Jason Calacanis recounts loaning Elon Musk $100,000 during his bankruptcy, earning the first Tesla Model S serial number, while critiquing San Francisco's crime and fentanyl crisis. He contrasts this with Austin and Miami, advocating for rule-bending entrepreneurs like Uber founders over Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes. Calacanis supports Musk's DOGE efficiency efforts and Trump's administration to address the national debt, arguing immigrants commit fewer crimes than Americans despite political narratives. The discussion concludes by urging wealthy residents to flee chaotic American cities for safer global destinations like Dubai or Singapore, framing economic migration as a necessary response to liberal incompetence and rising urban danger. [Automatically generated summary]
Jason on Twitter slash X. I thought I was going to start this by talking about the ear things that we were going to have in, because this is your studio with very fancy, professional-grade earbuds, and I thought I was going to sit in the host chair, and then I was going to have your earwax in my ear.
It was going to be a very strange start to the show.
We were saying when I did your show just here a few hours ago, we come at this, this thing that brings us together from opposite positions, because I was kind of a politics guy that ended up doing tech.
We would all be just, it'd be like 200 of us on YouTube in this little community.
And then over time, we got Jalen Brunson and Julius Randle and then traded him and got Kat.
And the team got better and better.
And it's just been a passion of mine.
But it really is interesting.
The audience becoming part of the show.
And for the fans, by the fans, is what CP calls Nick's Fan TV.
And it's become like a little business, and it very much reminds me of what you were doing, like with your fan base or our fan base here at This Week in Startups and all, and is the democratization of this, which started really in the internet in the late 90s, has actually come to fruition with the tools, the bandwidth, and the monetization has all lined up perfectly.
And it's really beautiful.
You know, anybody at any time.
Has the platform and create a show and can be as famous, notable, affluent, rich as their talent will take them.
But that, you know, place where people would go and look at records and you'd meet people You go there, and maybe if you're in the goth section, you meet somebody in your case.
But there was a zine section, and there was a zine called Mondo 2000, and there was another one.
called Paper Magazine, which was a zine at the time, and they became a glossy.
Yeah.
And there was one 2600 about hacking, and I really got obsessed with that.
And I had started a zine called Cyber Surfer about dial-up services, then Silicon Alley Reporter, Play On Words.
And there was very few ways to break into media back then.
You had so many gatekeepers.
And what I realized was those zines, even though they were 16-page photocopies Photocopies that were folded a certain way.
You can look it up online, had a magazine.
They were next to Spy Magazine and Esquire and The New Yorker.
And it was like an epiphany for me.
Oh, I could create my own magazine.
And then who's going to stop me?
And I did it.
And I put $1,800 on my credit card.
And I went up to the Village Printers on 43rd and 6th.
I took my first issue of Silicon Valley Reporter and I went to Roseland where there was an internet party happening.
Total New York, one of the first internet websites.
And there were probably 200 people there and I had about 300 or 400 of these printouts on a luggage cart.
And I went there and I started giving out this zine.
And I handed it to people.
And then by the time I had handed out like the 200th one, I turned around and I looked at the party.
The entire party had stopped.
And 100% of people in the party were looking over each other's shoulders, flipping through the magazine.
And I looked at it and I said...
All 200 people are reading my words.
I had a couple of friends write a couple of stories.
But I realized at that time, wow, if you control the medium, you have that power, you can define reality, you can own the scene.
And I combined live events, parties with the zine, and then it grew to conferences and radio and email newsletters.
And then I wound up starting a blog company when I had seen all these blogs, you know, in the early 2000s started to get – There was one called Pay Content that somebody who worked for me had started.
There was one called Boing Boing, if you remember that.
Shani Jardin, who worked for me, started doing it.
And then I had seen Gawker that Nick Denton had started.
So I saw that and I was like, I'm going to start a...
And I said, I think these blogs are going to become a thing.
And he said, why?
I said, because if you're a really good writer, you don't have an editor.
And so you can write things that the editor would have stopped you from writing.
It's like very punk rock.
It's very much like, I was into Dylan, I was like, it's kind of like acoustic, like, it's kind of like going down to like, you know, Bleecker Street, you just take out your guitar and you go.
And so again, it like clicked in my brain, oh, no gatekeeper, no gatekeeper.
And that is really what podcasting is about as well.
Podcasting is about no gatekeeper, nobody telling you what you can say or not, and then talent.
Comes from reps and understanding every nuance, every detail.
So I can tell you in this studio that we're sitting in, the lights, the cameras, the microphones, the audio software, the lighting, you know, these cables, I have set all that up.
