Billionaire Besties: How Tech Titans Save the World (While Complaining About Food Stamps)
Fresh from unbuckling their seatbelts on the Gliding Guru luxury jet and mooring the show’s mega-yacht, our decoders are feeling an unexpected surge of empathy for their last decoding subject, Gary Stevenson. It turns out that a bit of jet-lagged decadence really hones one's sensitivity to wealth inequality. Or maybe it’s just the natural response to voluntarily subjecting yourself to the truly insufferable world of the All-In podcast.That's right, this week you can vibe to the philosophical musings of a couple of Silicon Valley moguls, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, and David Friedberg or as they call themselves: the Dictator, the Rainman, the Moderator, and the Sultan (yes, really).Revel in their tales of private jets, $500K club memberships, and their noble quest to cut food stamps while engaging in hyper-elitist MAGA cheerleading. Plug in for a first-class tour through cognitive dissonance, private-jet populism, and your regular prescription of alternative media grievance mongering and conspiracy hypothesising.Perfect for anyone who enjoys listening to the top 0.01% share their insights and deep connection with the common man's struggles. Enjoy... because we certainly did not!SourcesAll-In Podcast: Trump's First 100 Days, Tariffs Impact Trade, AI Agents, Amazon Backs DownAll-In Podcast: Trump wins! How it happened and what's nextAll-In Podcast: The Great Tariff Debate with David Sacks, Larry Summers, and Ezra KleinAll-In Podcast Website
We're an anthropologist and a psychologist listening to the greatest minds the world has to offer and we try to understand what they're talking about.
I'm Matt Brown, CEO and Chief Executive of DecodingTheGurus.com.
With me is my junior shareholder, silent partner, committee member, Chris Kavanagh.
Welcome, Chris.
I'm your quant.
You're a financial analyst.
Yeah.
You are anything but a quant, my friend.
You flew in on your private jet.
You just made it into the recording studio.
We want to announce to all our listeners we're going to have a big party at the Madison Square Garden.
Tickets round about a grand each.
You get to play chess and listen to Deadmau5.
Spin the decks.
Could spin the decks.
He's an electronic DJ, but I'm sure he spins decks as well.
That's right.
If you want to rub shoulders with me and Chris, you can join, you know, a private club.
You know, the membership fee is hefty.
100K, maybe 500K.
But, you know, it keeps the riffraff out.
You know, come sit there and overstuff leather couches and smoke cigars with us and we'll talk about serious business.
That's right.
That's right.
No.
We'll get to that.
We'll get to that.
But there's a couple of things we need to take care of up front, one of which is a podcast advertisement, announcement, call for help, plea to the listeners, whatever you want to put out.
This is just that we have a YouTube channel.
Matt and I cannot edit videos.
We have editor Andy, who...
And he also has many other editing duties with his Beyond Synth podcast and other kinds of things.
So we are looking for somebody else who might want to help out with making video content from the podcast.
Now, we're mentioning this in a podcast because presumably then it will be somebody that listens to the podcast and understands the tone and would get the general thing.
You'd be working with Editor Andy and whatnot as well.
And the general thing that he said was it would be helpful if it was a person who can use Premiere Pro, right?
Which I think is a fairly standard thing.
And yeah, so if you send us an email to decodingthegurus at gmail.com and if you happen to be like an editor and somebody that you don't know how to do that.
Just contact us and let us know.
And also, helpfully, your rates, because Matt and I are not business people, right?
So if you just tell us this is how much it costs to do things, then, yeah, that would be helpful.
So, yeah, that's my call for submissions for anybody that has an interest in helping us make video content, right?
Okay.
Yep, yep.
That's right.
The content must flow.
I'm going to pay you on them.
We'll pay them.
Yeah, they get that, Chris.
They get that.
Yeah, okay, they got that.
It's not a Gary volunteer system, okay?
You will be reimbursed for your efforts.
You should announce it like a LinkedIn-type, corporate-style job.
Like, if you're passionate about making content flow.
Then join our exciting, dynamic team.
If you like removing ums and ahs and editing our glitches and retakes, then boy, do I have a position for you.
Yeah, yeah.
So if you want to be a contributor to the good ship, the good ship, DTT, send us an email.
No promises.
No promises, okay?
But I will look at the emails that people send.
So, yeah.
Hopefully somebody out there has time and motivation.
Now, Chris, you and I have talked about our shared love of Garth Marenghi.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
Author, savant.
Dreamweaver.
Dreamweaver that he is.
And, you know, him and other characters like Alan Partridge are pretty good in terms of forming the fictional base from which Yeah, yeah.
For people who don't know, Garth Marenghi is a kind of fictional horror writer, like a kind of Stephen King figure, but there's TV shows parodying his lack of self-awareness and kind of self-aggrandizement, narcissism and whatnot.
So just like Aunt Partridge, he's kind of a narcissistic, wannabe guru type.
But that's part of the comedy.
So, like, the comedy is Beers the Round, him, like, yeah, thinking that he's much smarter and, yeah, like, insightful than he is.
So, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, we talked about doing, like, a, you know, just for a bit of fun at the end of the year, covering that.
People were talking about it on Reddit too.
I was really happy to see on Reddit someone said, I've just...
Something good on Reddit.
I've just come across Garth Marenghi and oh my god this is exactly like a I mean It is.
Good.
Good connection.
Yeah, so you're suggesting we could do decoding of the fictional author slash guru Garth Merengue.
I think it does sound like something interesting, although the role that it puts us in is like trading.
comedic presentation of Akuru as a serious figure but you know we can why not We can try this.
What is this podcast about, if not about experimenting?
It's about experimenting, pushing boundaries.
Look, we'll play around with the format.
Maybe we'll just do a listen-along and do a quick gurometer thing at the end.
Who knows?
But I just want to watch Garth Marenghi again.
Good books, by the way.
Listen to the audiobooks by Garth Marenghi, Terratome, and so on.
Aren't they good fun?
How are you going?
How's your personal life going?
Chris, any exciting developments?
None.
There's nothing.
Nothing.
Things continue as usual on my side of fence.
Plus, I'm aware, Matt, that there's no such a coding.
So anything that I would say, I would just withhold to the supplementary material.
So you don't get nothing from me.
Nothing.
I'm fine.
How are you?
All right.
I'll keep it very brief because we can't talk much here.
We're not lied.
Exciting day today because my wife is heading down south to collect a pair of dogs.
Oh, well, I think we get an exception for new family members.
So we're going to have two new doggles.
Yeah.
Now, what are they called again?
I've already forgotten the breed.
Border Collies.
Border Collies.
Yep.
And they're from Pet Rescue.
They're rescue dogs, Jazzy and OJ.
And they're about 10 years old.
They're aged dogs.
They're entering their golden years.
And so am I, really.
So I think it's a good fit.
They can come here and hang out and relax here and go to the beach and stuff.
Encourage me and Mitch to go for a walk every now and again.
The other thing that's going on, Chris, is at this very moment, There is exciting new pizza dough fermenting on the thing.
I'm about to move it into the fridge where it's going to cold ferment for like 48 hours.
I'm making Neapolitan style pizza dough.
I made a thing called a poolish.
Do you know what a poolish is?
No.
You don't want to know.
Anyway, it's just part of what goes into this dough.
Because, you know, my pizzas are good.
You've seen photographs.
People on Twitter have seen photographs.
They're good, but they could be better.
They're a bit variable.
So I decided I needed to science the shit out of it.
And by science the shit out of it, I mean, I watched some videos on YouTube and asked the AI for a recipe.
But even so, I've got high hopes.
Well, this is something that you can report back on, on the supplementary material, if it was successful or not.
Not the dog.
The dog will be successful, but the dough.
That's right.
That's right.
Everyone, you're going to need to subscribe to the Patreon if you want to know.
If you want to find out.
If you want to hear the end of this story, you've only heard the beginning.
What could happen?
If you want to know how the dough turns out, how's the pizza?
You've got to subscribe.
If you don't subscribe, we're going to return the dogs.
And Matt, you have to remember then that you can't update it until like after 30 or 40 minutes into the next episode because otherwise they will hear it.
Oh, no.
You can't.
We've got to game plan this out.
This is the real goal.
Well, that's good, but I hope the dogs turn out well.
I had a Border Collie-Jack Russell mix as my first dog when I was a kid.
It was very nice.
Skullpoint, sir.
Was it a bit mental?
It was a bit mental.
Yes, it was a bit mental, but a very good dog.
So I think your dogs will be good, and good for you rescuing them from the center.
This is a moral ground standing at this is virtue signaling.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
It's straight up.
It's virtue signaling in the best possible sense.
Actually, I can't take any credit for the virtue.
It's entirely my wife's idea.
But, you know, I'm on board with it.
I'm on board with it, Chris.
I'm okay with it.
I'm fine with it.
You're contributing.
You're part of this family unit.
I'm paying the very steep adoption fee.
You have the vino power, Matt.
You could put your foot down and say, no, and probably the dog should come out.
I'm not sure about that.
Good.
All right.
No more of this.
We need to talk about these fascinating gentlemen, these fine, exciting gentlemen.
Who are they, Chris?
What's the deal?
Introduce them.
So the All In podcast started during COVID, I believe.
And like the name suggests, I didn't know this, by the way, Phil, I started listening to it.
It's called the All In podcast because it came out of them playing poker together.
So they were playing poker together and having chats and whatnot.
And then they realized this is too much insightful shit to keep to ourselves.
We gotta spread this out over the interwar.
People need to know this.
The concept of the podcast in general is that, right, that it's for guys getting together who are friends to discuss stuff.
And in particular, they are tech investors and entrepreneurs.
They're all billionaires or multimillionaires or whatever.
I think they're all variations of billionaires, but you have a guy, Chamath, Jason Calacanis, David Sachs, who now...
These are the four, as they term themselves, Matt, besties.
The besties.
That's right.
And they have designated nicknames as well.
Chamath is the dictator.
Jason's the moderator.
David Sachs is the rain man.
David Friedberg is the sultan.
Yeah.
So, you know, that gives you the vibe.
And, you know, I think it's, well, hopefully you're going to play their theme music, I think.
Why don't they play it now?
Why don't they let people enjoy that?
After all, why shouldn't they?
Yeah, here we go.
Here's their intro music.
Okay, let's start.
Let your winners ride.
Rain Man, David Sack.
And it said, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy.
Love you, guys.
Queen of Kinoa.
I'm going all in.
That gives you the sense of it.
I don't know.
I think that actually captures what it's about because they are these sort of Silicon Valley tech type people.
And it's a, Let's not jump into it.
Well, shall we not?
Can I just say that this robs me the wrong way.
I really fucking hate that intro music.
I hate it more than the classical.
It sounds like the intro music to The Apprentice.
And if you look at the visuals, it's also just insufferable.
So I'm just saying, this is not for me.
This does not rub me well.
And the general vibe that you get is like kind of, Porn or wealth porn.
It's kind of like these guys are super wealthy, super successful.
You're getting to listen in on, you know, the insider discussion around big geopolitics, business talk, all this kind of thing from these super successful billionaire types, right?
So that's the vibe.
Now, they start every episode as well with a little cold open where...
And we should also say, Matt, that the episodes we're looking at, there's a couple.
We're looking at one which is Trump's first 100 days.
That's from relatively recently, about two weeks ago.
We're looking at an episode that they recorded back when Trump won, the kind of, okay, Trump won, now what?
And an episode where...
So the episodes might be a little bit heavy on politics and stuff, but actually that's fairly representative because if you go and look, a lot of what they're talking about is that kind of thing.
Yes, it's about business, but it's also quite a lot about just current events, particularly around Trump administration, be it some stuff like culture war stuff as well.
Yeah, and they get big guests, people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump himself, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
So they're definitely, like as an anthropological little journey, it is a glimpse into this particular new MAGA, new conservative, new elite type world, right?
Yeah, well, we'll get to that.
It definitely is that, but I think one of the ways that it's presented is that it's actually like four guys with You know, you've got Jason, who's more liberal.
You've got David Sachs, who's like a MAGA conservative.
You've got other guys who lean more libertarian.
And Chamuff was a, you know, Obama supporter and all this kind of thing.
But that's not really accurate.
We'll get into the diversity of opinions that you come across here.
But to give a bit more of the vibe.
Okay, so this is like from one of those cold open things.
Yeah, right.
We'll start out with a little housekeeping and then we'll get into it.
So like and subscribe on YouTube.
YouTube.com slash at All In.
We're trying to hit a million subscribers.
Don't forget the holiday party.
Allin.com slash events.
It is Saturday, December 7th in SF.
We have a couple of great announcements for the holiday party, which I think we are spending way too much money on.
Steve Aoki will be DJing.
Nice!
Andrea Botez will be there doing the opening DJ set, and her sister Alex will be joining us as well.
Andrea and Alex will also be playing the Botez sisters.
We're going to have a chess tournament during the party, which will be super fun.
Sax, you can get in on that.
Challenge Alex Botez or David Sax to chess.
Yeah.
And at the end of one of these episodes, they're sharing photographs of mingling with Gwyneth Paltrow at some gala event and stuff.
So it's definitely, you know, the bold and the beautiful, the great and the good mingling together, you know, in this like very, you know, not techno, but, you know, DJs and this kind of thing.
Do you know who the Botez sisters or Andrea Botez is?
you wouldn't.
Not really.
She's a streamer and a chess streamer.
A young woman, quite attractive, who's got a following from streaming chess, but part of the appeal is And she's also a DJ.
But that just speaks to me about like, she is not a political type person, right?
You don't see her commenting on this kind of thing.
But this podcast actually is fairly political.
So this thing where, you know, the kind of streamers and DJs and...
Like, it strikes me as a kind of odd thing, but I don't think it's odd at all for, like, the tech world.
No, for this brave new world that is America, I don't think it's weird.
It feels incongruous to me, like, these four rich guys, VC.
Entrepreneurs are people who are also besties with their little nicknames playing the, you know, dance music and stuff.
And, you know, their politics is more and more, I guess, aligned with that kind of new, you know, it's like Elon Musk's type politics.
It's this new MAGA thing, but it's also got a very sort of...
Only in America can you combine such trappings of wealth and privilege with a grassroots populist message.
So this party that they're talking about, just a little bit more to illustrate that point.
Buy some tickets.
How much is this costing us?
A million bucks?
The odds are we're going to lose money on this.
How many tickets are we selling?
Not enough, apparently.
Not enough, yeah.
What's the total attendance size?
Sachs, you just won the White House.
I think you're fine, bro.
Anyone can do this math.
How big is the theater, and what are we charging for the tickets?
Well, it's not a theater, so the tickets are like 500 bucks, I think.
I love you being the moderator and taking all the arrows.
This is great.
I'm never moderating again.
Well, it's the PFA.
Remember where they used to have the Exploratorium, that building where they built for the World's Fair or whatever?
So it's in there, and it's all empty.
So we're kind of taking that.
We're building a stage inside.
We're going to build all the set and everything.
Yeah, it should be fun.
I won't be there, but it sounds great.
If you could take some pictures, Saks would love to see.
Unless it's Mar-a-Lago, Saks will not show up.
I want to just congratulate.
It's like, oh, we're spending a million dollars?
I won't be there.
Next!
Yeah, so I think one of the subtexts there is And they can charge $500 for a ticket for this.
Yeah, and they could lose money on it and it doesn't really matter.
There's frequent references to the elite schools they send their kids to and the private jets that they zip around in and the luxury.
Yeah, I have a clip to illustrate that as well.
I got to wrap, guys.
I got to catch a flight to Miami.
Let me do a closing here if you want to keep going.
