Stacy Abrams gets uh $2 billion for her nonprofit and you have all these NOS's who are basically cashing in they're all going to do everything in their power to stop those cuts from happening and they're the ones who are jinning up this hysteria you know burning down car dealerships and so

forth and so on so this is the problem that I see is that you don't really have a kind word to say for the people who are actually getting things done who actually are reforming things elon is one who's actually making difference can you can you find any good in this i mean you you sound like you're cherrypicking you when when I brought it up and I questioned you like "Do you support Doge?" Your first thing is to say like "Well here's my favorite pet projects i want to keep those." But yes right like this is I think really important and weirdly it's the through line of almost everything I've said on the show today knowing what you are trying to achieve

is the first part of achieving it so if Doge is cutting things that I think do good in the world I'm not going to say "Hey look they're making the government more efficient we no longer have a you know a strong uh foreign aid program or whatever it might be they've destroyed the Department of Education without knowing what they're cutting there." I don't think Doge is doing a good job because I don't think they have in a in a thoughtful way connected means and ends and weirdly my critique often of Democrats is also that they have not been outcomes focused they've been process focused so David's point here is actually not been the critique I've made

here i would make procedural criticisms of Doge but there's a world in which my take on Doge is look I agree with what they are trying to do but I wish they would follow the law but that's not my take on Doge you have to pick Kla Harris continuing the spending that was going on or Elon and Doge cutting which would you choose i would absolutely I would absolutely prefer the Kla Harris administration to the Trump administration would I like to see Democrats be significantly more reformist yes I've written a book about it i'm trying to persuade them of of this argument but your book is about getting rid of this red tape and you just said you want to keep the people

who put us hold on you just you you say you want change this is radical change i agree but you just said you would rather have had the person and the administration that put 9 trillion on top of this this is why you'll never get that change ezra you guys all invited me here you'll never get the abundance agenda that you want because it's people like Elon or Trump who get things done this is the way that politics work you have to have a paradigm shift to get what you want i think getting dumb things done is not good change right i I I I actually don't understand how this point is so hard to gro if you get a lot of change and the change is bad I'm going to think that is

bad not good i would hope that is true for all of you that if Kla Harris or some other Democrat came in and began wrecking things that you wouldn't say well we needed a bunch of change like let's break everything in sight i want to see things done well there should be good permitting reform so let me give you let me give you an example of the kind of thing that I am looking for we talked about chips a bunch on this show i like the chips act i did a big piece that coined the term everything bagel liberalism about the way in which the ideas inside that act when they began building out the grant program layered on too many standards and and programs and so on but one thing they then did

was they passed a bill or Biden signed a bill by Ted Cruz and Mark Kelly uh taking chips out of the normal uh environmental review because they said look if this is a matter of national security and we're trying to build these semiconductor fab so quickly we cannot have this layered in years of environmental review which now take on average 3 and 1 half to four and a half years so because I care a lot about clean energy one of my arguments is that we should have a speedrun for clean energy it should not go through the normal levels of review what is happening in California highspeed rail where it had 12 years of environmental review was not in my view a good idea at

the same time that doesn't force me to say well I think we should build a bunch of coal plants without environmental review because I can make distinctions between things I want to see happen in the world and things I don't i think you're totally right with that let me give you the more practical day-to-day example because those are these albatross projects that are largely a byproduct of ineptitude and corruption but let me tell you a more tactical example so that you can understand why what Elon and Trump are doing is so necessary so as I told you in 2020 on the back end of COVID I started a business to build battery cathode active material in the United States okay so

that's a business we need so that when you want to electrify everything you want to electrify there are batteries that we can make that's not reliant on the Chinese supply chain it made sense the guy that I started it with worked for Elon the other guy I started it with was a professor at Stanford and the third guy I started it with was the head of battery engineering at Toyota a more complete group of people I think you couldn't put together so we start to build we get a deal with General Motors so far so good but eventually you hit a point where in order to really commercialize you need some form of government acknowledgement that you're good and the way that you do that is you

apply to the DOE and the DOE has a very legitimate grant program that tries to accelerate these key things especially things that are critical we went through that program Ezra we paid a couple million dollars in consulting fees to the people that we were told to pay it to and we were rejected okay fine kept going i kept funding the business and then next year last year we applied again 125 companies applied 25 were shortlisted we all went through incredible diligence we won incredible validation at the end of that entire process so really two years from when I started and millions of dollars we got a hund00 million federal grant from the DOE and $50 million from Michigan to

build a plant in Michigan to help redmesticate battery cam in the United States it turned out that in that same period while we were going through that rigomearroll Stacy Abrams got $2 billion after 30 days and I just asked the question what is broken inside of the government that that's possible that us it's hopelessly corrupt that's exactly right a company of 50 people 50 people where none of this money goes into our pockets we take that money and we then have to raise more money i have to put in more money we try to hire people we try to build a battery factory that can basically give us resilience against the