Podcasting, the name isn't from like Pods of Wales, which people think.
It's from the iPod.
And what they did was the iPod, Dave Weiner and Adam Curry, who don't get enough credit for this, they just had this insight.
If you plug the iPod into your computer, and then at night they ran a script that went to the RSS feeds, and every night it would look to see if there's any new files, and then would put it into a podcast artist, an album, and then a track.
And so it hacked the original thing, the original iPod.
And then you would take your iPod with you on the subway and you'd have a couple of talk shows.
And I think that's when, you know, a lot of like interesting people.
Whether it was Charlie Rose or Howard Stern, there was a lot of like, I want to be those guys.
How do you become those guys?
Well, you gotta get somebody to give you permission.
like when it was all so new and like, you didn't really know what you were doing, but you knew you loved something and you were just trying to do it where now it's like, you can walk into rooms and people know who you are and you can make deals happen more easily.
And yeah, I mean, And, you know, heavy is the head that wears the crown kind of situation.
Like, be careful what you wish for because when you do become popular and you get to the top of the mountain, which arguably you are and, you know, all in is, very strange things start to happen.
Fame, even the micro-fame that we have, I consider podcasting fame micro-fame.
And, yeah, you'd have to be careful because, you know, it does create a house of mirrors.
If you're not grounded and then it happens to you, then, you know, you might have a hard time understanding that who you are.
And what you believe is different than how people perceive you, right?
And I think you probably have had this experience.
People will project their fantasies, their anger, their joy, whatever, into an individual that they are fans of or that they listen to.
And what's particularly interesting about podcasting as a medium, which I didn't anticipate, was there's something about being in people's ears, like we are right now, for a regular period of time.
And you got to Delhi.
And there's something about getting to daily, which Howard Stern did, Charlie Rose did.
I did for a while here.
I'm four days a week, three days on this week in Startups, one day on All In.
And when you start hitting daily and you become a habit for people, now they have this experience of asymmetrical intimacy, which is another way of saying fame.
They know everything about you.
They know you have a kid or two kids.
They know your dog.
You like to ski in Japan.
They know all this stuff.
You've never met them.
So when they come up to you, It's this cathartic moment, like, we went to summer camp together and we haven't seen each other for 20 years, or we fought in, like, some war, and then we saw each other again at a 50th reunion of something, you know, at D-Day.
It just opens up this incredible emotional experience for people.
And it's actually quite charming because I have always been so effervescent and enthusiastic about entrepreneurship and people quitting their jobs and just following their dreams.
Have given people that roadmap.
I can't tell you the number of times.
It's thousands that people have stopped me at an airport over the last decade and say, I heard you say this to this founder on your podcast, and yeah, I wound up starting a company.
But I mean, how often does someone randomly approach you at Starbucks or at an airport, pitch you something, and you're like, wow, we're going to have a call about this?
Sometimes people would describe them as assholes or difficult, but they're incredibly competent.
And when you hear them talking, you hear their passion, it's not an empty can making a lot of noise.
It's like it resonates.
It's deep.
It's like, yes, this will echo in eternity if it works.
Like when Travis showed me Uber, I was like, yeah, there's, there's, Even though we grew up at a time where everyone was told, don't get in a car with a stranger.
Yeah, and when I asked him pressing questions, every time I asked a pressing question, I would see him processing it like a Terminator, you know, like in Terminator 2. And he's processing it, even if he hadn't thought about the issue.
And he would have like a very clear vision for how that might execute.
And we had this like argument over tipping.
You know, I'm from Brooklyn.
Everybody gets tipped.
You know, my first time I ever took a flight, I was 15 years old.
And the waitress, I'm sorry, the flight attendant, stewardess at the time, flight attendant came to me and, you know, I was a And she said, what do you want?
I think it was more money because I just thought, my God, we never have any money.
And every fight my parents ever had was just about trying to pay the bills, right?
We were living paycheck to paycheck.
My dad had a bar at one point.
That was just financially super difficult.
The worst business you could ever be in.
And so I just always had this fear of running out of money.
And so when I made my first couple of million, I was sitting there with my wife after I sold the company.
And I was sitting there waiting for the wire to come through from AOL, and I'm refreshing my Bank of America screen, because they said the wire's been sent through.
Refreshing and refreshing.
You know, this is online banking in the early 2000s, and it takes like, you know, a couple seconds, many for it to load, and it loads, and I see this millions, tens of millions of dollars show up in the bank account.
And I felt my chin, and I was like, oh my god, I'm crying.
She goes, why are you crying?
You're giving me all this money, and we're set for life.
I said, oh, I never have to worry about money again.