You're welcome, two, three, two.
Plain just waits, just text the pilot and just tell them you're...
I'm kidding.
Wait, you're worried about missing a flight?
Everything and then putting it on the all-in budget and the rest of us are flying Southwest.
For your chairman dictator, Jermoth Polyopathy.
They're gonna miss a flight?
It's a strange concept.
Yeah, David, what does that mean?
David, when's the last time you flew commercial?
I haven't missed a flight in about 15 years.
Well, I want to shoot myself when I hear that music, but like, you know, I know this is just commenting on this aesthetic thing, right?
But it's...
It's the fact that so many people want to hear them do this.
And are kind of vicariously enjoying the displays of ostentatious wealth.
This is a general thing where there's a lot of people that aspire to be extremely wealthy.
But I also think there is something to it that strikes me as distinctly American, which is kind of reveling in the level of ostentatious wealth that you have and that the people in your audience don't have that wealth, but they're enjoying just imagining having it.
Something like that.
I don't get it, because to me, this more makes you seem like an asshole, right?
That normally, in the UK, people are trying to downplay their level of out-of-touchness when they're extremely wealthy, right?
But here, they seem to kind of play it up.
Yeah, yeah, it is distinctly American, and I don't think we have anything.
Comparative in Australia.
But I guess, yeah, what you say is right, that the idea that you're a fly on the wall with four besties who are super hip, super cool, super successful, super rich.
Yeah, that played a big role, I think, in the success of this podcast.
It started just a few years ago in COVID and very quickly become one of the most popular ones in the world.
We'll get into the content now, I guess.
But yeah, I mean, judge for yourself whether or not the substance is there.
Yeah, there's more.
There's more, Matt.
A little bit more, this aesthetic.
Because it's a big part of the podcast.
But you know, the last person that we covered was Gary, right?
Who frequently mentioned that he'd earned millions, right?
That he's a millionaire.
But you have to bear in mind that these guys are billionaires, right?
So this is way beyond.
The level of individual traders.
So this level of wealth is like the top, top, top, top, 0.5% or whatever.
I think it's worth bearing that in mind.
And another illustration of this is that they were talking about a new private club.
They're kind of ribbing each other about it, right?
But David Sachs and Don Jr. and whatnot are establishing a new manga.
Private club.
So here's a little bit of chat about that.
I mean, literally, it's interesting.
There's a new private club.
It's incredible that you have thoroughly prepared for this week, just like always.
I am always prepared.
Interestingly, I don't know if you gentlemen know this, Ryan and Aaron, there's a new private club in D.C. that Don Jr. is doing, and Sax is a member, Chamath's a member, and I just checked my Gmail.
I checked all three of my Gmail accounts, everything.
No invite.
You must have gotten lost again.
Did you send a paper one?
Was it like you sent a gold card or something, Sax?
How do I get invited to this private club?
What is this private club?
Everybody wants to know.
Well, we'll be happy to have you as a guest.
Okay.
Do I have to wear MAGA hats?
Do I have the courtesy MAGA hats at the door?
If you want to be a member, obviously there are dues and a membership fee, and I just didn't want to waste your time with an offer that I knew you wouldn't be willing to accept.
It's only $500,000 is what I read.
Is that true?
That's true for founding members who have additional benefits, but there's also a lower level that's the more reasonable membership level.
So I think people are getting a little bit carried away with that number.
Got it.
That's what I wanted to clarify.
Yeah, there's like 10 founding members who have that level, and then there's a lower level for a more average member.
Chamatha, are you one of those 10?
Yes.
Yeah, they talk about these private clubs and how cool it is to have these places to go where you're not going to be...
Very simple.
We want a place to hang out in D.C. All of us have been to clubs like The Battery or, I don't know if you go to L.A., like the best places.
There's Malibu Beach House.
There's Bird Street Clubs.
There are places in Palm Beach that are really cool.
In any event, we wanted a place to hang out, and the clubs that exist in Washington today They're kind of old and stuffy.
To the extent there are Republican clubs, they tend to be like more Bush-era Republicans as opposed to Trump-era Republicans.
So we wanted to create something new, hipper, and Trump-aligned.
Since I'm in the government, I can't be an owner, but I told him I'd be happy to be member number one.
And so I said, great, let's do it.
And so we're creating a place for us to hang out.
That's basically it.
We want a place to go where you don't have to worry that the next person over at the bar is a fake news reporter or even a lobbyist or something like that.
I think that's a good illustration of the vibe, which is a rarefied set.
Not the old stuffy type old boys networks, but the sort of new Mar-a-Lago era.
Club that is kind of developing as a result of all of this Silicon Valley, new money, paleocon stuff.
It even sounds like, you know, it just sounds horrifying.
The kind of people that would choose to spend their money in that way and want to go to that club.
You know, like I could just imagine cycling up to the club and you see Scott Adams.
Sitting down beside Peter Thiel.
I don't think Scott Adams is at that level in that ecosystem.
whoever, maybe he's in one of the lower tiers, but...
Actually, Chris, it does remind me of The one that was loosely based on Murdoch, I think.
Oh, Succession.
Succession.
Yeah, it does remind me of the kids in succession.
Yeah.
That was done really well in that show, I think, of how...
But there's also a desperate desire to be hip and cool at the same time.
It's so pathetic.
It's so fucking pathetic.
It's ridiculous.
You're supposed to be, like, when you have to have the money, I feel like it's supposed to be so you can just do whatever you want without.
The constraints about, like, you know, constantly having to demonstrate that you're hip and with it or not.
But it seems like it goes the other way for these millionaires.
It does, doesn't it?
With his gold chains and, you know.
Yeah, Donald Trump, not Donald Trump, Elon Musk with his desperate, desperate attempts.
I mean, it is really interesting, isn't it?
Like, you really would expect it to be completely the opposite.
Like, you know, just going around in flip-flops or making, like, that's how odd.
Operate?
I know.
That's how I do operate, but I'd become more so if I was richer, I think.
Well, you know, there's another thing that you hear in this, Matt, just before we get into some of the other more substantial points, in a way, that they cover.
You know, in the podcast land, you constantly hear back padding about numbers, how many downloads we're getting.
You heard them at the start saying we want to get over a million subscribers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And once again, this...
And I heard it in multiple episodes where they're talking about their level of success and popularity.
And this is just an illustrative example of that.
Off the record, didn't it?
Let's talk all about it.
There was an interesting moment, which even Friedberg had to recognize, which was we went around and said, hey, what podcast are you listening to?
Which ones are your favorites?
We went out in the room and I got to tell you, you know what your podcaster's favorite podcast is?
Bingo.
All in podcast.
Well, the funniest thing is my wife thinks I'm bullshitting all the time.
I say this is a- Mine too.
Pretty reasonably successful and well.
She doesn't believe it.
She thinks we're all bullshitting.
Why do you think I waited to make my world podcast premiere for All In?
All the ankle biters called and I said, no, I'm just going to wait.
I'm going to wait to the besties call.
Can we just say it, Nick?
You got to beat it up.
Podcast called, you're like, nope, can't do it.
Nope, sorry.
I'm waiting for the real deal.
I don't need JB.
Not that music again.
A ban on further plays about music.
Yeah, well, how much of this, though, is Chris, is you and me and our personal aesthetic preferences and cultural background?
I mean, certainly Americans have got more tolerance for this.
Rampant self-promotion bullshit That goes on But I don't know Mike Because it just speaks to me like Yeah, not all Americans.
There is a cultural aspect to it, right?
I agree with that.
But it's also just this thing that it feels incredibly...
They all do it.
And they're all constantly bringing up They're talking about a scenario where they went around the room and other podcasters talked about how their podcast was their favorite podcast, but presumably at least one of them or two of them was there to hear it.
So they don't factor in, for instance, that that might be people praising them or this kind of thing.
And then they bleep on.
The other podcast that the person mentions, right?
Because the guy says, oh, I told, beep, podcast.
No, you know, it's only joking.
But they actually are that kind of sensitive, these podcaster people, to people saying something negative.
And there's an episode where they did a thing at the introduction.
I think it's their most recent episode.
Were they they apologized for like kind of ribbing someone too much by suggesting that he didn't hang around or know famous people?
Jason, that was great.
I would just like to add a couple of things.
Phil is my best friend, has been for a very long time.
I love him.
He does have a lot of friends and he opens his Rolodex to us.
And so to the extent that Phil was hurt, because he was a little bit hurt last week because we were ribbing him.
We rib him a lot.
Jokes in the group chat a lot, but it's because we enjoy it.
He enjoys it.
But I think the way that we said it really hurt his feelings.
So, Philly, I love you.
We love you.
We love you, Phil.
We're sorry.
Sorry, Filipino.
I specifically am sorry because, to be honest, I probably started the whole thing and got everybody...
Sorry.
We love you.
Love you, Phil.
I called you a panda eating bamboo.
And I did not mean to say that you put your meat hooks into Timothee Chalamet.
And I didn't mean to say that you took credit for and didn't have a major contribution to the All In Podcast, obviously.
But Phil, honestly, you're the best.
You've been really instrumental in a lot of these important relationships that have joined our group.
So thank you, and we love you, and let's keep going, okay?
Yes, absolutely.
And it just seems like there's so much thin skin, so much need to be.
Recognized as successful.
And they're billionaires.
They're billionaires.
So like, it just, I don't know, it could be our version to this, but it also strikes me as like incredibly needy that they have to constantly bring up that they're successful and that their podcast is great and they're getting lots of downloads and all that kind of thing.
And people who listen to the podcast regularly said, this is a Yeah, I don't know.
Maybe it's a venture capitalist investor type thing where you always are talking a big game and puffing yourself up.
Maybe that's the subculture.
I don't know.
Yeah, I guess so.
Well, in any case, we've got a couple of topics that come up, right?
Which will illustrate the general tenor and what the Hosts are doing.
But I've got a theme that I want to highlight early on, Matt, in case I forget it for later.
So, as I mentioned, it is often presented that the hosts have a diverse range of political perspectives and views on different topics.
They might debate about whether tariffs are good or the extent to which the Trump administration is doing something right.
But I want to highlight, before we get to those claims about the diversity of their political opinion, their approach to conspiracy theories.
So here's a little bit.
I think this is David Sachs at first.
This is before the Trump administration had got going, really, and who they need to get in for things to work out well.
That's why the swamp people are able to maintain control.
Because the person above them who's appointed doesn't fundamentally know the inner workings of the organization.
I suspect what you're going to see is a radical push to transparency.
And I think that when you combine transparency, and Sachs called for this, a version of the Twitter files for the government, I do think you're going to see that.
But if you combine that push to transparency with a handful of topics, you know, by the way, we introduced a long time ago this idea of zero-based budgeting.
Into the lexicon and language of these political candidates that they used all the way through to the finish line.
I do believe the Republicans earnestly mean it.
And so I think when you put these two things together, Freebrook, I think what you will have is all of this laid bare.
And then I think it'll start a debate on what to do.
And I think the decisions about what to do will be so blindingly obvious.
The low-hanging fruit will save this country once we pluck it.
Can I say a word about, I think it's so important for Bobby Kennedy to be confirmed in whatever cabinet position that he's going to get.
Number one, you know, we look back at the campaign now and it seems obvious that Trump was going to win it.
But at the time that Bobby Kennedy came on board, that was a major factor in shifting momentum towards Trump.
So that's number one.
Number two, we need to keep Bobby Kennedy's coalition as part of our movement.
It's not just about what he did in this last election.
It's keeping all of those people, those young people and those former Democrats, on side and part of the Republican Party and the MAGA movement.
And number three, he's genuinely going to reform that huge part of the bureaucracy.
And that's extremely important.
We need outsiders to come in and shake things up.
He's right about the regulatory capture.
He's right about the marriage of state power and corporate greed.
Let's have someone go in there who's got fresh eyes but also understands how the bureaucracy works.
He's talking about Bobby Kennedy.
Robert F. Kennedy.
Yeah, so that was Chamoff at the start, and then that's Sachs.
Making clear that, like, you know, Trump is in, but we really, this was before RFK was confirmed, right?
We've got to get RFK in the senior position because he's got so many important insights, and he's a really key member of the coalition.
Because David Sachs is, like, all in on MAGA, right?
But I think that's worth noting there that it's not just about, like, you know, a kind of Trump thing.
David's Axe is all the way into an RFK Jr.
That's very important to him.
Yeah, yeah.
So I don't know how it was when it started out, but what I listened to, this is not a broad spectrum of views.
Not diverse in the least.
Yes, you can distinguish between the different characters there, but they're pretty much all in on MAGA overall, right?
Well, we'll get to that, Matt.
We'll get to that.
We're sticking to conspiracy world at the minute.
So that was Sachs, you know, kind of.
So you've got to hear he likes RFK Jr.
That's a really important guy to get in this senior position.
He must be happy with how things went.
I can't think of any objections to that.
We'll just let that go.
Yeah.
So now let's hear a little bit more from Chamath.
His views.
It's not just on that dimension, right?
We're going to see the Epstein files.
We're going to see the Diddy lists.
We're going to see the JFK file.
I know that these things are sort of fringe conspiracy theory type things for some people.
But the point is, from pillar to post, that first phase of this radical truth-seeking transparency is an incredible disinfectant that you can build from.
And he told the FDA, I think, something to the effect of, pack your bags and keep your records.
Now, let's take the hyperbolic part of it out.
But it's the keep your records part that should be valuable because we...
Now, when you think at the same time that you have inventions like AI that can crunch every single piece of data under the sun and tell you the absolute truth, imagine when you put transparency and the government sharing incredible amounts of information with the compute power that the Googles and the Facebooks and the open AIs of the world are creating.
You'll know these answers to all of these questions.
Vaccines, are they good or bad?
When?
How?
Fluoride, is it good or bad?
When?
How?
All of these drugs that have been approved, why?
All of these drugs that have not been approved, why?
You're going to start to see some really interesting things.
Has there been research on the impacts of food on physiology?
Were they suppressed?
Were they not suppressed?
So I think phase one is get it all out into the open.
It is incredibly revealing, I think, that little clip there.
They are all in on...
The government's got secret files on all of this stuff.
It's super important.
Probably aliens as well as Epstein and all of this.
You know, there's information locked away in there in the government.
Vaccines.
About vaccines or fluoride that Robert F. Kennedy and the power of AI to just dig into all of that.
Absolute truth, Matt.
Absolutely true.
That's insane.
Like that's an insane thing to say, that like the power of AI, to crunch all of that data allows you to arrive at absolute truth.
It's such a naive view of what AI can...
But we would never make a statement like that.
And that claim as well, Matt.
Granted.
This is before the start of the, you know, just when the Trump administration has kind of won.
So this is predicting what's going to happen.
But the Trump administration being radically transparent, is that the case?
That doesn't seem the case at all.
In fact, just like Elon Musk taking over Twitter, there's like rhetoric around transparency and opening up things.
But when you actually pay attention to what they're doing, they're taking databases offline.
They're not giving access to independent researchers.
On the back end, right?
They're not even letting people know who are the employees of Toge.
They are unwilling to acknowledge who the head of Toge is, right?
So it's like a cloud cuckoo world where the rhetoric is all that matters and this kind of latent conspiracism that it's the treatments that actually work.
They've been suppressed.
There's stuff about physiology.
It's exactly the same as Joe Rogan.
It's Joe Rogan's beliefs, right?
This is the statement of beliefs, the missing creed of the alternative media.
You have to sign up to these set of conspiratorial beliefs.
Yeah, this is what the new right in America, of which Joe Rogan is a part of, looks like, I guess.
They may well be quite socially progressive in some ways.