Chinese which I think is great they're an incredibly forward you know strong and viable competitor in 30 days she got 20 times more than we did how do you explain it so here's what I'll say on here's what I'll say on the two things and how do you fix it i have not myself looked deeply into the Stacy Abrams story but I'm very skeptical of the accounts I keep hearing about it i suspect that if she had made $2 billion in 30 days she wouldn't be now hosting a podcast on crooked media she'd be on an island somewhere so I can't comment on that piece of crooked media yeah what I Yeah the America thing it's a joke from Donald Trump actually i don't know the

broader thing here though right which is you're getting at you're frankly what I worry about is that what you had in that DOE process was fairly quick for the government one of the things that I am targeting in the book is a way that even when members of the administration when governors want things to happen they are not willing to upend the process to pass the new bills to reconstruct the architecture of the federal or the state government to get it to happen jerry Brown and Gavin Newsome wanted highspeed rail can't you acknowledge Can't you acknowledge it's insane that somebody

can get $2 billion after 30 days i I I am not going to acknowledge a story I have not looked into myself because I'm not sure I trust the account of it i don't think it's I don't think it's crazy i don't think it's crazy to get the money after 30 days but it depends on whether or not the process was good hold on i want I want to stop before you guys move around to a bunch of like random people the thing that I want to stay on with abundance for a minute here is that the thing that I think would be useful to do is actually build legislation to make these processes work more quickly with more discretion from decision makers and then oversight after the fact rather than heavy process

before the fact i was talking to somebody highly involved in the royal broadband programs under O Biden and one of the things they were saying to me was that there is this entire uh edifice as he put it of policy that is here to make sure I do nothing wrong what would be better and I think this is right is to allow me to act more and then look afterwards to see if I did something wrong and then hold me accountable for it i think too much of our regulation is precautionary as opposed to being able to to let people move quickly and make decisions in the real world and then go back and see how they worked out all right i I think that's a a great point

and I agree with you on that and I think there are a lot of people out there who would say that government's too too bureaucratic there's too much red tape in terms of getting things done any kind of project like the rural broadband takes 15 steps three of them were DEI that's crazy the environmental reviews and the lawsuits that bog these projects down for years make them unfinancable there are people who agree with you on that you know what they're called republicans republicans agree with this but you know who doesn't agree with you aoc and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders so maybe you're in the wrong party because I don't think you're

going to convince Democrats of this well we'll see well I wish you well in that i hope you do i appreciate that yeah no I do i I think if you can convince Democrats of this I think it'd be a great thing but look this is my issue with some of what you and and Larry are saying is that you want Elon and Trump to abide by all of these procedural nicities you want them to play by saying Marath of Queenberry rules you keep saying this is my view but it's not my view you know who get things done and this is what we say in Silicon Valley you know who get things done disruptive people founders founder mentalities

they're the ones who get things done your response Ezra as we wrap here i know you have to go getting dumb things done quickly is not a good idea and that is why Starlink is a much better idea than rural broadband neither are batteries batteries are not dumb things you're asking me about what Trump and and Musk are doing right now we started here on the tariffs what what you're watching with Trump is using expanded tariff authorities to do things that have a bad process behind them and will have a bad set of outcomes so look I've asked you many many times here i don't really feel like I got the set of metrics I was looking for but we will maybe talk again in 2 or 3 years and we

can decide together was this genius work by the disruptors or was this a really really dumb approach to economic policy what was the issue with the metrics that I gave you Ezra you don't think they're I I I don't think I don't think they're You want the unit of measurement kilogram i don't think they're remotely complete i think you're processing us you're doing to us exactly what the government bureaucrats did to rural broadband what's your metric how long is it going to take you to deploy this we have to go through a checklist yeah exactly come on these are debate tactics here's all you need to know Ezra it's a

hundred bucks to get Starlink it's 15,000 to do fiber we're trying to debate principles and you're trying to bog it down in procedural arguments hold on this is amazing to me do you really think saying to you in 2 years what are three or four metrics that would give you what you gave me doesn't fit the pol I mean look we don't need to do this whole thing again but what you gave me doesn't fit the policy it's just re-industrialization hold on we said that we want to re-industrialize America in critical industries especially and reduce our dependence on foreign supply chains that are based in potential adversary countries that's concrete enough as well those are basic a