It was just like, incredible, cathartic release to say, oh, I don't have to have that fear, right?
Like a primordial fear.
And then I also thought like, well, wouldn't it be interesting if like you were relevant and people listen to your opinion or you knew people and your friends were super relevant and you So when you and I grew up in the boroughs, there was a term, B&T.
And if you went to Manhattan, when I went to Manhattan and I tried to go to Palladium or Limelight, half the time you went and you showed your Brooklyn ID, they would hand it back to you and say, no B&T.
Of course, I got a fake ID, an NYU ID from, say, Mark's Place for $10, and that solved that problem.
But, you know, I wanted to try to be in charge.
I wanted to have control of my destiny because the first two or three jobs I had, I kept getting either fired or told to wait in line, and it just infuriated me.
But once I figured out how to hack stuff, I was like, oh, The world's a video game.
There's a solution to every level.
I'm just going to route around anything in my way.
Anything that's in my way, I'm just going to find the back door.
Because in New York, when we went to the movies, one person would buy a ticket.
They'd go to the back of the Fortway.
They'd open up the emergency exit, and six kids would run in.
That's how we went to the movies.
We didn't have the money to go to the movies, so one person bought a ticket, went in.
We just always had an angle.
We had an angle.
And so, you know, that's what But, you know, after that, you're going to wind up, and I tell this to entrepreneurs because I've seen it happen over and over again, and ones who've made much more money than me.
You know, you see the bank statement, and then you all of a sudden regret selling your company.
You have no purpose.
They own your company, the brand, the baby.
The team doesn't work for you anymore, and you're sitting at home with all this money and all this time.
And I've seen people get really depressed.
You know, drugs.
Suicide, depression, you know, they realize, oh, that does nothing to solve whatever it was that put that battery in.
And then you have to, oh, the shark has to stop moving and you have to actually examine, okay, well, what actually gives you joy?
And what is your purpose?
And then I was really able to see.
Like, I actually really enjoy building things with people who are different, who are mutants.
I took the edge off and it took a couple of years, but then I realized, okay, now I'm dangerous.
Like, I don't need...
I needed to make money.
I needed to get an investor.
There were costs associated with it.
Then it was like, oh, I can just start a project now and just do it.
I don't need to go to an investor.
I can just build the prototype or get started.
And in today's day and age, young people who have skills, product designer, developer, sales executive, They can start a project on the weekend, and we have something called Founder University where we teach people over 12 weeks how to build a company and all the little secrets that people don't know.
And some of it's obvious stuff like legal issues around cap tables, which you probably had to learn as a comedian.
I mean, well, I mean, I did everything from bartending and waiting tables and all that kind of stuff, like some of the worst.
Well, this was, I wasn't even paid for this, but to get on stage as an early comic, I used to have to stand outside for two hours a night in Times Square, rain, sleet, nor snow.
But if you do go the route of bending and breaking rules, like I have a sort of golden rule I have to teach young founders because they're like, oh, Uber broke the rules and Airbnb broke the rules.
I'm like, when they bent the rules, because I'll go with bend, when they bent the rules, who benefited?
You know, if you bent the rules on ride sharing, well, the people in Brooklyn who couldn't get rides or – You were taking the subway.
It was like a known thing to the point at which they did reality TV shows showing this example.
And if you were somebody who wanted to get an Airbnb or rent an extra room you had, when Airbnb bent the rules around that, they reinterpreted the rules.
They said maybe these rules don't apply to this new category of inventory.
Well, who benefited?
People who couldn't afford to go to Tokyo got to go for the first time in their lives.
Or people who could only afford to go to Manhattan for two days got to stay for 20. And the person who had the extra room got to make money and hit their rent or pay their mortgage.
So you have to be careful that you're bending the rules for the betterment of not just yourself, the enriching of yourself, but the enrichment of society.
And you look at Elizabeth Holmes, when she broke all these rules around blood testing, she was putting people's lives in danger.
Sociopathic, insane.
And it was to benefit herself.
And she was lying to her investors, so she wasn't even to benefit her investors.
It was strictly to maintain her own narcissism and at the cost of, you know, the people's potential health.
Like, there were people who got low cholesterol readings or perfectly fine cholesterol readings who then got prescriptions for drugs based on inaccurate results.
So imagine you took a blood test with some Silicon Valley company.
Not to say, though, if you break the rules for the, you know, let's say the right reasons as you're laying out, you could still end up in a lot of trouble because you've got taxi companies with their medallions not happy with you guys or you got big.
Probably, I mean, New York City real estate probably not so thrilled about certain things.
London was a hard one, too, I think, because they had this great tradition with their cab drivers who knew every nook and cranny of every little back street and had to take these tests.