You know what I mean?
Like they're probably, they're not, they're not anti-gay etc you know you could probably list a bunch of ways in which they they Yeah, so it is amazing how much conspiracism was just baked in to what he said just then.
It's just taken as a given.
I can give you warm-up.
So let's hear a little bit more David Sachs, then we'll get there.
Jason and David Friedberg.
So here's just a little bit more from Sachs talking about the Twitter files and what they revealed.
I said we should do Twitter files for the whole federal government.
Just what I meant by that is remember before Elon bought Twitter, they told us for years that the idea that Twitter was shadowbaiting conservatives and engaging in censorship was a conspiracy theory.
Then Elon opened up the Twitter files and we saw that it was all true.
And moreover, that the government was engaged.
In censorship, they have been working hand in glove with the Trust and Safety Department.
And the FBI had logins that could just go in themselves.
I mean, it was crazy.
Yeah, and the FBI had their own tool called Teleport, which would allow them to transmit secret instructions to the Trust and Safety Team at Twitter, and they were censoring based on those instructions.
That's completely unacceptable.
Twitter management lied about it.
The government lied about it.
We only found out through the Twitter files.
Let's do a Twitter files for the federal government.
What do you think we're going to find out?
What do you think we would find out about COVID?
What do you think really happened there if Bobby Kennedy can do that?
The lies they told us?
Incompleteness of the actual clinical validation studies, the authorizations and the waivers that were secured, how good or how brittle or how fragile was that data?
Anti-vaccine stuff.
The Twitter files revealed the government was actually in control of all censorship and whatnot.
And Matt, you know, one thing that strikes me every time I hear this now is like, So they're talking about, you know, we needed Twitter files of the federal government or whatever.
I wonder what would happen if you looked at the private correspondence between Twitter in its current instantiation under Elon Musk and its relationship with the administration in power, right?
The connections between what goes on on Twitter and the agenda of the Trump regime, because it certainly seemed like in the pre-election period, That Elon Musk made it into a campaigning tool and juiced up things on his own account, on accounts that he finds valuable, which is mostly MAGA conspiracy theories and whatnot.
But they generally don't care about that.
And what they claim the Twitter files showed is not accurate.
What the Twitter fans actually showed, in most cases, it was what you would expect.
But it was actually much more limited than you might have imagined.
And in many cases, they didn't do it.
They were requested, maybe you could remove this, and they didn't.
And in some cases, it was like stuff with Hunter Biden's penis or whatnot.
But yeah, just the framing here is very...
And again, it tied in with anti-vax sentiment and all of the usual shit.
Yeah, like these guys sound more eloquent or refined, perhaps, than Joe Rogan, perhaps.
But it is interesting, isn't it?
That same sort of paranoid construction It's just taken as a given.
There's a bunch of stuff which you hear in this podcast which isn't really debated.
It's just kind of taken as a given.
It clearly forms part of their assumptions about the swamp and government bloat and institutions and the fake mainstream media.
A lot of that stuff gets mentioned because it's just known that these are all things that they completely agree on.
Vaccines, like the Twitter files, the list goes on.
And if you suggested that they were like anti-vaxxers, it would be the standard refrain.
Like, no, we only were interested in like, you know, transparency.
Yeah, they mentioned, you know, things were rushed.
There wasn't the, you know, checks and balances, all of which not true.
None of it is true, right?
They're totally open-minded about it.
We just need AI to get in there to figure out whether or not vaccines are a good idea or not.
It's unknown at this point.
Now, Matt, maybe it's unfair because I've been focusing on David Saxon and Chamoff, who are both known as kind of mega boosters, right?
So let's hear a little bit from Jason, the most liberal, the person who's often referenced as a Democrat on the podcast.
You know, is he opposed to all this rampant conspiracism or what's his take?
Let's not forget the foil leader.
They were literally being taught how to...
I mean, there's a lot to uncover here.
I'm 100% here for it.
So just to be clear, there's a law in the United States called the Freedom of Information Act.
The FOIA is kind of a common term.
And it gives the power and authority to individual citizens and third-party agencies to have a check and balance on the federal government that they can go in.
They can request actual data, actual files, and it is all necessarily available to the public at any time, except for classified information.
Okay, well, the federal government now overclassifies everything.
We have something like, what, like a billion classified documents?
They literally classify everything.
So through the FOIA process, third party lawyers and nonprofits have made requests to federal agencies to get access to this sort of information.
Just more of that, you know, general information.
He was, you know, he was giving advice about everyone about how to hide things.
There's a lot more to uncover about what was going on.
You know, presumably, Matt, there might be a role for gain-of-function research in creating COVID.
That's what this is all about.
And you heard David Friedberg, you know, come in.
Now he's the one.
His nickname is The Moderator?
Oh, I've forgotten who's who.
Let me check.
David Friedberg is the Sultan, I think.
Okay, he's the Sultan.
Well, in any case, in this episode, he was taking the role of the moderator.
He was asking people, okay, what do you think about this issue?
But he wanted to make sure that people might see him as a very down-the-line thinker who doesn't entertain these kind of things.
So he wants to reassure them about what his actual position is.
So listen to this.
I'm not a black and white guy.
So there are things that he says that make a lot of sense.
There are things I've pointed out, particularly around microplastics in the environment, particularly around chemistry that we use in our food and our systems of food and production.
And I believe very strongly that we have real issues that have, you know, compounding effects on our health.
So let me not be too flippant about that.
I am not a all vaccines are always good all the time person.
I think that every one of them needs to be studied on the merits and the risks.
I think fluoride is an interesting conversation to have.
What are the merits?
What are the risks?
And why is there a federal authority over fluoride and water?
Which, by the way, there isn't.
It's all local municipalities get to decide.
On a nuanced basis, then, net-net, where do you wind up, Freeberg?
Net-net, where do you wind up?
I will say that there are a number of things that RFK have said that caused me a lot of trouble, that I'm very troubled by, because I think that he has said things that are factually wrong.
And I want him to be open to debate and open to review of objective truth, and that's it.
And that's it.
So NetNet, do you like him as a disinfectant, as a rabble rouser, as to shake up the system?
Or NetNet, do you think it's too risky to let him in?
Generally, I think all these systems should be challenged, 100%.
Yes, so not 100% on board with RFK, but pretty soft opposition there.
Yeah, they generally are all in agreement that Bobby Kennedy, you know, a necessary disruptor, and even if he makes some errors, he's fundamentally motivated by all the right things, right?
Yeah, well, that's the thing, Chris.
The system needs a shake-up.
The system needs disruption.
There's a lot of corruption out there in the system, so maybe these characters, like whether it's Trump or RFK, you know, aren't perfect.
They're a bit wild, but they're a necessary disinfectant, right?
So Matt, we need to shape things up.
You know, the political system has got to steal.
There's these invested interests.
So what we need is a Kennedy.
We need a Kennedy.
That's what we need to shake up the system.
I feel like there's a slight, you know, contradiction there.
But again, I'm going to get out of the conspiratorial world at least a little bit in a second.
But just to highlight how deep it goes, here's David Sachs talking about the things that have restrained.
administration in achieving things, especially in its first term.
I do not see an administrative branch.
That has sprung into existence over the last several decades.
Yep.
And it rules us.
There's roughly 3 million people who work for the federal government.
Of those, the president basically appoints 3,000, and it takes forever to get them through.
Yeah.
So we have roughly 3 million people who don't report to anyone.
Nominally, they're supposed to report to the executive branch, but the president can't We talked about it on a previous show.
If Elon had gone into Twitter and he hadn't been allowed to fire anyone, do you think he could have restored free speech to Twitter?
Of course not.
They just would have kept doing whatever they wanted to do.
And that is the big problem in the federal government right now, is we are ruled by a fourth branch of government that is not in the Constitution, that doesn't report to anybody.
It is not subject to elections.
We can't vote them out and we can't fire them.
And they have been in the forefront of trying to stop Trump and the larger reform movement that he represents ever since Trump got elected in 2016.
Remember, it was members of the administrative state, specifically the security state, who said, don't worry, we're going to be the insurance policy against Trump.
And they have done everything possible through the Russiagate hoax, through lawfare, through the whole Steele dossier hoax to basically try and stop.
He can finally subdue this bureaucracy and bring it under democratic control, under the control of the executive branch, as the American people want, and as I think the Constitution intended.
Right now, we are run by an unelected branch of government that has to stop.
And what Trump represents is not dictatorship, but democracy, the triumph of democracy over this bureaucracy.
Yeah, okay, so it's all...
I mean, this gives you a feeling for the podcast if you're not familiar with it.
I think it's a fair bit of political...
But it is all mainly directed towards cheerleading for MAGA.
The way they see things is that if the government or journalists or some platform like Twitter stands in the way of Trump and MAGA, then they're a corrupt force for evil.
And just putting more and more power into the executive branch of the government is basically freedom.
That's how I read it.
It's quite a spin to present that Trump is about the triumph of democracy.
He's one of the most anti-democratic presidents, perhaps the most anti-democratic president in recent history in America, right?
And, you know, he's doing things like challenging the Supreme Court, overriding Congress, attacking.
Legal firms threatening and issuing lawsuits at media that covers him critically and all this kind of thing.
So it's just really remarkable how someone like David Sachs can, you know, present it, that he's restoring democracy to what was originally intended in the Constitution, when in actual fact he's running roughshod over a lot of the constraints that are intended to be there.
And it's all based on this claim.
That there is a deep state which is unelected, which is fighting back against Trump's reforms.
It essentially is the kind of QAnon conspiracy, but now it's absolutely just part and parcel of the MAGA doctrine.
It's no longer like a fringe cult attached to it.
It's what they all believe.
Yeah, that's right.
Like that these guys definitely perceive themselves and present themselves as eminently respectable people.
Not radical people, not crazy people, not conspiracy theorists.
But, you know, they are coming to this with a bunch of just baked-in assumptions, which are, yeah, kind of scary.
And the reason, one way in which you can tell that they are completely partisan and don't even know it, I think, is the way that they can give so much attention.
For instance, to the Twitter files, right?
To his claims that, you know, there was all of this censorship and, you know, guiding of the narrative and all this stuff going on, yet no attention at all to how Elon Musk has her on Twitter, right?
Well, he restored free speech, Matt.
He restored free speech.
Now, it's like so blindingly obvious.
There's so many documented examples, right, of it being now, I mean, And you thought, oh, it was a bit liberal.
It was a bit too quick on the draw to ban Nazis or whatever.
It should have let more free speech happen.
Okay, fine.
But there is no way any reasonable person who is not completely partisan and blinkered could look at how Musk has been running Twitter and say, oh, yeah, that's politically neutral.
That has no bias in favor of anything.
Yeah, if you think that, or if you are perceiving the world in that way, then I think your brain is mush at this point.
Absolutely, absolutely.
Now, just to point out as well, Matt, so the two that tend to give more pushback are David Friedberg and Jason Calacanis, right?
Those are the two who will couch slightly more criticism of Micah, but it's within the spectrum.
It's like the kind of criticism that you could expect on the Joe Rogan podcast, right?
That is the way I would put it.
But Chalmuth was asked about his assessment of how the Trump administration was doing in the first 100 days.
And I'll play his positive assessment.
I think the first 100 days have been a B+.
And here's how I get to that score.
There have been two things where I think Trump has, frankly, hit a home run.
The first is all of the direct investment and specifically the foreign direct investment into the United States.
I think it's approaching, if not, it has already exceeded a trillion dollars from corporations and organizations and individuals from around the world.
Who have committed to bringing money into the United States.
And I think strategically, that's a legacy that will live past him.
So I think that's been an A+.
The second is we had a very unsafe border situation and he ran on shutting it down.
I'm not talking about the execution of the deportations.
I'm just saying getting the illegal crossings to zero.
And he's done that.
So that's been an A+.
I think what's going to be more controversial are these next three things, though.
In my interpretation, I think the tariffs have been an A. And I think that the market reaction, the stock market is only down 4%, and the interest rate markets are 4.25%.
I think those have been an A. But he does have some things that he wants to mention that he's not...
Matt, he's got things that he thinks they could do better on.
So let's just hear what, you know, out of all the things that Trump has done in the first 100 days, what's the things that Tom wants to focus on acknowledging that there's some reason to criticize?
Okay, so where have they then not done so well?
I think the documents have been, frankly, a D. We were supposed to get the Epstein files.
We haven't yet.
We were supposed to get the Martin Luther King files.
We haven't.
We did get the redacted JFK files.
I don't think there's been very good communication about why it's taking so long.
So I think it's a very small, narrow thing, but I think it had a lot of attention on the way in.
I think the communications of the tariffs and the back and forth have been a C. I think the markets were not led.
In enough of a way where they could absorb the volatility.
But if you take it all in its totality, I would give it a B+.
I think it's been a very productive 100 days.
Yeah, yeah.
So they're generally positive about the first 100 days.
But again, Chris, it's very telling that the thing that they thought Trump didn't do a great job on Opening up the files.
Conspiracy theories.
Yeah, the conspiracy theories.
And you hear the same vibe from people who are into other conspiracy theories, whether it's about, you know, UFOs or something else.
They have this idea that the files are definitely there, right?
The government definitely knows.
And once we get our guy, Trump, in the government, then he's going to, you know, he's going to have the power to open them up.
And then they're very disappointed.
A few months later, when it turns out there are no files about a secret UFO capture or something.
Well, there's actually been recently an interview that's been going around where Dan Bongino and Kash Patel or whatever his name is, the head of the FBI, are in an interview and they're basically saying, look, we were along with you.
Everybody thinks there's this trove of information about UFOs and secret pads.
And we know, we know, we thought so too.
I'm going to tell you the truth.
And whether you like it or not is up to you.
If there was a big explosive there, there, right?
Given my history as a Secret Service agent and my personal friendship as a director does with the president, give me one logical, sensible reason we would not have.
If you can think of one, there isn't.
There isn't.
In some of these cases, the there you're looking for is not there.
And I know people, I get it.
I understand.
It's not there.
If it was there, we would have told you.
But, like, we are in, pardon, we just, it's not there.
I don't know what they're telling you.
It's so fucking, you know, it is blackmailing a way to watch because, like, it doesn't matter that they're saying that because nobody's going to.
Believe them.
And even with that, you know, the Trump administration is perfectly fine with, like, putting out a website saying, lab leak is proven, Fauci created COVID or whatever.
Like, they don't mind.
Just absolutely bullshitting.
But it's not enough.
That's right.
They would absolutely do it if there was some secret information that they could reveal.
They absolutely would, but they haven't because it's not there.
So I think it is telling for these characters who do present as very respectable, very thoughtful, very successful, very smart people, are actually all in on some really dumb conspiracies.
It's pretty discrediting.
Oh, yes.
Yes, indeed.
So just for an illustration, which is mentioned, In passing.
So, you know, just in case you thought they wouldn't go for bottom-of-the-barrel conspiracies.
Dax, it's so obvious that the technique they used to defeat Trump in 2020 after those chaotic four years was, hey, do you want normalcy?
What technique is that, 15 million votes?
Wait, what's that?
I didn't hear the joke.
I said, what tactic was that, 15 million extra votes?
Oh, please don't start with the conspiracy theories.
We're really going to say that this has to be a conspiracy theory now.
Well, who's the chart from?
Who's the chart from?
What's the provenance of the chart?
Just so you know, the Y axis starts at 50 million.
So don't be, you know, like a little too crazy.
Like they mailed out all that.
Hold on, before we go down this rabbit hole, let me just finish my point.
then you guys can go to Conspiracy Corner and say the election was stolen.