sufficient objective Because the other thing that I the part of you the part of it that I did not hear things seems to be measured was okay where is the economy right there's got to be some cost you don't want to pay so what metric would you want I'd like to see like okay GDP growth has been X I would like positive GDP growth and we want resiliency for those four critical industries amongst others okay and and it be nice for the trade deficits to come down and you know especially with certain countries get back to work then we're all going to get back to work we got the four critical industries we got the GDP increase and uh yeah trade deficits yeah it's it's an

open debate all right Ezra Klein's new book Abundance is out in fine bookstores and Amazon and all kinds of other places you can get it and you can hear him on podcasts incessantly when are you going to stop this podcast for Ezra oh my god I know man it's growth industry one of the last absolutely all right we'll talk to you soon Ezra bye y'all thanks for having me thanks Ezra all right thanks Ezra how do you think the debate went i think is a good debate to have and we made progress here the paradox of all of this is what they're describing in some ways is what Trump and Elon are doing yes but it's a it's a bit too hot so if I were to give a criticism or room for

improvement to the current administration to maybe pull some of these people over it's basically slowing down and explaining what's going on a bit better i give the administration like I give Doge an A++ it's obvious like they're doing the right thing i give the communication like a B like just increase the communication and you can see they're doing that antonio went out and talked a bit about Doge they did a a round table and they're updating the website faster the more you do that the less the opposition's mind is going to wander the same thing with the tariffs if the terrorists if if Bent was out

there front and center every day talking about methodically what their plan was instead of the shock and awe I think people would be able to process it quickly let me just add one person's opinion okay I like that obviously you can always say that communication should be better but but here's the reality of it take Doge for example you have crazy leftists firebombing Tesla dealerships painting swastikas on Tesla cars accosting Tesla drivers okay creating violence and chaos and trying to depress Tesla's sales okay and who's to blame for that and then what people say is well somehow Elon's the disruptive figure here you have a crazy leftwing

that's reacting in crazy ways to sensible things that Doge is doing and then what people do is they reinterpolate this chaos that's being created by the left they somehow put the blame for that on Elon i think your uh explanation there is even more reason to be proactively communicating decisions so and that doesn't forgive anybody drawing SWAT stickers on Teslas obviously they should go to jail and if anybody's coordinating it that should be like a RICO case and we should find out who it is just if we're going to bring these two parties together which I think we came close to here of like finding some common ground I think Chimath you outlining your four bullets and then at

the end Ezra saying well what what's the impact on GDP and then you adding to that sax well what's the you know input on the trade difference for the first time you know these two sides I think we outlined what should happen what should the measure be in two years are have we on shored those important industries is GDP P robust and is the trade deficit deficit more balanced this is the same debate we always had over immigration let's pick a number and work towards a number right and and that's where the debate in our country breaks down in my mind is that we don't pick numbers we can agree that we need a ton of innovation segue Jason go hey uh Chimath I saw that you were at the breakthrough

prize ceremony over the weekend sorry I couldn't make it Yuri i uh I had family stuff but Freeberg was there as well and uh as everybody knows this is the breakthrough prize is like kind of the Oscars for science they had hundreds of guests there and uh about a third of them were scientists a third were tech founders and you had a bunch of Hollywood folks there hosted by James Cordon and you had Jeff Bezos Yuri Milner as I mentioned Zuck Vin Diesel Sergey and Gwennneth uh and Mr beast lots of excitement there and I know David you were at a secret conference that uh also I was almost invited to that um you met Gwennneth Paltro friend of the pop jason my Nick you can show

some photos here oh we do have photos okay I know why don't you show them my wife sent me a letter to read on the air so let me just open this up here is this an open letter what's the letter to oh my okay dear Gwennneth Paltro oh jeez just a open a love letter to Gwennneth okay I'm just going to read this here last night when I met you I learned in that moment that pherommones are not a myth they are real and apparently trademarked by you you have the kind of femininity that could destabilize the stock market i left the encounter slightly dazed unsure if it was your presence or an as of yet unlisted goop candle okay wait let's just stop here let me just mansplain what she's trying

to say here guys wait are you saying she's got a girl gwenneithro crashed the stock market gwennneth Paltro is hot as balls okay that's the Troy are you saying she crashed the mark she has so much aura and rez david you have to I mean I don't know if we have the picture where David met her at the JPM conference but she is so kind she's got high EQ but I I I got to say so cool i have to say like I've met a lot of stars that's like a star star that's a star star where you're just like "Holy shit." You're just kind of like a little bit in awe she's Oh she's a star she's a star look at that there she is fifth bestie Gwennneth Paltro GO nat was stunned nat