And then there's a whole bunch of you that all kind of came up at the same time.
Everyone sort of knows their names.
And obviously you're on all in with some of these guys and everything else.
One of the things that I've found super interesting over the last couple of years is that when I was sitting down with, I would sit down with these guys because they had built all these things.
And what I always thought was interesting, and this was probably before you guys had All In, I was always like, all these guys kind of want to be me.
And I don't mean that as a pat on my back, but I always thought it was odd.
I sensed that what they really want is a show.
They made money, which is awesome.
And a lot of times I was talking to guys when I had no money, and I was like, God, you have the greatest life ever.
But then they would walk out of my house and I'd be like, I'm pretty sure what they really want was to have what I have.
Now you have both of those things and there's a lot of you guys that have both of those things.
What do you make of that just sort of premise generally?
I just know musicians who used to go and play at his place in Beverly Hills.
He had all these guitars, and he just liked to jam with people.
He was smart.
You know, like, I think he realized, oh, I only have a certain amount of times around the sun, and I'm just going to make the best of it.
And he had gotten sick early in life, so he valued life.
And he was like, yeah, I don't need to be here for the 12th release of Windows.
I can go do some other stuff.
But our industry was largely under the radar.
And the way we sort of integrated with the world was Steve Jobs would do a keynote, but not many people did that.
You know, Steve was a showman.
And then you would speak at a tech conference.
You know, once a year, there would be a tech conference twice a year.
And then TED started.
So, you know, it's like a third tech people at that.
So we'd go to TED and there'd be 600 people there.
It was still underground.
It wasn't shared online.
And you got to press once in a while.
So you had a PR person or you went to John Markoff at the New York Times or Wired and they wrote a story about you.
And that was like the extent of it.
And people were rooting for tech because tech was cool.
Like, oh, I got an iPod.
I play music on it.
But it wasn't.
Your whole life wasn't mitigated by the tech industry.
And really, all of a sudden, Google, you're like, yeah, I kind of live in Gmail, and I'm using Google all the time, and they own YouTube, and I'm kind of into that.
And then, really, I think Facebook was a major moment in time when people started to see the dark side of tech, like, oh, this is resulting in bad things, and this is taking a lot of people's time.
This guy doesn't seem to have the great intent with people.
And really, social media, Facebook specifically, Instagram, it started having a certain toxicity to it.
And then the world kind of started to turn on tech a bit.
We went from these nerds who were making cool shit that people could enjoy, but generally made people's lives better, to, is this actually making my life better?
It's kind of not.
And I don't trust that guy.
And really, Zuckerberg was that guy, I think, that a lot of people were like, I don't know if I trust that guy.
Two of us went there and wrote He had P1 or P2, the prototype, and I had number 16. And he just had texted me like, hey, on our BlackBerrys, to date this conversation, let's have dinner.
I'm feeling kind of blue.
I need some company.
So I went and had dinner with him.
And he was like, yeah, it's kind of like, what's going on with the rocket ship company?
It's like, yeah, well, we blew two up.
I said, well, what happens?
When's the next launch?
He's like, oh, the launch is coming next month.
And I said, what happens if you blow that one up?
He's like, SpaceX is gone.
And I'm like, okay.
Well, I got a couple of million dollars.
I'll ship it to you on Monday and, you know, whatever.
I'll loan it to you.
And he's like, don't bother.
Not necessary.
I said, well, Elon, there's got to be some good news.
And he said, yeah, actually, I got some good news today.
I said, okay.
And he takes out his BlackBerry.
He said, don't tell anybody.
And he shows me the clay models of the Model S. And he's flipping through it.
You know, in the BlackBerrys, he used to have that little trackpad thing on the ball.
You know, like, Little Clay, but I'm looking at it and I'm like, that's nicer than the Porsche.
It's like, I've never seen a car.
It looks kind of like a futuristic Taurus or something.
I was like, what is it going to cost?
It's four doors and it's like a sedan?
He's like, yeah.
He's like, what should I call it?
And I was like, I don't know.
You call it like the Model T. He's like, yeah, we can't call it the Model T. He's like, we can call it the Model S because Ford still has the trademark.
We actually looked into that.
I was like, yeah, that's a pretty good name.
Model S is good.
Like ST, whatever, sedan.
And I said, what's it going to cost?
And he said, I think I can do it for $50,000.
I said, if you can do that for $50,000, you'll change the fucking world.
This company has to survive.
And he wound up over Christmas in St. Bart's closing some funding from some friends of ours, and he kept the company alive.