The point I'm making here is, obviously...
So that did work for them previously.
It just didn't work this time because they had to defend their record on the border.
They needed to defend their record on the economy.
And Sachs is exactly right.
They didn't touch that.
So, Chris, you've listened to other episodes that I haven't.
Remind me, say some of them.
Are in on stolen election conspiracies.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Basically, like, that split.
Like, Chamath and David Sachs are in on the conspiracies.
And Jason, not so much.
And David Friedberg, not as much.
But, you know, the level of pushback, Matt, is what you just heard, Derek.
You know, like, well, let me just finish this point and you can talk about that.
You know, conspiracies about the election and you hear David Sachs saying, but are they really conspiracies when everything else has been proven correct, right?
So, but that's just the highlight that, like, stolen election, absolutely part of the, you know, level of conspiracism.
And even though none of that makes sense, right?
Because, like, so Biden was in power for four years.
He had time to stitch everything up more.
And yet he just wasn't able to do it this time.
I guess even Musk and...
Yeah.
It was a very close election, so you'd think it wouldn't have been that hard to steal it.
Or maybe they tried to steal it, but it just wasn't quite enough.
Didn't quite get them over the line.
But in that case, how come no one's talked about it?
Because Trump won.
Because Trump won, so they don't need to make up a story about stolen elections this time.
Yeah.
So annoying.
Well, before I get lost again, I'm going to talk about the political diversity of opinions that you can hear.
And for this, we need to focus on Jason, because he is often presented as the outlier.
He's the one that gets into arguments with different members about their views on tariffs or this kind of thing.
And so when Trump won, you hear this kind of teasing.
Today, congrats, Jason.
How does it feel to have finally accomplished your dream?
Feels great.
Yeah, absolutely.
Big shout out to J. Cal.
I did see a tweet where somebody gave me a lot of credit for moving the Overton window in Silicon Valley, and they said that Jason was indispensable as my foil.
If I didn't have him to dunk on for four years with my political takes, it wouldn't have been nearly as effective.
So thank you for that.
Absolutely not.
My pleasure.
I'm here for you.
I am Abbott.
He was your internal MSM debating partner.
We need someone to represent the legacy media point of view.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So you get the framing, you know, Jason is his foil, right?
Jason's a kind of, you know, mainstream media liberal cock, but, you know, it's set in jest.
But I just want to play a couple of exchanges whenever this comes up elsewhere, Matt.
So listen to this.
It's interesting for you to say that as a Dem, right?
Because I think that may have chased a lot of people.
I'm a moderate.
I'm not a Dem, by the way.
I voted Republican one-third of the time.
Maybe even a little bit more recently.
But two-thirds you voted Dem, so you were open to that.
I'm a left-leaning moderate.
I mean, I've been very clear about that.
So, like, he's voted Republican one-third of the time, and he's been more inclined to vote Republican recently.
But you know, so he's more of an independent, Matt.
But they're like, yeah, yeah, but you Yeah, he's the liberal.
So I guess it's an effective kind of positioning where you've got a very strong MAGA-oriented political podcast, but for it to be straight up propaganda and to be perceived as such, that wouldn't go down too well.
So it's much better, of course, for it to be presented as a diverse podcast.
But it's helpful when the person that's representing the non-MAGA-pilled point of view is incredibly weak.
It's just like can smack them down every time very easily.
Well, but it is notable, Matt, because here's something again referring to him as, you know, the left-leaning one.
I just listened to his response again.
I think we knew Saxon would be very pro.
Chamath seems really pro other than he wants the alien conspiracy files released, which we'll get soon.
What is the view from J. Cal, Wendy, where you're the left-leaning guy in the room?
I'm kind of independent, but yeah, social liberal.
So every time he's framed as the liberal one, he objects and kind of says, well, you know, I'm actually more of an independent.
And Matt, just to give a view of his liberal credentials, right?
So he was asked, how does he assess the Trump administration in the first 100 days?
You know, most liberal people had quite a lot of issues with what Trump had been up to, even center-left people.
You know, Sam Harris, not a happy man.
Let's hear what Jason gives as his assessment of the first 100 days.
You know, I look at what all Americans I believe and try to build some consensus here.
One of the things I've been trying to do on the pod is look for where we agree.
Americans universally want the border secured.
They don't want illegal immigration, and they don't want fentanyl.
So this is the biggest win, I think, for Trump, which I think everybody on the panel pointed out.
And, Sachs, you were dead right.
Like, when we were seeing those videos, some of them were five years old, some of them were recent.
Biden really covered up what was going on in the border, and it took years to figure out what was exactly going on there.
So that's the biggest win possible.
I give overall, just to be brief, a B for this first 100 days, and I give Biden like a C minus.
The second thing that everybody agrees on is they want to downsize the government.
They don't want waste and fraud.
So I think Doge is the other huge win.
It's a huge win.
Now, I'm getting mixed up in my memories because we listened to two, and one of them was just after Trump came to power, and they were talking about Doge a lot there, about this exciting new thing that was in the process of saving huge amounts of money and preventing all kinds of government waste.
And then there's this one, I think, which was like 100 days after, right?
So there's a full 100 days, and that was just a couple of weeks ago, I think, Chris.
Yep, yep, yep.
That's right.
Yeah.
So if you're at a couple of weeks ago, This is the liberal guy, Matt.
This is the left-leaning, bleeding-hard guy.
Let's just hear a little bit more.
You mentioned we also listened to the one at the start.
So he was asked, you know, look, he didn't want Trump to win, but, you know, what's his kind of view about, you know, what's going to happen, what he would take as good signs.
So let's hear him, you know, what he would take as kind of positive indicators for the Trump administration at the start.
Do you see past the person or do you still have a strong degree of reservation about the individual?
And do you see that playing out in your cohort, friends, family, what have you, that there's strong reservation because of the character?
It's a great question.
I think the thing we have to do now is come together as a country.
He's the president.
It's great that it was not a debatable election and we're not going to have riots at the Capitol and people beating up police officers.
And now it's time to actually look at what Trump said.
And then we will grade him on what he actually gets done.
And, you know, if he is able to hang out with the cohort of Elon and Chamath and Sachs.
And J.D. Vance, I feel a lot better about it.
Now, there's a lot of people speculating he will turn on Chamath, he will turn on Sachs, he will turn on Elon, and that relationship will end in the next year or two.
That's what I'm looking at.
Will Trump actually do the things he says he's going to do?
And what did he say he was going to do?
Well, he's not going to have a national abortion man.
He's not going to kick people out who get college degrees here.
Remember, he said on the show he's going to staple the green card to it.
And but then there's other and he said he's going to end the Ukraine, the war in Ukraine on day one.
So let's make a list of all the things he promised.
And like anybody else, let's judge him based on what he gets done.
Yeah, well, I think ending the war in Ukraine on day one, that ship has sailed, Chris.
It's all right.
David Sachs already pre-butted that because he said that, does he think Trump's going to end the war on day one?
No.
And in particular, he blamed it on Ukraine.
Because Ukraine isn't ready to negotiate.
In terms of the rest of the agenda, I mean, Trump clearly does want to end the war in Ukraine.
Is he going to be able to do it on day one?
No.
I mean, I don't think that's realistic because, frankly, the Ukrainians are not willing to make the concessions yet.
They're not in a place where they're willing to make a deal.
I still think that what Trump was saying during the campaign, if you look at it as expression of his motivations and where his sentiments are coming from.
They were good sentiments.
But if he can't solve it on day one, because the Ukrainians don't want to make a deal, I can't really fault him for that.
But I think he'll try.
Right, because David Sachs is a massive, massive Putin apologist, right?
A lackey, basically, for the Putin regime.
And I think it's just because he's a conspiratorial asshole, rather than, you know, paid off by Russia or this kind of thing.
But he may as well be for what he does.
But he said, look, he's not going to be able to end up because Zelensky and the Ukrainians, they don't want peace, right?
They're not ready.
To make any concessions.
So when he says, I'm going to end the Ukraine war on day one, does that mean he's literally going to do it on day one?
No.
What it means is he's going to try really hard to end the Ukraine war.
If he does it on day 365 of his presidency instead of day one, I'm not going to come out and say he lied and didn't do what he said.
No, I'm going to say he got the job done.
He did what he said he was going to do.
So I think it's very important to judge him in that way.
So if he ends it, That's just as much of a win as day one, right?
You don't hold them to the most extreme version.
Matt, that's just rhetoric.
But it's like, does the Ukraine war end in the next four years?
Then that's a win, right?
He did what he said.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And look, I heard David Sachs do that kind of apologism for Trump on the tariffs as well.
It was just an incredible amount.
And, you know, if you're motivated, you can cast anything as being a win or being, you know, not a problem or whatever.
So like these guys who are ultra capitalists, you know, super rich, they're meant to care if all of the American markets, including the stock market and the bond market, the American dollar.
If they all go down at the same time, then sort of hard-nosed finance people, you'd think, would treat that as legitimate signal.
But no, pretty much David Sachs is quite willing to say...
Or, you know, maybe the market just didn't understand and haven't communicated the sort of true genius here.
And also the five-dimensional chess sorts of moves, which is that, oh, well, it looks like it's all come to nothing because he's rolled over on everything.
No, no, he's establishing a good negotiating position.
And, you know, trust me.
The winds will come rolling in.
So really, at no point did I feel I was getting any useful information about anything.
I heard apologism the entire time.
Yeah, the strongest pushback you get is from Jason or on occasional guests, right?
like Revezra Klein and Larry Summers, you heard like strong pushback.
But in the case of like the besties, you just get...
That shouldn't happen, right?
But it's all softly, softly, it's very, very deep-found criticism from a thing which is supposed to be, like, a robust exchange around shit.
Yeah, no, that's right.
I mean, look, obviously, you and I are going to be more sympathetic and perceive someone like Ezra Klein or Larry Summers a lot more positively.
But honestly, I'd encourage people to listen to that debate about tariffs.
Well, I wouldn't actually.
You shouldn't listen to it.
But if you did, you know, you'd go away from it thinking, look, you know, I have a lot of respect for those guys.
And I thought making powerful points and the guys on the other side of the ledger, the besties just felt.
You know, they're just soft and pointless.
There's one point where you hear, because this is something that's really common in MAGA world in general.
It's like, they'll make these statements, right?
Kind of generalized statements about corruption or about the need to do something or whatever.
And Ezra Klein pushes David Sachs like, okay, stop.
Give me a metric that you're going to use to indicate.
I think something I'd love to hear from David.
It's very hard to break the pattern of 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 Larry's side than what I'm hearing from Chamath and David.
But what are your measures?
What in two years?
Good question.
manufacturing, employment or whatever is below X, will you be unhappy if GDP is What is a sort of objective yardstick where we could come back in 700 days and say, did this work out or was this a bad idea?
I would say probably the biggest thing would be whether the U.S. can re-industrialize to some extent so that we're not completely dependent for our supply chains on a potentially hostile avenue.
Is it the quantity of manufacturing we're making?
Is it the share of manufacturing?
I don't think it's a hard thing to understand.
You know, during COVID, we I am saying it concisely.
During COVID, we discovered that we were horribly dependent on a supply chain from China for some of our most essential products, for pharmaceuticals, for Sure.
So what would be if you were to put a metric on it?
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 would be the objective measure of success?
like a certain number of jobs, certain number of factories, certain types of He returns it and he keeps asking for a metric.
I really want to say that rather than having 30 minutes of debate over something that happened in the 90s, I would like to go back to this question.
I keep not hearing members of it.
I will answer your question, Ezra, because that was a great question.
I would like to hear from David.
But I love yours too, Chamath.
Yeah, I want to— Hold on, I never got a chance to— I think that there's a tendency to just begin talking in an anecdotal way about industry.
This is not anecdotal.
Okay.
We want to move forward.
Presidents announce these policies, and then there's never— Give me the metrics.
Give me what indices you are going to look for where if in two years it is under X, I can come back and we can have a conversation.
Here's some metrics.
Ezra, I'm so sorry it didn't work out.
Here's some metrics for you, okay?
Let's go back to Bill Clinton's speech that was given at Johns Hopkins on March 9th, 2000.
No, no, he was asking about forward, David.
Forward-looking metrics.
What would you think would be successful two years from now?
Not the history lesson.
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 to- Listen, you're trying to change the subject.
Let's just finish up on this topic.
No, no, no.
We're trying to move forward.
That's all.
We're trying to finish up on this topic, okay?
And eventually, they get to a VEG metric, which is there's no actual metric given, but just like, There will be increased domestic industry for essential production.
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 two or three years and we can decide together.
Was this genius work by the disruptors or was this What was the issue with the metrics that I gave you, Ezra?
You don't think they're complete?
You want the unit of measurement?
Kilograms?
Dollars per 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 $100 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.
You really think saying to you in two years, What you gave me doesn't fit the policy.
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.
And in a similar bit, it's Ezra Klein that keeps pushing that bit, but there's another bit where Larry Summers is sparring with David Sachs about China being brought into the World Trade.
The WTO, yeah.
WTO, World Trade Organization, right?
And David Sachs is spinning this up as like, we just threw up our markets to China.
They completely, you know, screwed over America.
I don't think 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.
We're talking about decades ago, though, right?
That's what started this whole thing.
Yeah, okay.
I don't think those millions of people want to lose their jobs.
You're talking nonsense.
What are you talking about, Larry?
Respectfully.
David.
You were Treasury Secretary when we walked China to the WTO.
And you were just still defending it.
I was just watching an interview.
Hold on, Larry.
Larry, you just did an interview with Neil Ferguson.
Can I ask my question?
Why am I the only one who gets to talk for two seconds before I get interrupted?
And Larry Summers is saying, no, no, no, this is wrong.
Like, this is wrong.
And he keeps asking him, give me an example where there's, you know, a particular policy that led to what you're describing.
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 in the United States that had not been in place for five years before that we removed?
I don't think we should have done any of it, Larry.
We threw open our markets to Chinese goods.
What restriction?
Your thesis is that we threw open the market and therefore we exposed ourselves to all of this China thing.
And the question I'm asking you is, can you name any restriction on Chinese exports to the United States that – Can you name any such restriction?
Just name one for me.
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.
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.
What was the point of bringing them into the WTO?
The point of bringing them into the WTO was to use the leverage that we had to win a whole variety of concessions that enabled us to export more to China.
Larry, let's be honest.
You know, it's an interesting idea.
It's called reciprocity.
This is an extraordinary variety of history here.
They go back and forth with this, and then Chalmuth.
And it's very obvious, Matt, if you look at him, that he's just ChatGPT-ed.
You can hear him physically reading these very specific policies that he has asked ChatGPT with a prompt about what kind of thing could you reuse for this?
Let's go back to this.
Just a minute.
I just want to know that the whole argument you are making is about increasing And so I'm just going to keep asking you, what barrier that previously existed got removed?
Okay, I'll name them.
I'll name them.
I'll name them.
Go ahead, Jamal.
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 capped those duties at agreed rates.
Number two, they eliminated export quotas.
They 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.
And that's the level of the conversation.
They don't dog specifics.
They speak in contradictory points.
And then when they are making points, they're doing things like just reading.
Or it looks very, very similar to what would happen if somebody relied on a chat GPT kind of thing to give them a summary of points.
Yeah, like you didn't hear a substantive rejoinder to many of the points that were brought up.
For instance, if the goal is to ensure these critical supply chains and strategic industries and so on, then why do these broad tariffs that cover every good, right, from Nike shoes to mangoes to a wide range of different countries, including incredibly poor ones?
Like, what's the goal there?
How does it achieve that?
And you just didn't hear any kind of coherent response to that.