was stunned i was stunned we were all stunned so wait are you saying that Nat has a girl crush i think so a girl crush has been declared here for the first time on Allin we have an official girl crush what I think is just remarkable Jason though is that another conference lost your invitation in the mail i mean it just keeps happening you got to talk to the post office about all these invites i my White House invite this uh your mailman he must hate you or something i don't know i got to get invited to something i think you're the party i guess I'll see everybody in F1 you're a great You're a great family man so at least you're But you're always busy with your family so I think people Well I try

to prioritize the fam i got young girls just what am I supposed to do you know oh my gosh big shout out big shout out to Yuri and Julia Milner I think uh yes incredible and what they're doing to inspire people to get into science is just so you know you know they the awards are enormous it's like $3 million awards which I think is just kind of like it's an amazing reflection of how important this stuff is and every so for the last two years also had a little tear had to shed a little tear because they do these things where like you know you you bring some of these folks that have been impacted positively there was a girl who had her jeans edited she was literally on on her deathbed and this

guy David Lou who won the Breakthrough Prize did a very targeted gene edit she's alive and thriving and she gets to present the award to him and you're just like "Oh my god it's you know Sax when he said he was shedding a tear or almost shed a tear." I thought he was going to say he saw his reflection in his tuxedo and just got a little choked up about it because of how good he looked roth does look good in that photo put it back up put it back up let's see what are you wearing the silhouette the silhouette on your tuxedo is just uh outstanding that so Nat So Nat's wearing Armani P and I'm wearing Laura Piana which is like a double breasted they make a double

breasted wow i didn't know they made that cashmere cashmere tuxedo i I cannot comment on the material choice because it was just that is absolutely wow that's a gorgeous garment well actually you know Freedberg was going to be on the program today but then he found out how many endangered species were murdered did you Did you see that nick do you have the picture of us with Zoe Sana oh there's Austin Friedberg oh Freeberg looks good oh there's Zoe Sana the Mr beast and her husband who's the guy with the man bun marco Paraggo great guy this is Zoe Sana's husband a cooler funnier fun dude you're not going to That guy should be at every party really bun huh he definitely looks like he's

carrying look at Look at Zoe Sana's uh tattoo in her on her chest i don't know if that's I want to see if that clo You know that closed guy on X who's always critiquing Republicans oh he's awesome i love I wonder yeah Derrick or whatever I want to I want to know if he how he responds well that's terrible Mr beast fails but I want to know how he responds to your tuxedo Jamath and finally gives you credit because I think he he only compliments Democrats is sort of the problem oh is he really not uh yeah he's always picking on Republicans jimmy looking Did you guys see the picture of Julia's dress i just want to say one thing about Julius did you see Julia's dress i I haven't let's take a look here

this is an insane story so this is Julia Milner so the cool thing about this guys is this is this is a very incredible and famous painting by Raphael called the school of Athens yes this is like a a visual manifesto of human knowledge and so there's all these very important people Aristotle Plato Socrates Pythagoreia Pythagoras etc anyways she got the license I think from like the Vatican and then she worked with Dolce and Gabbana to make it into a dress for the occasion just to celebrate learning but there she is with with our boy Jimmy Donaldson so anyways it was a great event thank you Yuri and Julia for including us all right guys i gota wrap

all right David i miss you thanks for the invite all right bye i will handel Jason's invitation for 20 seconds i'm pretty sure i mean I I have a phone number you could text me the invite i could You could send me a calendar i have a Gcal i've got a Google calendar you could invite have a good so funny that that event that Sax was at one of our mutuals was like "Hey guys this incredible event's going on this famous person's hosting it these celebrities are coming jay Cal Freeberg everybody you're all invited." And then like two weeks before they went I was like "Um are we going to this thing?"

Cuz I'm just like my calendar and everything they're like "Ah yeah yeah the event's happening." And I'm like "Fo you Jason did you send the event?" And they're like they're like I'm not sure you're my ride or die you're my ride or die texting me the invite but you didn't email it okay sure i will never go to an event that rejects you ever like a ride or die baby for our chairman dictator another exceptional episode of the all-in podcast we'll see you all next week byebye we'll let your winners ride rainman David and it said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it love you [Music] besties [Music] are my dog taking notice your driveways

oh man my appetiter will meet the ugly we should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow your feet we need to get merch i'm going all [Music] in i'm going all in