So that— Well, that story actually perfectly kind of explains the thing that I was asking about, which is this weird thing of, like, so successful builders who are good at these things and can take these risks and do all these things, and then the fame component has now come with this, where you guys on all, and now you guys do conferences, and people just know you from a million things, or the, I mean, Elon's level is now off the charts.
I mean, people, I think, you know, Oh, I want to be Elon Musk.
It's like, no, you don't.
He can't even go out to dinner.
Like, I'm like, let's go to dinner.
I got this new place or let's go on a hike.
It's like his life is like living in a cage now.
Like, it really sucks.
And then with all this hate, because he just wants to make the government more efficient, I can tell you, like, he has got a very highly ethical, moral mission he is on, which is he, like many of us on All In and other podcasts, I'm not part of it, but, you know, I'm around it.
I mean, we identified pretty early on the existential crisis for America is running out of money and this debt load.
And thank God, you know, Trump and JD and everybody and Peter Thiel and everybody in that circle kind of had the maturity and the courage to say, yes, that is an existential.
Putting aside how you feel.
Democrat, Republican, never Trumper, always Trumper, MAGA.
None of that matters.
We have a balance sheet that is upside down.
If you've ever known anybody or your family members who've been upside down with their mortgage payments or underwater or no job, that's America.
And there's only one way out.
Cut expenses or raise income.
Austerity or income.
And, you know, if we try to take too much taxes, then people stop working.
You know, we need more money to be going in the economy.
And then if we stop government spending, well, that's not good for the economy.
This is not going to be easy.
Just like losing 50 pounds is not going to be easy.
But you got to do it at a certain point or you're going to die.
There's a lot of comorbidities that could happen from all this.
So I just think, you know, the stuff he's doing with Doge is unbelievable.
And we really need to carry on that Doge spirit, you know, beyond this administration.
The government.
Should really be effective and it should not waste money.
And the amount of corruption and grift from all sides of the aisle is unbelievable.
What they found is going to be talked about for a long time.
And yes, they're going to make some mistakes, cut too many people here, not cut enough people here, but you got to start somewhere.
Do you fear that him walking away, or at least, I guess maybe he's doing one day a week, or he'll always be somewhat involved, but that the bulk of him walking away at this point, that because he looms so large over everything, even though I've seen a lot of interviews with the Doge guys, and it's a really eclectic mix of what seem like hyper-capable people, that you need someone like him and there's no one else like him to like actually continue the mission properly.
I think he can, parachute in and inspire people and keep them focused.
It's going to be on Trump and JD to keep it a priority.
And, you know, there are people around Trump who I worry about.
There are people in the first administration who I definitely worried about and what their motives were.
And, you know, now I'm, I kind of like Lutnik and Besant and Elon and Sachs.
I was a close friend.
You know, there's a group of people, Tulsi, who are around Trump, I think, who are, you Either incredibly highly qualified and or have incredible intent and don't need to be there.
And so I'm rooting for them in a major way.
Some people I think are like weird choices and suboptimal and picked for loyalty, of course.
But, you know, overall, it's going to be up to Trump to decide what he wants his legacy to be.
Does he want his legacy to be – Do you think there's any risk—this is not my position, but this is what you hear a lot—that there's some sort of risk in having all of these hyper-wealthy people around?
I'm like, this is the oligarchy magically appearing.
One of the things that I loved from Linda McMahon, who took over to Department of Ed, she gets up there, and the first day—she's a billionaire—she was like, I'm here to put myself out of a job.
I thought, what a great thing for a public servant to say.
But if you listen to the Bernie class or whatever, they're upset that he's got all these rich people around him in essence.
As if the Democrats wouldn't have done it or didn't do it.
If you were talking about people who, you know, were the heirs of Walmart, and I don't know them, but I'm sure they're fine people.
But if, you know, you're the second or third heirs of the Rockefeller family, I don't know, you're old money in some way, like, yeah, maybe you'd be worried about that.
Maybe they're entitled, maybe they're not effective.
But Trump likes self-made people around him, people who started with nothing and kind of got there.
And those kind of people tend to be You know, there are some things that have bad optics.
You know, we're sitting here at the time when the Qataris are giving up, you know, a giant plane that's worth $400 million.
So there are things like that that the press makes a lot about.
There's the Trump coin, terrible optics.
There's a bunch of things that have bad optics that I think they should clean up.
The most charitable way to look at it is like, Trump's going to Trump and, you know, it's going to be fine.
Let's just look at the totality of the presidency.
Fair enough.
And, you know, I think the other side is like, oh, my God, he's Hitler.
And, you know, we're spinning into this, you know, what's going to be Putin, you know?