And likewise, when I think it was, um, uh, it, it, it, it could have been as recline, he pointed out that, you know, we've got a three or 4% unemployment rate in the United States at the moment, which is really very low by historical standards.
Is there really a huge groundswell of people that are like eager to be joining factories to sew the garments that the countries are exporting to the United States, which Trump sees as a huge problem, you know, so.
So there was no response to that either.
Clearly the outcome is either they do get made in the United States and the price of them increases hugely, or there is no...
Well, they flip around, right?
They flip around between it's a negotiating strategy, it's a way to earn trillions, it's like, you know, it's going to lead to bilateral agreements, and anything that happens is counted as a win.
And something I've been thinking about over the past very long eight 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 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 counter argument, was, oh, you libs.
You always take him literally when you should be taking him seriously.
I had Vivek Rambaswamy on my show.
He said, he's not going to do that.
That's just a negotiating ploy.
And this was the common line from Trump allies on Wall Street.
And then I watched as he began doing not just that, but layering a series of 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 ship those tectonic plates without creating a few earthquakes.
Then, the moment the tariffs paused, or the 90-day pause on the 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 that 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.
Even the market crashing and then recovering as the tariffs are slightly walked back, that's taken as a win.
Right, like even if they've not returned to where they were, but that's thinking as like, well, but they went up.
And what was interesting is, I think even Ezra Klein sort of took it as a given that countries would come, foreign countries would come cap in hand to the Trump administration after having these punitive tariffs.
Put on them.
Basically desperate to make a deal and to roll over and give Trump whatever it is he asked for.
And what's interesting is that I think the evidence is that that hasn't happened, actually.
Yes, there's been negotiations.
Yes, for some countries it's higher stakes than others like Japan or China.
But I haven't seen any amazing deals that have been struck.
But they'll point to things like the agreement between the UK and America that was, you know, just touted recently, the Special Relationship Agreement, or China agreeing to reduce tariffs.
you know, they're now down from whatever, 145% to 30% or whatever.
So they're like, they're just constantly, the same way Batcha Ngar Sagan does that, anything that happens is a win, right?
Like when that is the outcome, it means that it doesn't really matter.
So if you say, well, there's no example of that, they can point to all these cases where, you know, they've made an agreement with Argentina or they've made an agreement with Brazil or, you know, any country that makes a trade agreement is a win, even if it's a worse agreement.
And yeah, it is frustrating.
Actually, there's a contradiction that I think We can highlight quite well about this.
But I'll finish this last clip related to Jason and then we can move to that because the last thing, and this actually ties into the Gary episode, right?
Jason was talking about basically like he's kind of a libertarian type person, right?
So he wants the government budget to be balanced, not running at a deficit.
That's a priority.
So, you know, like a kind of Rand Paul type person, right, which is not generally the way that you regard, you know, a center-left person, right?
But in any case, he talks about, you know, the fact that the Trump administration is still going to increase the national debt and how this is a problem for him.
So what things would he like to see cut or, you know, changed?
And there's a bit of a talk about doge in this.
We are now burning an additional $2.5 trillion a year, adding to our debt load.
We're in a fiscal crisis and we're not willing to admit it.
And I've said this from day one, that Doge can only do so much.
And clearly that's the case where they're now talking about sub $300 billion a year in potential annual savings from Doge action.
At the end of the day, Congress needs to take action.
And this bill from Congress doesn't take much action.
I will tell you that if you look across the board, all of these programs are still being proposed to be run at a cost that is well in excess of their pre-COVID levels.
And so I would set two guiding principles if I was to be the benevolent dictator of the United States of America.
My guiding principle, number one, would be that any program that we intend to continue to persist have its budget level cut to pre-COVID, to 2019 levels.
Second would be, and if we did that, by the way, we would be in a much better fiscal situation.
The second would be that we add no new programs in the moment.
There's a whole bunch of new shit thrown into this bill, as well as increasing the cost and a few cuts here and there.
I'll just highlight a couple that I think are worth noting.
You know, there's a cut in the SNAP program, which is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
That's food stamps.
And I talked about this with Brooke Rollins in the interview I did a few weeks ago.
You can watch it on YouTube.
and we talked a little bit about how this SNAP program has absolutely exploded in size from 60 billion a year in 2019 to 120 billion a year today.
So in this budget proposal, they're actually cutting it back by about So it's still 50% higher than it was pre-COVID.
And there's a lot of kind of stories we could go through on what happened during COVID that caused this thing to blow up the way it did.
But political wrangling pulled money out of the government, into people's pockets, and that is persisting today.
I'm a big believer in cutting taxes.
Obviously, I'm probably more libertarian than anyone else on this show or that we've ever had on this show.
But at the end of the day, you can't just say, hey, let's cut taxes and spend more than we're making.
It doesn't make sense.
Right.
So he's talking there about the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
So these are four incredibly rich men talking there about how bad it was that they haven't cut the SNAP program, which is to provide food benefits to low-income families.
Family, so they can afford essential, nutritious foods.
How bad it hasn't been cut more?
Yeah, yeah.
And then, you know, he moves on that he's a guy that, you know, thinks that we should cut taxes more, right?
So that will stimulate.
But he's saying, you know, that's not enough.
You need to do more cutting.
But it's telling that, like, his concern is cutting the foodie.
Like, getting that down, right?
Like, that's the thing that he's chosen to hone in on.
And like you said, Matt, this is billionaires sitting, like, complaining about poor people who are, there's too many people getting too many handouts, right?
There's a bit in the Ben Shapiro conversation where they're suggesting that, like, the only people that are actually properly contributing to, you know, the country are the higher earners because the other ones are drains.
On the system.
You know, they are taking out just as much as they give in.
And like, I actually get sympathy for Gary.
Like when I hear this, because you just have billionaires complaining about food stamp allocations, and he'll go on to complain about governments banning his particular companies that he invests in the artificial meat.
companies, right?
There's some states which are banning enterprise in that area to protect farming or whatever.
But like in part also, I think just like an artificial thing You guys can laugh all you want.
If it was in a market that you were an investor in, in innovation or technology, for example, if they said, "We ban AI in our state." How would you guys react?
What sort of opinion or commentary would you guys have on the show?
Move around the state, let the state go to zero, and then come pick up the ashes later.
We have 49 other ones.
And I think that that's really important.
And now, by the way, there's a House bill being proposed to do the same thing throughout the United States.
Meanwhile, China and Europe are building cellular meat systems that are rocketing ahead.
They're actually economic drivers because they make the cost of food cheaper.
They create new industries.
There's a lot of supply chain that goes into these industries.
Whether consumers like or want to buy the product or not should be left to the consumer.
It should be a free market.
The market should decide as long as they're regulated, check for health, check for safety, as they all are today.
The FDA, the USDA and others are all involved in regulating these systems.
They shouldn't be banned because in every single state, they've said the reason we're banning them is to protect our ranchers, our cattle ranchers.
But the priorities are very much the poor are the dreary.
And they're just like billionaires.
The thing to me is these guys are posing as populists and they're sitting around talking about their fucking luxury jests and their streamer DJs that are going to come to their party at their 500,000 membership club or whatever.
And then when they get down to brass tanks, Food stamps.
Yeah.
And then they're complaining about how out of touch everyone is.
It's like listening to the fucking Monopoly man, you know, talk with his buddy, the real tycoon of whatnot, about how the poor people are getting too uppity and they're costing the government too much money.
And it's like the way to drive the thing would be to give me and my friends more tax cuts and cut the programs that are...
And this is one of the most popular podcasts in America at the moment.
Yeah.
It's interesting, isn't it?
Yeah, I mean, I'll take Gary any day of the week over this because it is kind of sickening, really.
And at the end of the day, Gary may well be something of a toxic personality, I think, in terms of his, I don't know, how he does things.
But he is fundamentally arguing.
For taxes on the rich and more affordable housing, right?
In terms of what he's arguing for, it's not stomach churning at all.
What are these guys big on?
They're big on insane conspiracy theories and cutting food stamps and things like that.
It is not a pretty sight.
No, no, it's not.
So anyway, just to remind everyone, the last thing I'll say there is this is the liberal guy.
This is whether this keeps being referenced in media and whatnot as displaying the diversity of opinions.
It's a lot of guys with a lot of different points of view.
So this again is like the Joe Rogan level of diversity of views where yes, they will have occasional guests that they'll argue strenuously with like Ezra Klein and whatnot.
But when it is the four of them and when you look at the general spread of guests that they have on, it is This kind of shit, right?
It ranges from libertarian independent tech bro to MAGA cultist tech bro.
That's your broad range.
That's a big tent, yeah.
It's a big tent, Chris.
Yeah, it's a big tent.
Yeah, you've got a lot of different perspectives there.
Okay, so the other thing, Matt, this also just comes up endlessly in this kind of stuff, is the narrative about the alternative.
The alternative media and its power and what people want.
I've got David Sachs first, striking the usual victim narrative around this.
So listen to this.
He'll reference Joe Rogan and whatnot as well.
You cannot just put the blame on Kamala Harris.
It's got to be on the Democratic Party as a whole.
And just to echo what Chamath said about the cultural stuff.
They've talked down to us.
They've lectured us.
They've insulted us.
They've censored us.
They've gaslit us.
They've tried to cancel us.
They've tried to punish dissent with warfare.
They turned Elon into an enemy, which was the single worst own goal in history.
Remember, this wasn't just Don't forget.
They kicked Joe Rogan out as well.
Bernie supported Joe Rogan.
But with Elon, it wasn't just disinviting him or never inviting him to the EV summit.
It goes all the way back to Lorena Gonzalez's tweet.
Telling him to F off and leave the state of California.
So look, the Democratic Party as a whole has to own this, and they're not going to start winning elections again until they have an improvement in their agenda, not just their messenger.
Yeah, partisan hacks.
I'm sorry.
Such big babies as well.
They're just constantly bemoaning their grievances.
Yeah, like it does remind me of the vice president, what's his name?
Did you even say thank you?
You know, this kind of, you know, you personally insulted me and the other powerful people that really matter.
Egos have been, you know, insulted.
Yeah, and again, Matt, I'm going to go red in the face from pointing this out to people.
Bernie supporter Joe Rogan didn't endorse.
Bernie.
He said he liked him in the Democratic primary, and then a couple days later, he walked back to say that he liked Tulsi Gabbard and Yang just as much.
But he endlessly gets referenced as that.
And Bernie Sanders is a populist kind of left-wing figure, right?
So just recently, he went on with Andrew Schultz.
And was talking about how the Democratic Party stitched him up and stole elections, you know, completely endorsing all their narratives.
So it's just Joe Rogan didn't super strongly endorse Bernie.
And even if he had have, it's not that surprising because there is a pipeline to left-wing and right-wing populism.
But more fundamentally, they're trying to say that the Democratic Party, by screwing up and not paying them sufficient respect, somehow lost.
the allegiance of an Elon Musk or a Joe Rogan.
As if those people are like fundamentally liberal left-wing people, democratic people who against, you know, all their inclinations have been drawn over to...
No, clearly.
You never had...
Come on.
They were always like this.
Their political leanings were what they were.
Yes, but I do think there's a counter-argument that Elon Musk was celebrated on the left in general as a tech entrepreneur who's promoting electronic cars.
He featured in the first Iron Man movie as a kind of genius.
He was celebrated in that way.
That's right.
That's when he wasn't really known for his political innings one way or the other.
But I think he had those.
But I do think, like, even at the very start of him buying Twitter, he clearly had his leanings.
But, you know, at that stage, he was still pretending that, you know, it's better if you annoy both the extreme right and the extreme left.
And yes, that was opposed, but I do think it's fair to say that there was a more positive life No, no.
But I'm not saying that.
I'm agreeing.
I agree.
But that's because, you know, yeah, he was known for being the guy with the electric vehicles.
He was known for the guy with the tech, you know, stuff and the rockets and that.
And, you know, who doesn't like fancy rockets and electric vehicles, right?
But they're making out that these were good liberals.
These were good progressives.
Oh, they were light.
Right.
And the Democratic Party fumbled the ball, and as a result, But I just don't believe they had them.
Yeah, yeah.
In that case, like, no, Joe Rogan was never, like, you know, a campaigner for the Democrats, right?
And he absolutely was a campaigner for Trump in the past election.
So, yes, there is that point.
And that kind of focus, Matt, on the interpersonal aspects and perceptions that they're being, you know, treated badly and whatnot.
David Sachs, you hear that from.
You can hear Chamuff talking about this.
This is actually from a clip that went kind of viral.
Him talking about his interactions with the Trump administration compared to the Biden administration.
So I've got two clips related to that.
Here's the first one.
This is one thing I'll tell you about the Trump administration, which is totally different.
I was a lifelong Democrat.
I was a mega donor to the Democrats.
Dinner with Obama level donor, okay?
I couldn't get a fucking phone call returned from the White House to save my life.
The only thing that happened to me was I made an off-collar comment about something in China, and I had the Biden administration basically say something, essentially put out a press release, basically saying I was mean.
That's all I got for millions of dollars.
You know what I mean?
For being honest.
I mean, I was like, hey man, there's a lot of problems in America.
Talk to me about the fentanyl crisis before we talk about everything else.
Anyways, the Trump administration is totally different.
There's not a single person there you can't get on the phone.
And talk to.
I'll give you an example of this.
A friend of mine's company was really impacted with these tariffs in a bad way, okay?
This is like a really amazing, legitimate American business, 150-year-old business, family-owned, all this stuff.
And I was able to call the deputy chief of staff and I said, "Hey, can you talk to the CEO?" And just so you're on the ground, he's like instantly putting me on the phone.
Well, yeah, I'm sold, Chris.
This is damning, I think.
To the Democrats.
So you donate.
You're a big ticket donor.
You donate, I don't know, millions of dollars maybe.
And that doesn't buy you special access.
What the hell?
Yeah, what the hell is going on?
You want to know what the off-color remark, by the way, Matt?
I believe it's when he said, nobody cares about what's happening to the Uyghurs.
Oh, that one.
Yeah, you bring it up because you really care and I think it's nice you care, but the rest of us don't care.
I'm just telling you a very hard, ugly truth.
Of all the things that I care about, it is below my line.
Okay?
So this was a comment that was, you know, subsequently criticized.
But in any case, it doesn't really matter because like the issue is he's not getting But that's it, Matt.
This is very funny because he is complaining about the opposite of what the alternative media usually claims, right?
Donate money and then hang around with Obama and whatnot.
Or actually, maybe it's the same.
Because all he's saying is, all I got was a dinner.
No influence.
No power.
I think the dinner is the standard thing.
You know what I mean?
You donate above a certain level.
You get the dinner.
He's not getting the special access.
And he is getting that with the Trump administration.
They do the quid pro quo.
So it's clear which is the better party, I think.
And there is a little bit of pushback in response to this.
So look at how he deals with this.
We were able to talk to all of them.
They were like, explain the issue.
I want to understand it.
So this is what's also totally different, which I really give them a lot of respect.
They are willing to debate it with you.
You can pick up the phone and talk to these people.
I've never had that experience, guys.
I mean, look, I was like a senior person at Facebook, could never get a meeting.
I only met Obama once when he came to the thing.
Then when I was running an investment fund, successful, I had dinner with Obama, but it was, you know, under the purpose of should I donate to the foundation?
You know, I've donated millions of dollars to Democrats.
I've never been to the Oval.
Okay?
But the minute it's like here, it's like, hey, come to the White House, explain these issues now.
You get on a plane, you get over there, and they're like, explain it.
And then they'll debate it.
That's like, it's totally different.
Sorry, devil's advocate.
Should being a mega donor, I mean, I guess, I get your point of view, but couldn't it also just be like, no, we're not going to be biased just because a person donated money and we're not going to just answer the phone whenever he calls?
You think I was like, you know, stupid?
Five years ago and all of a sudden tried to like start to build national champions like now.
Dude, man, I've been in the grind for fucking 25 years here paying my taxes.
I fucking paid, you know, more than most people.
Yeah.
So irrespective of the donation.
I've been trying to do the right thing.
Yeah.
I wasn't trying to favor myself.
It's like even just to explain, like, here's what's happening on the ground.
Do you want to know?
I think this is an issue that really resonates.
I can see why, you know, this is populist type.
Politics, because, I mean, this is a problem a lot of us have, Chris, you know.
You donate the millions of dollars and you're not getting the access.
I mean, you know, come on.
This is something.
Yeah, this is, I think it's Andrew Schultz's co-host actually here, who's not in any respects usually like a critically minded, you know, harsh interviewer.
But even he is like, but...
And then his response is like, you think I just became a genius now?
Like, you think they're asking my opinion now?
Like, I was the same genius five years ago, you know, and they weren't using me.
And it's funny because it is the Eric Weinstein thing.
But in this case, he's actually been able to make And get invited over to the White House.
So he's like, this is right.
This is the way it's supposed to be.
The rich and important people, they get to have the meetings with the people running the country.
This is how it's meant to work.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's clearly how he sees it.
And there does seem to be a bit of a contradiction there with the whole drain the swamp.
Well, they're not the swamp, Matt.
They're not the swamp.
When they do it, it's cool.
It's speaking to the people, understanding what it's like on the ground, understanding the issues.
See, I think the issue with us, Matt, is that you and me are a little too cynical.
We haven't met Trump.
We haven't sat down for dinner.
You know, Sam Harris famously has talked about how wonderful people can be at dinner parties.
And if you didn't know them interpersonally, you wouldn't know that, Matt.
You wouldn't get it.
Chamath does make this point about Trump.
These are the kind of people, you know, that are going to, like, dinner parties and being hosted tomorrow or this kind of thing.
So listen to this little story.
I totally missed that.
You're absolutely right.
That's another one where I would give Trump an A+.
Nat and I had dinner with POTUS two weeks ago.
Wait, you had dinner with Trump?
This is breaking news.
Well, okay, whatever.
Yes.
I think it's remarkable how much of a Putin apologist J. Cal's become.
I mean, you want to end the war in Ukraine now?
I've always wanted to.
You're just going to give in to Putin?
No, no, no.
You're not going to stop Putin?
I'm totally in favor of what Trump's doing in negotiating a deal to get our money back.
Oh, you want to talk to Putin now?
I've always wanted to talk to Putin.
I just don't trust him, but you can trust him.
Let me tell you what Trump said.
So-Here we go.
There was a handful of us at dinner and then he- And he reminded me why I was so inclined to vote for him, which is he talked about his uncle and he talked about how his uncle taught him about the severity of nuclear war and how people don't understand how intense and how destructive it is and the power of these weapons.
And he left.
That speech at the end saying, and this is why I'm so fundamentally against this thing.
And it reminded me, to your point, Jason, it is so easy to forget that there's only one existential risk, save like aliens coming from the heavens, right?
There's only one existential risk where all these issues become fringe issues.
You mentioned rule of law, border security, foreign direct investment, tariffs.
It all goes out the window in a nuclear war.
I was like, I am so glad this guy's in charge because this one issue, he never wavers.
Matt, he knows that nuclear weapons, I mean, a lot of us don't appreciate this, right?
It's like Lex in World War II.
We just don't get it.
But Hitler was bad.
There was a lot of suffering in World War II.
A lot of people died.
And, you know, Trump, Matt, he's one of these rare people that understands nuclear weapons.
His uncle told him, that's really bad.
If we start firing nuclear weapons around, that's going to be bad.
And he doesn't want to do that.
So what else do you need to know, Matt?
What else do you need to know?
Yeah, well, that's clearly the thing, isn't it?
I mean, all those other political leaders in the United States, they're all pretty keen on a nuclear war, I think.
But Trump gets it.
Yeah, yeah.
It gives so much credit to Trump, doesn't it?
I mean, the alternative is he just doesn't give a shit.
Just like What's-His-Name doesn't give a shit about the Uyghurs in China.
He doesn't give a shit about Ukrainians.
And they trot out the nuclear war thing.
I wouldn't just let Russia do what they want because, you know, we don't care.
It's a very convenient excuse, I think.
And I think it is an excuse.
Well, Matt, Chamov used to think like you.
He had been, you know, indoctrinated by the mainstream legacy media and the misrepresentations of Trump.
But OK, that story didn't convince you.
I got one more, one more that might make you see Trump in a different light.
I think that the mainstream media has been working hand in hand with the Democratic Party to propagate and move forward an agenda that tried to vilify Donald Trump.
I did not know that when I initially encountered him in 2015 as a candidate.
But what you're supposed to do as an adult is once you start to see a I have said this.
Till I blew in the face, but I'll say it again.
If I think of all of the people in the political infrastructure of America that I have met and spent time with, from Bill Clinton on, I remember sitting and having dinner with Barack Obama the day of Brexit and getting a note that he read and he said, oh my gosh, and says, wow, the UK just pulled out.
I was sitting across from him that dinner.
I've been with all of these people.
The Democrats only come to me to ask me for money.
The only politician that has ever called me just to have a conversation, just to say thank you and be kind, the only one has been Donald Trump.
Isn't that incredible?
Of all of the people, every other person has only ever called and asked me for money.
Right, right.
Yeah, so I'm detecting some themes.
This lines up with what you're talking about before, Chris, those personal connections, the personal relationships, and it kind of makes sense.
It all hangs together.
This is the tech venture capital geniuses like Elon Musk and his little geniuses will sort stuff out.
He's one of the insiders.
He values the personal relationship.
A lot of people think a lot of bad things about Trump, but it's all just a snow job that's been fabricated by the mainstream media.
He's got an impeccable character.
Donald Trump is an excellent person.
He cares.
You know, he's the sort of guy that's...
And that's the problem with Obama.
You know what I mean?
And the Democrats generally, they're there.
They're running the country or whatever.
Why aren't they calling up Silicon Valley?
Tech billionaires.
Just to have a chat.
You know, they're important people.
Yeah.
And, you know, also, I'm sure it is that, like, you know, Trump, it's not transactional at all.
It's not like if Chamov were to come out and criticize Trump harshly, that he wouldn't be nice to him and he wouldn't be pandering to him.
Trump values his insights regardless of whether he's a staunch defender of him.
Now, the fact that he is.
An apologist for almost everything Trump does.
That's irrelevant, Chris.
He likes him as a person.
That's why he's growing him up.
Yeah, that's it.
I mean, this is obvious, right, Matt?
But Trump, even amongst people who like him, infamously a transactional figure.
Somebody who himself touts his constant ability to focus on making deals and getting better results.
But according to Chamov, that's actually the farthest thing from his character.
He just wants to know how people are doing.
He's just calling them up like none of the other senior politicians were giving him a call.
There's a lot that needs to go down in the ledger of gurudom about concerns around phone calls, because it certainly seems to give them a lot of motivation and the belief that they have seen into the true character.
Yeah, it's the personal phone calls and also recounting the personal dinners.
Yeah, he has mentioned it a couple of times, the Obama dinner.
Not just him, but other gurus as well, right?
This is the thing.
And I think that's part of the appeal, right?
Because it's like the person who's talking on this podcast, they're an insider.
They're there.
They're sitting at the table.
They have the dinners.
They know what's being said behind closed doors.
You know, listen to what they've got to say.
I could kind of get the appeal of that, but yeah, I don't like it.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, speaking of that, Matt, so, you know, before the, well, after the election victory, but before they had been invited into the cabinet in David Sack's case, and Chamath also has an advisory kind of position within.
Magaland.
So they were talking on the podcast about well, if called, would you take the call to step up to serve the country?
And just listen.
It's the most incredible thing I've ever seen.
Have you espoused those views in the past?
If so, the likelihood that somebody will raise an alarm bell now so that you can't get near this administration?
I've never seen anything like that before, actually.
Yeah.
And you know what?
Here's the great danger is you look at the last few months, okay?
Who was there for Trump?
It was people like Elon.
It was basically all of us who worked.
And look, I'm a very minor, minor figure, but I did my little part.
And there were a lot of other people on the ground doing their thing.
But where is Elon today?
Elon had to fly home for a Tesla board meeting.
He's got real companies to run.
And who all of a sudden shows up in Mar-a-Lago?
The swamp creatures.
They were nowhere to be found for the last three months.
Now the swamp creatures come crawling out and they're going to be swarming Mar-a-Lago and trying to worm their way into the administration.
And that's the issue is we got to keep – We have to consolidate this victory and get reform-type people in the administration, not just the usual-type people from Washington.
Would you serve if asked?
No, I mean, look, I've already said before, I'm the key man at craft.
I can't do that.
But, you know, look, I would do something part-time, meaning if it wasn't a full-time job, if I didn't have to leave my current job, if it was just serving on some advisory committee or something that was compatible with my current job, I would do that.
That's a no-brainer.
I would love to do that.
Absolutely.
Not full-time because I'm running a company, but if there was the opportunity to help.
Basically- Just put me on the Doge committee, Sachs, if you wouldn't mind.
I just want to go like line item by line item in one afternoon and I'm out of there.
Like I'm just going to go in.
Elon did say this today, but he said the A-team are running companies.
We're all running companies.
But if asked to serve, especially in a part-time capacity where you don't have to divest everything you own and you can actually just go and call bullsh** and actually just make sure good decisions get made, it would be an honor to serve in that capacity.
Yeah.
Well, that's how Trump- Administration runs.
There's no need to divest yourself of your assets because there's no problem with conflicts of interest.
They're absolutely fine with that kind of thing.
It's all about pulling together the great and the good, the billionaires, people like that.
Yeah.
The A-team, Matt.
The A-team, you know?
Elon Musk is saying the A-team are all running the tech companies, but they're ready to go.
Unfortunately, they did get called up to these part-time positions.
So it all worked out for everyone that now Yeah.
Yeah, so this is basically a MAGA propaganda podcast.
This is how I see it now.
It has kind of the window dressing of it's just four guys hanging out, chewing the fat, diversity of opinion.
But it's pretty much cheerleading for Trump.
Obviously, when David Sachs isn't there.
And they have guests on.
The topic can range to, like, other things, right?
They can talk about Silicon Valley type stuff.
But it would be a mistake to suggest that these are outlier episodes.
Like I listened to the most recent episode with Ben Shapiro and it was very much like essentially, you know, you get the full range of hardcore MAGA cultists to...
That's the rage you got.
And the episode with Ezra and Larry Summers, that was actually billed as an unusual head-to-head with people that are going to push back.
That is not normally what comes up in the podcast.
So even in the case where you have people like, I listened to one where somebody was complaining about the effects of tariffs, and they were talking about the genuine impact that it's having.
That's going to cost people jobs and whatever.
But it's all done with, you know, they'll hand over back to Chamov or Saxu will then say, well, no, you know, we don't know what the policy is going to be.
And I think you're fear-mongering a bit there.
And, you know, so even where it's applied, it's like always minimizing the, you know, severity.
Yeah, that's what I heard too.
Even when you hear someone, usually a guest, saying, well, hang on, maybe the way in which...
Is it maybe completely optimal?
It's kind of a layup for the cheerleaders to dunk it in.
No, no.
Stay the course.
Five-dimensional chess.
So, yeah, like you said, a mixture of apologetics and cheerleading.
But, I mean, my main problem is that kind of thing.
I guess like all ultra-political partisans, it's so incredibly boring.
It's so good to be boring.
Because I would...
Well, this is the best you get.
I mean, they did attempt to do that on the episode.
Yeah, and it was terrible.
Yeah, this is as good as it gets when it comes to Magaland, isn't it?
Like these are not the...
I don't know.
What are the names of the crazy?
Ambogino and yeah.
But man, there's just not much there.
It really goes to show too that If there's a great deal of talent and intelligence, if that's required to become a Silicon Valley millionaire slash billionaire, I'm not seeing it in anything these guys have said.
No.
Well, I'll play a clip where they kind of argue the opposite here.
But this is cementing in my worldview that you can be exceedingly wealthy and successful and not understand very basic concepts around...
Anytime I hear them talking about topics that I know, like related to science or COVID or conspiracy theories, it's very clear that there are...
They're just the same as anybody on Twitter, just with a slightly improved vocabulary.
And then whenever they're talking about economic issues where I'm more at sea, as soon as they have thoughtful pushback from somebody like an Ezra Klein or a Larry Summers, their answers are shockingly bad.
Or they simply don't answer.
That's what I heard many times.
They deflect.
You mentioned, Matt, that it's essentially like a propaganda podcast.
Well, is that true?
Let's hear another clip.
We need bills passed by the Republican Congress that Trump can sign, but we also need, I think, cabinet-level appointments who will start to subdue the bureaucracy, bring them under control, find out what they're doing.
Just give us transparency around what they're doing.
Twitter filed this thing so then we can reform it.
I think that we're going to look back on this era, and I think it's going to last about 20 years or so, at least, which I call a return to originalism.
We are returning to the founding principles of this startup called America, and I think it's incredible.
I think Sachs is right.
There is this unbelievable living document that created this incredible experiment.
We veered way far away from it.
It's taken us a lot of courage to get back to that place where now you can actually let that guiding document govern a highly meritocratic country.
So it's going to be a lot of hard work, but my gosh, it's just an incredible moment and opportunity.
Everybody should just take a breath and remember that.
It's a meritocratic opportunity, Matt.
It's all...
Like, these guys, just to be clear, have the exact same opinion as Jordan Peterson.
Like, in the episode where they're talking about who they want for the cabinet, it's Tulsi, RFK Jr., you know, all of the same, J.D. Vance, the same group of people that they regard as hyper-competitive when, in actual fact, you know, they're conspiracists and just, like, polemicists.
Media figures.
Like you said, maybe you're not so confident with the economics, but you're confident on a topic like Ukraine.
You're confident on a topic like vaccines.
And they have no fucking idea what they're talking about.
I mean, this podcast is just a perfect demonstration of why you should not go to rich people and think that they have something insightful to say about things.
Because their views about politics, maybe they're more arguable, like bliss.
Grounded, in fact.
Maybe it's you and me that are biased and ideologically driven with that.
But without a doubt, I could say on a bunch of other topics, they have no idea what they're talking about.
And it's fully consistent with my theory of them, which is they don't know what they're talking about pretty much everything.
Yeah, I think that is correct.
And another thing, as I highlighted at the start of this, they're constantly back-padding about their success, their besties.
Romance for the world to enjoy.
And now David Sachs is in the administration, right?
He's the cryptozar.
He's the AI king for the Trump administration.
But they have to have him on and talk about the performance of the Trump administration.
And so look at how they navigate this, you know, tricky thing that, like, you know, they still have to be willing to hold people's feet to the fire and, you know, address these kind of things.
So let's see how they manage that.
I'm not sure exactly how to ask you this, but you heard some nice compliments about AI from Aaron.
I happen to agree with those.
I actually agree with a good portion of the crypto stuff too.
I think actually getting those tightened up, which are your two zones of excellence and your area that you're focused on, I think you've done a great job there.
So just bestie to bestie, great job there.
Thank you.
What's your take overall?
It's kind of hard, I guess, to ask somebody in the administration to criticize the administration, but hearing everybody else's take, what's your response maybe?