And it's like, no, it's not going to be.
Obviously, we survived Trump one.
We survived Biden one.
Well, some survived Trump two.
But really, it's the opportunity.
Is there an opportunity here to make government much smaller?
As I've gotten older, I've started to appreciate this concept of states'rights and that there's this incredible feature in how this experiment known as America was constructed, which is And if you think California is devolving like I did, and I think you probably did as well.
Yeah, and I was like, this place is not where I showed up 20 years ago.
When I got to California in 2002, I was like, this place is incredible.
Look at the nature, look at the people, look at the opportunity.
And then it was like, oh yeah, we hate capitalism, we hate entrepreneurship.
We're going to just let the cities burn.
We're going to allow, you know, junkies to take over.
And they're more important than the safety of your children and the safety of businesses.
Like, it just doesn't make any sense.
And you're like, what's going on here?
And it's like, oh, yeah, there's a bunch of grift going on, whatever.
And then you come to a high-functioning city like Austin or you go to Miami and you're like, oh, my God, this is like, wait, a city can have less crime and you could run the city for the taxpayers and the citizens and the parks can be clean.
And, oh.
Yeah, I think I prefer this.
And watching New York devolve has just been tragic for me.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and I remember it peaking under Dinkins, how dangerous it was.
Then you had Bernie Getz shoot a bunch of kids on the subway because people were carrying illegal guns in the subway in Manhattan because it was so dangerous.
And I was like going to school at that time in college or Fordham.
I was just like, I went back there with my kids and they wanted to take the subway and see how I got to Brooklyn or whatever.
I took them on one subway ride.
It was chaos.
Homeless person, another person screaming and yelling.
Three police went running down the platform.
It stunk like urine.
I'm like, we're going to get back in an Uber.
This is too risky for me to have three daughters on a subway platform where these people are high out of their skulls on meth or fentanyl.
What's going on here?
And the cops have given up and the city seems to have given up on any modicum of policing.
Because, obviously, a huge amount of people have left Cali.
San Francisco was the hub of everything you're talking about.
I mean, when I met with Elon the first time there, we stood in his office.
I think I told you about this off-camera, but we stood in his office, in the corner office, so he has a nice view of the city, and he was doing play-by-play.
It was kind of funny the way he was doing it, as if he was watching a sporting event.
Basically, like, they get the drugs there, they do the drugs there, they wander over there, they fall asleep over there.
I think people have to get sick and tired of being sick and tired.
And then when you see the tax basis change over time, which has happened in New York and New Jersey already from what I understand, all those folks moved to Florida because they were already going for a couple of months in the winter anyway.
So it's like if you're down there for two or three months.
The snowbirds were like, yeah, I could just stay here and not deal with the crime in Manhattan and this chaos.
My understanding is New Jersey and even Connecticut are having problems with their tax bases because there were some hedge fund people there who were paying a billion dollars in taxes.
They're not there anymore, and that actually affects services.
People have to get sick and tired, but I think it's a 10-year process, and it's not a two-year process.
And like this Karen Bass, you know, in Los Angeles and watching her operate in the world when she came back from her trip and she couldn't even answer questions from the press and she didn't come back in time.
And then they could have had Rick Caruso, like the guy who created the.
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It's like, these are beautiful institutions that I took my children to.
It is, I think once, you know, And I think for Los Angeles, it's different for every city.
Los Angeles, it was the incompetence of the fires.
They could have avoided a lot.
I mean, thank God people didn't die at a much higher rate.
It was only a handful of deaths is what I understand.
Thank God.
But, you know, the loss of property could have been avoided in a lot of cases.
I mean, especially with like...
It's so dumb, but, like, in California, I have a house up in Lake Tahoe.
The brush just got out of control there.
And there would be fires.
Then Trump does this whole thing.
There's a bunch of fires.
He says, hey, you know, in Norway, they rake everything up.
You know, it's like forestry, it's called.
He's exactly right.
Like, why are we doing that?
It's like, oh, yeah, because we're incompetent.
Then, after all these fires, and Trump says this, I go up to Tahoe.
There are people in the woods around all the different ski houses and towns raking up giant piles of stuff, doing control burns and chipping it out.
Same thing in Los Angeles.
I saw it over and over again when I lived in Brentwood.
People were letting their brush go crazy.
And like, you just have to change the roofs and everything and you can, you can solve these problems.
And for, I think San Francisco, it is when your car is broken into for the third, fourth, fifth time, when you go to the store and you can't buy deodorant and it takes 20 minutes to buy a razor and you need to get a shave.
And it's like, is this like some crazy dystopian guy?
Or you're in New York, and you get on a subway platform, and literally, the week before I got there, three people were stabbed by one guy in one week, and I'm like, I can't go to my hometown.
There was a contingent in San Francisco which was very different than Los Angeles.
people were like on the fringes, I think incredibly liberal.
And, you know, like I remember when I moved to Santa Monica in 2002, 2003 timeframe, they were like having a big fight over, in their store well, in the well, like, you know, in the little...
Thank you.
And I like all these like And it was like, well, my dad owned a bar.
Like, that's ridiculous.
I got to come out and clean the place and then chase the person.
So that's like a weird, like, liberal guilt kind of like, oh, like, well, what's the core problem here?
Like, they're addicted to drugs, so if you treat them like homeless...
There's more beds than they need.
This is about being on like a super drug.
So you have to actually, it's mental illness, it's addiction.
There's like other things you have to address.
And so, you know, you accept, when you pay for something, somebody told me this one time, incentives matter.
And if you pay for something, you get more of it.
And what happened in Santa Monica, what happened in San Francisco, is they just had the best deal in the world.
The lowest economic price for fentanyl, $5 a hit, with the least policing.
And I remember when I was looking into this, because Sachs and I collaborated on getting rid of Chester Boudin.
He started this, or he worked with the Recall program, and I hired an independent journalist to write stories about the victims.
So we kind of attacked it from our different skill sets.
His was political, mine was journalistic.
And we just kept harping on, like, this issue over and over again in the early days of the podcast, and we got Chesa Boudin removed, or the people there voted for it.
But, you know, when you were watching this happen, you know, you're just like, how on earth could anybody like allow this to happen?
And San Francisco is filled with not just like liberals, but there's actually socialists and communists, like quite literal, like who believe that capitalism.
But in terms of, like, delightful place to live where you can buy some land, great.
And it's isolated.
Yeah, if there's a nuclear holocaust, pretty great place to be.
Pick one of the islands far away from everybody else.
But putting aside Armageddon, places like Italy and Spain and the MENA region, Dubai, Saudi, Singapore, they are all more than willing to offer you a golden visa, a 1% tax rate, etc.
Now, if you gave up your US citizenship...
One of the founders, Eduardo Serevin, if I'm pronouncing this correctly, who left Facebook.
And he went to Singapore and he gave up his citizenship.
So that's an extreme example.
And you don't see many people giving up the passport.
I don't think we're there yet.
But if Florida and Texas don't hold, if Boulder and Nashville don't hold, and we see chaos in those places like we saw in those other cities, and those other cities don't turn around, I would not be surprised if people say, you know what?
Literally, Republicans' position under NAFTA was to have an open border with Mexico so that we would have seasonal workers just pass through the southern border in order to work in fields.
Like, literally, this was the Republican position.
about 15 years ago.
You can look at articles in the New Wall Street Journal arguing for the virtuousness of like, why wouldn't we let these folks come back?
Yeah, and how many Americans do you know that want to just get down on their knees and pick strawberries for us?
You know, this is an entry-level job.
take right we have the lowest unemployment of our lifetime and then ironically you have democrats now saying okay we need them to pick our fruit but it's like uh the robots are starting to do that and then what are you going to do with all these people it's a very simple thing like the idea of deporting 20 million people is far to go it's a lie by trump it's a lie by bannon it's a lie by steve miller they're just doing that to feed the maga base it's red meat for them they're gonna they're they're deporting a couple hundred people a day which is a thousand or two a week at the end of this year
they'll have done no more than 500 000 in their first year that means they'll probably do an obama level deportation of a million or two million people primarily people who have felonies or misdemeanors and you know have done bad things here the rest of them are immigrants like have been here, your parents might have been here for five generations.
When Stephen Miller says America is for Americans and Americans only, that's like the kind of trolling that this group does to kind of trigger people.
America is for immigrants, by immigrants, and should be welcoming of immigrants.
And if we welcome these immigrants already under multiple presidencies across multiple parties, the compassionate thing to do is give them a path towards citizenship.
And if they are good actors and they're willing to pay, because they're already paying into Social Security, they're paying for Medicare, they're paying for a lot of these services that they're never allowed to tap unless they become citizens.
But if you've been here, let's say, five years and you've been here and you haven't broken any laws and you have a job and you, let's say, have family and you've paid taxes and something, there's something that we can do.
I like what you said about that, you know, if you've been here a certain amount of years, then you can pay it back a certain amount.
So there's something that has to be played with there.
And what we're not good at as a country really is dealing with the nuance of that.
Am I just going to, like, kick out everybody?
Like, I know I hear people saying it.