Well, I would highlight three main areas that I think are big accomplishments for the Trump administration in the first hundred days.
So number one has to be the border.
It's just, it's seeing, like asking, well, first of all, saying, you know, bestie to bestie, I just want to say you're doing great at your position.
I think that's all fantastic.
And yeah, thanks.
you know, thanks for letting me.
It reminds me of John Verveke saying that, Jordan, you know, I've observed you interacting with people and you're a man of incredible And yeah, yeah, that's great.
Thanks.
Glad you've said that publicly.
And in this case, you know, there's not an easy way to ask you this, but, you know, well, how would you rate the administration that you're a part of?
Would you say it's good?
Is it excellent?
What is it?
The answer is he goes into an extended thing about, you know, it's achieved me and achievements and how great it's doing.
And even the people that were critical, this was an episode that was like.
Focusing on issues with the tariffs and whatnot.
They still felt compelled to highlight, you know, the areas where they thought things were going well.
That's why this clip starts off with them saying, well, you heard Aaron there, you know, praising you and what you've done in AI and tech.
So, yeah, it's just there doesn't seem to be any discomfort, real discomfort with the fact that this is such a display of like.
And, you know, the Omega rule doesn't seem to just apply with the sense makers.
It extends across the alternative media sphere where you can disagree.
You know, this podcast does have episodes where they disagree with each other around, you know, things to do with tariffs.
But ultimately, you're always trying to strive for the point where you can emphasize agreement and talk about how much you love each other.
Well, yeah, I've heard them disagree vehemently, but it's usually along the lines of, do you support Trump moderately strongly or very strongly?
David Sachs is like a disagreeable son of a bitch, and he will act like he's really angry and very disgruntled if you opt for moderately strongly.
But that does not represent any kind of interesting difference of opinion.
Yeah, yeah.
That is kind of the level that they're operating on.
If it affects them badly, they might complain about it.
They might express that they don't like something, but it's mostly around whether it's affecting them negatively.
That's the main concern that they seem to have.
Well, that parallels the apparent minor schisms that there was between Elon Musk and the administration.
Like a lot of the protectionist policies or loving the fossil fuels and stuff like that, we're contradictory to Elon's business interests, which is the only time you'll see any kind of fissure when it's inconvenient to them personally.
So if that's the standard, if that's the level of principle along which they operate, where the only time there'll be a genuine issue with the administration is when these random Yeah, yeah.
That's the most you can say for it.
That is putting it very accurately, I think, Matt.
May I just say?
Thank you.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you.
But, you know, one of the things that was notable for me, Matt, was that because there was the episode recorded after Trump's victory, That a lot of the analysis about his victory focused on the impact of inflation and the kind of cost of things and how this was a problem because it's actually impacting people, costs are going up for people.
So it was just interesting to hear that given, you know, the subsequent pivot in MAGA world into people will no longer get iPhones and they'll be happy about it.
They don't mind paying extra because it's all about this.
So just listen to the slightly different position here.
End of 2019, you could buy a McChicken for $1.29, and in mid-2024, it was $3.89.
The majority of Americans wind up going to Taco Bell, McDonald's every week.
Some cases, multiple times a week.
You cannot discount exactly how profound this cost of eating food and buying groceries had on this election.
It is the number one issue, I think, this election.
We can talk in our bubble about it, but it was about inflation.
This is what I mean by a return to normalcy.
These are normal people problems.
How much does it cost to put food on the table?
How much does it cost to drive from point A to point B?
I want to send my kid to a school.
Where they go and they learn the ABCs and the 123s because they're going to have to graduate and compete with India and China.
I don't want to worry about indoctrination and all this other stuff.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yes, indeed.
So that kind of rhetoric completely flipped when Trump is the one ushering in what looks like a lot of inflation and increased cost of living.
Then it's character building.
Yeah.
It's a good thing.
I mean, by the way, I know about that.
Particular issue, right?
You know, the increased, or that statistic rather, the increased cost of fast food, like especially budget fast food, like McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, whatever in the United States.
And from a good economics podcast, where they actually look into the bunch of factors that are driving it.
And actually, there's a lot of stuff going on that's got nothing to do with Trump or Biden.
There's some structural factors.
There's employment factors.
There's the impact of DoorDash.
It's all incredibly boring, to be honest.
But what gets me annoyed, and this is similar to Gary, is that they'll pick up a statistic like that and go, boom.
It's very simple.
It's very simple.
Why is the McChicken $4 instead of $2?
Biden.
That's Biden.
And you'll see people talking in the other direction as well, and this is so...
And I think for me, it is a complete giveaway that the people involved are not serious.
They don't actually know what they're talking about.
They're just picking up talking points for their partisan policies.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, now, they also make a point, Matt, about, you know, they're analyzing why the Democrats lost.
And, you know, it's overdetermined, right?
There's plenty of different reasons, but one thing they highlight is Right, exactly.
So what you see is that the Democratic Party base is these very affluent, very overeducated, very non-religious types.
And frankly, I wonder whether they're too out of touch to know they're out of touch.
They're certainly very whiny and entitled.
And I just don't think they're going to cede control of the party without a fight.
And frankly, they've disappeared so far up their own woke asses that I don't think they can find an electoral majority if they try.
So if these people stay in control of the party, and these are the people who you're seeing having a mental breakdown on TikTok, they're posting all the videos, they're insulting the electorate.
And let's face it, it's not just on TikTok, it's on the legacy media, it's on MSDNC.
It's basically the legacy media who are trying to diagnose a psychosis in the American electorate to explain why they were so wrong.
Yeah, a lot of mental illness, a lot of entitlement.
Yeah, they're so out of touch and whiny.
That's the problem with it.
And like David Sachs occasionally, you know, can actually make reasonable analysis for things and criticisms, right?
And you can make the point that the Democrats, Fine, fine.
But their analysis that this is because the leadership is too affluent, too out of touch, right?
Like it's too focused on these culture or whatever.
Like that's you guys.
You guys are billionaires.
Like, if that's the concern, These are all millionaires and billionaires, many of whom who have supplement companies, who have their own, like, tech companies, multiple tech companies.
They're flying around in private jets, and they're constantly talking about, like, saying, working-class people won't care if they can't get iPhones.
They'll use flip phones.
And you're like, you guys, it's just amazing that they are able to It does kind of remind me of ancient Roman history where you had the Senate, the equestrian class.
And, you know, vicious factions and political infighting and each of them accusing the other side of the worst possible things and each of them appealing as much as they can to demagoguery and populism in order to get one over the other side.
To the extent that what he says about the democratic elite of what is true, as you said, it is even more true of people like this.
Yeah, like, you know, you're talking about people with money and influence who are playing these games and appealing to populism and the working man and the cost of a cheeseburger when it suits them.
When they live these rarefied lives, they live in these circles with $500,000 club memberships and $100,000 a seat tickets to sit down and have a seat in the corridors of Powell, yet still kind of...
I don't like it.
It's not good.
It shouldn't work, but it seems to resonate.
The thing you noted, Matt, this is sometimes presented as an entrepreneur podcast, but in a lot of ways it is now essentially a light MAGA propagandist outlet.
Even immediately after the election, they were talking about the role of the alternative media, right?
And listen to them explain that.
Jason, do you think that that message got across more clearly in this election than ever before, as some have claimed, because of the power of alternative media for reaching the audience, rather than having everything pushed through reporters in traditional legacy media, in this case,
And did that move the needle for a lot of people in a way that won this?
Or was it the policies and the difference alone?
Well, clearly, being on podcasts was a major part of Trump's strategy that people are starting to report on right now.
And, you know, in media, you go where the audience is.
And I think the Democrats just didn't get that.
Now, stepping back, I think the number one problem here is the candidate that the Democrats put up.
And probably the close number two is inflation.
And the economy, as we all know, it's the economy, stupid.
If you were paying $2 for a cheeseburger at McDonald's and now it's $4, that's what people are going to remember.
The inflation that occurred over this last four years was huge.
And people cited that over and over and over again.
So you got the reference there again to the fast food prices, right?
As you said, that's the point that they'll return to over and over.
But the bit at the start of it, the interesting thing for me is like they are noting the kind of network of Lex Friedman, Joe Rogan, them.
Theo Vaughan, a whole variety of alternative media that came out and basically gave Trump very softball interviews, a whole bunch of free publicity.
The way that Joe Rogan approached Trump was the absolute softest interview you've ever seen.
He was giving him answers before he got the questions out.
What they're essentially talking there when they're saying, you know, the legacy media feeling, you know, the Democrats feeling to take advantage, it sort of ignores that, no, it wouldn't have worked like that because you guys wouldn't have been the same way you are to Trump because you're aligned there, right?
Like, it's like Lex interviewing Zelensky versus Lex interviewing Elon Musk.
It's a very different kind of vibe that you get in that experience.
So they recognize that There is this ecosystem, and they're presenting that as Trump made use of it, and it was there to be made use of.
And it's more like, no, you guys are a soft propaganda wing for the Trump campaign.
And yes, you did fulfill your purpose in that respect.
But don't they have any moment where they think, wait, but are we supposed to be a campaign wing for a political movement?
And, yeah.
Well, that's the thing with independent media, right?
It can be anything they want it to be.
There's no rules.
You know, like, the baseline premise is Joe Rogan, he's just a guy talking about stuff that interests him.
They're just four guys that used to play poker together.
Now they're talking about stuff they like, they're interested in.
Like, there is no, there's no editorial guidelines.
There's no, there's no standards.
They can do what they want, I guess.
This is my problem with independent content.
I mean, it's great with non-political stuff.
There's so much rich stuff out there.
But when it comes to political reportage and editorializing like these guys are, then it's, well, you know, all bets are off.
You could be a Hassan or you could be like these guys.
But it's just one-sided propaganda or one side or another.
Yeah, but I guess the thing that's interesting for me is they're constantly talking about the mainstream media and how it lied about Trump, all the things that it presented, and that people started to see through it.
So I've got two examples.
Here's the first one.
So what does that mean?
I think what it means is that there has been a concerted effort to perturb the way that you interpret who he is.
Separately, there's been a concerted effort to prop up whoever is sitting against him in opposition.
And I think this is an opportunity to finally acknowledge that if you trust these traditional legacy sources of helping you to get to a decision, you're going to get tricked.
There's that old saying, you know, fool me once, shame on you.
But fool me twice, shame on me.
Because I am now allowing this to happen.
And I think that for a lot of Americans, that is what happened.
I think it is really as simple as that.
I think they were able to see through the veneer of an attempt to malign and corner somebody.
And on the other side, an attempt to basically play on vibes and feelings and emotions.
And I don't think that America wants that.
What they want in running the country.
They want somebody serious running the country where you can have disagreements with them and you can still find an opportunity to work together with those people.
So I think that little speech there is a good indication of the intellectual weight in this podcast.
You know, fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
And I think what the people want, you know, there was a concerted effort to demonize.
Like, just go back and listen to that.
And it is such fluff.
And it is partisan, propagandistic fluff delivered in the sort of homely kind of way.
The guy's very articulate.
He speaks well.
He has a nice speaking voice.
And I think, yeah, I think that's kind of what they're offering here.
But it is, if you take those little things away, it is just straight up partisan propaganda, right?
You know, the mainstream media, everything you think you've heard about Trump, it's all just a character assassination.
He's really a great guy.
They're all lying about him.
You know, the mainstream media are lying to you.
And, you know, a sensible person will wake up.
They want serious people, Mark.
Yeah, a serious adult person will not listen to people.
Like, that's the level of it.
There's no deep ideas there.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And also just Not like them.
Yeah, not like us.
We just have conversations.
We don't think.
So that was Chamov's version of it.
Here's David Sack's version of the same thing.
From the same episode, by the way.
My point is just the Democrats had a massive advantage on the money side.
They also, I think, had a massive advantage on what you would call the legacy media side.
I mean, I don't know how you put a value, a dollar value, on what the legacy media has done, not just in this election cycle, but for the last eight or nine years.
They have basically called Donald Trump a Nazi, a fascist, a traitor.
Did it work?
Or did it blow up in their faces?
I'm about to get to that.
They called him an agent of Putin.
They called him an insurrectionist.
They called him a convicted felon.
They called him a dictator.
They've been yelling that at the top of their lungs now for at least four years.
The country didn't believe it.
I would just say that the legacy media's spell is broken.
Their credibility has been destroyed.
And I think that the repudiation of the legacy media is one of the most important results of this election.
It just shows that.
And you have to, at the end of the day, say that that's a result not just of alternative media gaining steam and free speech on X. I think those were absolutely necessary enablers.
It's also the fact that Trump has a trillion-dollar personality and is a tremendously gifted communicator and politician in his own unique way.
Genius.
But finally you have to say, Yeah, that's a balanced point of view.
Yeah, but you know that thing where they're trying to call him an insurrectionist, a convicted felon.
He is!
He is those things.
No, no.
If it's negative about Trump, it's propaganda, Chris.
It's very simple.
That's how you know.
Once again, the pathological inability of people in this space to acknowledge Right-wing media exists and is powerful.
Was Trump maligned consistently for years in the Murdoch press?
I wouldn't say so.
I would say that he got propped up not just by alternative media and X, but almost all right-wing media fell in line.
Initially, when they thought that he might not be, you know, the king anymore, you know, they were willing to air critical opinions.
But just like J.D. Vance, Just like all of them, they fell in line.
And so they act as if the only media that exists, when they say legacy media, is left-wing media.
And then there's the alternative media, which is completely independent, and it just so happens to love Trump.
What is actually the case is that there is huge amounts of right-wing media, which has pushed Trump consistently, even while Trump's You have, like, Fox News, but you also have One American Network and so on, right?
And then you have the independent, so-called alternative media sphere, which is vastly sympathetic to Trump.
This is the example of people giving balanced, critical coverage, this podcast that we're listening to.
So it's presented as if the underdog has won.
But there's so much media stacked in his favor, and they are part of it.
There's so much a part of it that these guys went on to, some of them, be part of the administration.
But that is not presented as like corruption or elitism.
RFK Jr. is a member of the Kennedy family.
Joe Rogan is a multimillionaire who ran as a senior position in a supplement company that he sold the UniLivier.
He introduced Casey and Kelly Means, who is now, you know, nominated to be Surgeon General or whatever.
Like, there's all these elites with millions and billions of dollars.
And they're all talking to each other and complaining about being mistreated.
And yet, they've got all these conspiracies about the deep state and the people working behind each other's backs.
And they're doing it in front of everyone's fucking face.
It's just, I don't know, Matt.
David Sachs.
Yeah, yeah.
And Chamov was at Facebook.
He's a Facebook guy, Chamov.
Yeah.
These are incredibly rich and influential people and they're making full use and talking about how they make full use of their money in order to influence things.
Now they're doing it on the podcast and yet The fact that nobody seems to care about the discrepancy between that and the populist vibe, the idea that they're the people that really care about how much a cheeseburger costs.
They're the people that want to clean the swamp and ultimate transparency and make sure that it's just the people's will is being felt.
My God.
And you're being anti-elite.
Yes, like you said before, I guess there's an argument.
That the Democrat Party in the United States is also a party of elites as well, right?
Sure, sure.
I'm sure there's a preponderance of people with degrees from Ivy League universities who are influential there.
But I think at least the Democratic Party, like its version of the elite maybe encompasses maybe the top 10 or 15 percent, whereas the Trump version of the elite encompasses the top 0.7 percent.
You know, it's like battling elites.
Well, they're even, and the funny thing is, like, on these episodes, they've been complaining that they weren't granted enough influence, but the Democrats were too mean to them.