The cost.
Well, the cost and just like, The chaos afterwards and the shredding of a portion of our social contract, even if there are illegal.
The only reason everybody in this country doesn't have a job is almost universally, you know, aside from people who don't want to work.
Right.
Or don't want to work in certain jobs.
It's because their job is not in their geography and they don't have the money to move.
And that is actually an issue in the country.
Like, if you could move people to a different region, you could get them employed.
So there should be some, actually, there could be some opportunity there to pay for people to move from one region to another if they, you know, and they could get a job or giving them a loan to do that.
Putting that aside, then it tends to be skills.
and skills are freely available on YouTube and, you know, Gemini and Grok and ChatGPT.
It's almost no skill you, So we are doing so well.
If we were to deport, you know, even 10 million people or 5 million people would cause massive chaos, massive expense in this country.
And it would be completely against the soul of America to allow these people to come here, to use them for their labor that we're unwilling to do, and then to savagely deport them because, I don't know.
You don't like Biden and you think he did the wrong thing by opening the border?
I think most Republicans, by the way, I think would get on board what you just laid out there if they saw the crime and the drugs drop.
So if the Democrat-run cities, if New York and Chicago and L.A. and Portland and Seattle, blah, blah, blah, if they could get that more under control, which they still, even now, Eric Adams, who's kind of coming around, he's still doing so much wrong.
Yeah.
So it's like, if they could get that more under control and then people could get back to that more normal life, I think a fairly moderate plan like you just laid out there or a thoughtful plan actually would make sense.
But until people don't see the crazy subway videos anymore or dead people don't get raped on the subway, etc., I just think there's just no chance for that.
It feels worse to people when they see an immigrant commit a crime.
If an immigrant speeds or steals, it hurts more to most people than maybe an American doing it.
Which I understand to a certain extent.
Like maybe you feel like you have a little more rights here to break or bend the rules and whatever.
But, you know, there's – I think what's nice thing about you and I talking is like – It's like three people who are either in the administration, around the administration, or super right-wing.
And, you know, people try to make me into a lefty, but I'm kind of living in Texas on a ranch and I carry a gun.
I mean, I'm kind of not a—I'm not carrying a gun right now.
I'm not ending on immigration and I'm also not ending on January 6th.
So I'll give you just like an open one to end this on and we will definitely do this again.
So what is exciting to you now?
What are you looking at right now that you're either business or personal or just that you're just like, yeah, this is awesome and I want to be part of this.
The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well with this new generation, I think, and people are starting to reverse COVID.
We have a generation that got lost in COVID and social media, and it really polluted their brains, and it really impacted them in a negative fashion, missing college, missing formative years in high school, being too addicted to Instagram and Snapchat or whatever.
But I'm seeing a lot of young folks who are saying, you know, I want to be in an office.
I want to build something.
I want to be part of something.
And so I encourage young people to start companies with like-minded people, to start projects, and to just have the courage of their own conviction to build things in the world.
And I think there's like a renaissance coming of young people who realize, oh, Elon created a rocket ship company.
I can do that.
Oh, Shane created Polymarket.
I can do that.
I can go out and just create things.
Travis created Uber.
Vlad created.
You know, Robin Hood, you created your media empire.
You know, there's nothing stopping you.
And I think this group of young people, we're going to see entrepreneurship and capitalism and the celebration of creation and even wealth accumulation.
There's nothing wrong with that.
In this country, overwhelmingly, when somebody gets rich, you know what they do with their money?
They give it away.
That's the tradition in America.
The tradition in Europe and other countries is, I have to create a family wealth system and it's got to trickle down.
In this country, people were like, yeah, I don't want to give my kids.
I don't want to ruin my kid's life by dumping money on them.
They can either work for the family business or they can- Yeah, I mean, everybody knows it's like not a good idea.
The amount of money given away and the amount paid in taxes by our billionaire class, by our great companies, is extraordinary.
It dwarfs what everybody else has given.
What Bill Gates will give away is greater than 90% of the country's given away.
So, you know, one of the most important things in life is to, you know, if you're working hard with a group of friends and you happen to make it, it's just...
Imagine pushing that to a week, what it would feel like.
I'm telling you, I will suddenly, my audience has heard me say this a million times, but I have suddenly, out of nowhere, I'll think of a friend who I sat next to in second grade who I haven't thought of in 30 years.
Out of nowhere, their name pops in my head, and then I have some weird memory.
Or suddenly, I'll remember the entire...
Every lyric to a song.
I could just suddenly remember every lyric to a song.
all this weird stuff just starts popping.
Cause your brain is not reacting to like, It's a slot machine.