So they, you know, they've now switched to support Trump, and this is what you get, Democrats, right?
And you're like, this is oligarchs and elites telling you that they weren't getting special enough treatment.
So they've decided to support somebody who is going to give them prayers.
You know, I'm potentially positioned in the administration.
And yeah, it's just surprising to me that this seems to be so appealing to so many people.
Well, that's the bit that surprises me.
It doesn't surprise me that there are four rich guys who are dicks and boring.
Yeah, that's normal.
I think that's right.
That's fine.
But yeah, it's one of the most popular podcasts in the world, or mostly in the United States.
And why?
I guess it's what we said before.
It's just, well, they're rich.
They can name drop.
They can hint at walking in the corridors of power and being at the special dinners.
And there's some truth in those boasts, unlike with a lot of our gurus.
And that's it, I guess.
I don't know.
It's CEO and wealth porn.
That's what it feels like.
It's that mistake that we keep talking about where people mistake money and wealth for intelligence and capacity.
right?
Like that is what causes people to become like hugely wealthy.
It's only earned through like, and CEOs themselves do this, right?
Like because they then go on to feed that story to the public that yes, I'm in this position because I have a unique personality and character that allowed me to be And obviously, there are cases where it is the case that somebody saw some gap in the market or they are good at sparking trends and investing and this kind of thing.
But that is not the same thing as being somebody who you should listen to about how to run the NIH or something like that.
Like, it is not the same thing.
And in this case, a lot of them have, like, you know...
But it seems to me that there's that distinction.
And then there perhaps is the thing that people want to emulate these kind of guys, right?
There's a lot of entrepreneurial spirit in the US.
These are people that are like, The heads of significant companies and they have insider knowledge in the tech and investor space.
So they do talk about, you know, deals and things that are going down and whatnot.
But I genuinely don't think that people are listening to this and kind of getting insights about which companies to invest in and whatnot.
It's more just the proximity to power.
And in our normal gurus, it's the proximity to like intellectual.
Brilliance.
That's what's being presented.
You're hearing a high-level conversation from a political analyst and a philosophical psychologist.
But here, you're hearing insights into the minds of brilliant investors and tech CEOs who are breaking down economic issues in ways that the layman can understand.
So that's the impression I get for why it appeals.
Yeah.
Well, people can tell us.
Maybe some of our listeners will.
Have more insight into it than us because it kind of mystifies me a bit.
You know, when we went to cover these guys and I started listening, we sort of spoke and we thought, oh, you know, they're really annoying, but they're not going to dig in the carometer very much.
And to some degree that's true because they don't have a lot of the They don't have very clear philosophies.
No, they don't have the intellectual pretensions that a lot of us have.
And they have the pretensions, I think.
They have the pretensions, but they don't have...
That's right.
They don't follow through with the revolutionary theories and stuff.
But man, I mean, I'm looking at the Garometer and they ding a few.
They ding a few, like the self-aggrandizement, the conspiracies we heard so much of, the anti-institutional.
Establishmentarianism.
Establishmentarianism.
Yeah, and even other things too, like the moral grandstanding.
So it'll be interesting to rate them that they may well score moderately high.
But it is also just so interesting how these claims of great success, like resting your appeal on that, like if these were four guys and they were relying entirely on the quality of their conversation to sell their podcast, I don't think they'd get very far.
So they lean very, very hard on what wonderful masters of the universe they are in terms of their connections and their money.
And, you know, it does remind me of Gary, who's a very different character in many ways.
But he also feels compelled to lean so hard on whatever his metrics of success are that he can plausibly lay claim to.
getting the best grades at the university, going to the elite university, being the best trader in the world.
I think maybe, I'm just trying to understand here, like the But the person who, you know, it's not just the content, it's who the person is, what they embody, what they represent.
Yeah.
So what you're saying, Ma, is like, we should really be speaking.
We should be picking up ourselves more.
we want to make it big.
We've got to start talking more about our elite qualifications.
This is what we need to emphasize.
People would like that.
Well, we have precious little to dig into that in terms of our worldly success.
You can spin it, Matt.
You can spin it.
You know, I think I've got a teal, I can tell.
But, you know, whatever the key is.
So, I've got more clips, but do we need to hear them?
Well, please no.
Please no.
I think we're all right.
Everyone knows what the deal is.
Yeah, let's leave the all-in crew to their own back patting and whatnot.
Leave them to their private clubs.
Leave them to their $10,000 seat dinners.
Leave them to their mansions in Silicon Valley.
They'll be just fine.
Yes.
And let's also note that it is the chaos, right, that the...
They are less bad than David Sachs and Chamov, but it's all relative, right?
They're relatively less bad, but it's relative.
And fundamentally, they're all part of the same project.
I think that is fair to say.
Yeah, yeah, they are.
No.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know.
The world has to move towards a place where people like this are not the people who are driving things behind the scenes.
We need to put an end to this.
Gary should go on their podcast.
That's what I want.
Let's get Gary on their podcast that they can have.
You know, a battle of whatever they do to each other.
They could have a battle.
First of all, they could figure out who went to the best university, who's the most elite.
Who's the best at predicting markets?
That would take me being hard to get that sorted.
Yeah, yeah.
But then once that was out of the way, yeah, I think...
Well, look, I'd still choose Gary over these guys.
He's an annoying prick, but at least...
These people are not good.
And in Australia, we have not as many.
We don't have Silicon Valleys.
We have mining magnets and stuff like that.
Let me tell you, Chris.
Everyone fucking hates them.
If they had a podcast, you need to cordially despise your rich people.
Tolerate them if you must.
But don't listen to their podcast.
Come on.
Okay.
Okay.
Well, now, Matt, we're approaching the end of the podcast.
We've done our duty.
We'll be back with the grommeter afterwards.
But I did want to just give you a little heads up at the end of the podcast.
I put up the poll for the next book that will be covered on required readings.
Would you like an update on how that is going?
So far?
You've been working on the scenes.
I have done nothing.
There's 95 votes so far, so you still have time.
Okay, read them out to me.
I'm not going to go through them all.
There's a lot of choices.
Tell me the top three.
Start with number three.
Work your way out to number one.
Okay.
Number three is Drunk, How We Sip, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization by Ted Slingeland.
Approve.
I like that one.
12%.
That's currently on.
Number two is Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America by Gene Borden.
35%.
That's not bad.
Cults Like Us.
Okay.
Yeah.
But currently ahead with 1% extra, 36% Buddhism: A Journey Through History by Donald S. Lopez Jr.
So, Matt, the revenge for Cod may arrive.
It may.
It's only 1% ahead.
It's unclear.
There's been no vote tampering.
Nothing has gone on.
I had to select an image to go with the post, and I randomly selected a statue of a Buddha.
That was just a random.
You've been influencing things.
I know.
You've been dropping the Buddha thing continually.
You've totally destroyed my faith in democracy.
First, there was the Trump win at the last year's election.
Now, you're winning your thing.
Is that what people want?
Do they want me to lose my faith in democracy?
You know what to do.
Come on.
You voted.
Are you trying to claim that you did not affect the scales when it comes to COD being selected?
I don't feel that that was completely independent.
In any case, it will already be done by the time this comes out, Matt.
So there won't be any influence from here.
But if you made the right decision, we thank you.
If you made the wrong decision, Let's see.
I want a full investigation into vote tampering.
Vote tampering, yeah.
Dispute the result.
I'm going to claim victory.
Yeah.
No matter what the result is.
Well, before we give a shout out to the patrons, that's the last thing we need to do, Matt, here, before we disappear.
I did just want to read out one review because...
We need our egos taken down a pair, okay?
The title is A Show of Weird Takes.
Two stars.
It seems like the hosts attempt to break down arguments of obviously intelligent or witty people without using much evidence or science in the contrary, or evidence of anything.
Besides, I just don't see it that way.
They use statements from someone else's study and they pick any minor shortfalls in the process as an argument against it, without providing any of their own study results besides their personal experiences.
It seems mostly anecdotal.
In attacking some people's humor, it comes across as unfunny whatsoever, even if they think they are.
Basically, just guys wanting to break intellectual people and podcasts down.
It's not funny, not witty, and flat.
In listening, I'm just curious as to why they are compelled to try to nitpick intelligent arguments.
Do they get enjoyment or consider themselves podcast warriors?
Hours worth of weird takes and misplaced laughter that are not worth listening to.
KiloGolf111 from the American States.
The United States of America, sorry.
To the American state.
Yeah, wow, I thought that.
See, he's clearly a science lover.
Clearly!
Clearly, he mentions science a lot and studies.
Isn't he right, Matt?
Do we provide our own studies to take down the intellectual insights of people like Michael Schellenberger or Jordan Peterson?
we don't do our own studies we rely on Interesting character.
I wonder what hurt him.
I wonder what which of You're saying what episode triggered him.
He may well have listened to a lot of them and just come to the general conclusion that we are bad, which we might well be.
But I suspect that he listened to one about someone he likes.
That's what I suspect.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, just to give you another one, Matt, that is more specific.
Everyone I don't like is a conspiracy theorist slash MAGA.
This is from Yop Yop Yop, a game from the USA.
I see a theme emerging.
That's basically the show.
Listening to their show on Michael Schellenberger, they seem to not know much about him or his history and then work backwards from the idea that he's bad.
We didn't provide any.
Evidence to support our, you know, claims about Schellenberger and his conspiracy proneness, but there was nothing except just bond thief, out of context clips.
That's all.
Yeah, look, look, Reddit leftists, if you're listening, just remember, these people hate us, right?
These vagabond people hate us.
You need to rally together and support us because we can't be taking it from both sides.
The manga.
No, the leftists and the MAGA people are, you know, it's hand-clasping across the aisles in the Hydrate of Decode and the Gurus.
We are the unifying force.
The one thing that unifies.
Not the one thing.
They've got other things.
It's true, they do have other things.
Yeah, they've got what we we help out in that respect.
Well, but speaking of people that help out, Matt, that I'm We have conspiracy hypothesizers.
I want to thank them.
Do you object?
No.
Proceed.
Proceed.
Okay.
I'll proceed with the shoutouts.
I would like to fight Chris Bowers and Eduardo De Prez.
Okay?
Those are two people I'd like to shout out who I think I don't have the tier for.
There you go.
Whatever tier is appropriate.
Now, conspiracy hypothesizers.
Mike Smith, Das Mann, Tom Hodgman, Rob Dennis, David Bryce Wilson, Ben Simmons, Red Team Wins, Callum Coleman, Carl Moss, Peter Lynn, Ben Perleski, Brad Bolduc, Jacqueline Warkerton, Preston Hooser, Rita Forbes, FT, Ignacio Gonzalez, Laurie Rantanenin, Alex Sieschlack, TG, Emmanuel Turley, Max Letty, Jeffrey Crompton, Jonathan Church, Bevan K, Jeff D, Kim
Lawless, Mickey Norden, Mikko Olke, Mao Canafi, Lazar Stauer, and Steve B. That's all our conspiracy, my proposizers, for this week.
Thank them.
Thank you.
Thank you all.
I feel like there was a conference.
That none of us were invited to.
That came to some very strong conclusions.
And they've all circulated this list of correct answers.
I wasn't at this conference.
This kind of shit makes me think, man.
It's almost like someone is being paid.
Like, when you hear these George Soros stories, he's trying to destroy the country from within.
We are not going to advance conspiracy theories.
We will advance conspiracy hypotheses.
They will.
They will indeed.
I wonder what the all-in people think about George Soros.
They're not a fan.
He did come up.
He came up.
They're not fans.
It's surprising, Matt, that he could work that out because it's so unpredictable.
But he's incredibly rich like them.
You'd think that fell a certain affinity.
No, he's an elite, Matt.
No, he's not like them.
Yeah, he's not a good elite.
And now, on the revolutionary This is the ones who can get access to the decoding academia.
The ones that can join the book club if they want, Matt.
They can attend.
Yeah, they can read your stupid book about Buddhism.
Maybe.
It's unclear yet.
We'll see.
Now is the time to join because we're not reading Kodakian.
Join and vote against the book.
Come on.
Yeah, but it'll be too late by the time you hear this.
Nonetheless, there's all the reasons.
Lots of things on the Patreon.
Now, we have.
People have such imaginative names.
Minotaurus Rex.
I mean, how many Minotaurusaurus Rex.
How do you come up with this?
I really...
I don't know how to do it.
I will steal that one because I'm incapable of coming up with this kind of thing myself.
You can name your dog that.
Okay.
And lastly, Matt, we have Galaxy Brain Gurus.
Okay?
Now, they are the tippy-top.
Of the guru.
They get special access.
They get special access.
That's right.
They get to hang out at the monthly live stream things, if they want.
We don't force them.
It's not a requirement that they have to do that.
But, you know, they can tell us about the facts on the ground, how our policies are affecting their business, and we'll take it into account for future episodes.
And chief amongst them, we should shout out Adam Schur, who campaigned for this episode and provided various suggestions for stuff to cover.
So good on you, Adam.
Thanks for that.
Very active on the Patreon community, which is an incredibly active forum.
When I'm feeling lonely and I knock people out replying to me on Reddit or Twitter, I'll go there, Chris.
Well, they're kinder there.
There's always someone there.
Yeah, that's true.
They accompany me occasionally on my random live streams in my car.
How many people listen to you rant when you drive to work?
It depends.
It depends on the thing, but it's a manageable amount.
I'm not a live streamer, okay?
Let's be clear about that.
This is not something we advertise as a perk, okay?
It's just something on occasion that happens.
It's like a thunderstorm.
Yeah, just because you can't be alone with your thoughts for more than 10 minutes at a time.
People have good questions.
I've told them many things about you.
You know, they want to know.
Do they miss me?
Do they feel like this is weird?
They actually would prefer if you were there.
They've got to meet through with me.
And they're like, when will Matt come?
Like, never.
You get them once a month, but that's it.
So, yeah.
But, Matt, anyway, the important thing.
the Galaxy Brain Growers.
Here we have Jagger.
Ify Donatello might be a leftist, Matt, but he's one of the good ones.
Easy?
Good.
That's good.
That's good.
There are a couple.
But overzealous euthanasiest.
That's an imaginative.
How did he come up with that?
How did he do it?
No, tell me your method.
I need to know the method.
That's it.
Well, you get this for your efforts.
We tried to warn people.
Yeah.
Like what was coming, how it was going to come in, the fact that it was everywhere and in everything.
Considering me tribal just doesn't make any sense.
I have no tribe.
I'm in exile.
Think again, sunshine.
Yeah.
Scott Adams diagnosed with cancer.
It's sad for him.
It is.
We'll cover it in the next supplementary material.
But yeah.
Yeah.
So in any case, Matt, that's Mischief Managed for today.
We will be back.
Of supplementary materials soon enough.
There's lots of good, funny supplementary stuff that's happened.
Oh, yes.
Look forward to that.
It'll be better than the last supplementary material.
No, the last one was good.
But it would be even better than that.
Even better.
It was good.
But if you felt vaguely dissatisfied with the last supplementary materials, rest assured we've leveled up.
Next one.
Yeah, it'll be 10x.
10x.
So, well, anyway, I've got to go hit the jet, Matt.
I'm just going to fly off back to my island retreat now.
Yeah.
I might even just sign up to Gary's website now because I do feel we need to get these bastards.
I want to eat them.
Literally want to eat the rich.
That's how I feel after.
That sounds right.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's be careful of the way that we endorse what he said.
But yeah, in any case.
These are not my tribe, Matt.
These are not my people.
No, they're not my tribe either.
If you'll excuse me, I'll go inspect my collection of ivory backscratches.
