DOGE vs USAID, Crypto Framework, Google’s $75B AI Spend, US Sovereign Wealth Fund, GLP-1s
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What a grifter. He’s just talking about his investments. Those are the four things you focus on—Roku, the four essentials. You get a good Athena assistant. All of this is brought to you by my NGO, which is All In NGO. USAID gave us $18 million last year. Guys, I forgot to tell you about it. But don’t worry, it’s in an offshore account for all of us. When we get back to Ethiopia and Vietnam, we have an all-in castle built there, okay?
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All right, everybody. Welcome back to the All In Podcast. The number one MAGA finance, business, and personal optimization health podcast. Yes, we are now larger in the health space than Huberman, Tim Ferriss, and Peter Atiyah combined. Yes, we’ve really started to grow the pod. If you want to, you can subscribe to the podcast on x.com, YouTube, Spotify, and all those other places. Especially if you want to have an incredibly positive world, enlightening conversation with Ray Dalio, you can tune in to Friedberg and Ray Dalio on the channel. Great conversation. It’s gotten three or 400,000 views already on YouTube.
How’s the feedback been, Dave? Got so much great feedback on you. Ray Dalio, is it the end of the empire or are we coming back? What’s awesome is a lot of the recommendations he shared seem to be becoming policy for the Trump administration. Elon and Besant and others in the administration have echoed trying to get government deficit below 3% of GDP. That seems to be the economic magical number. And if you can do that, rates drop. I think that’s resonated. It was great to have him publish that a couple of weeks ago, talk with us about it.
It’s great. We have great bonus content from the team at All In today. We’re super excited to have our friend, Antonio Gracias, joining the show. Antonio is the CEO of Valor Equity Partners and he’s made some solid investments. He was one of the first investors in Tesla, SpaceX, and Athena. He was actually the second investor in Athena after me. Welcome to the program, Antonio. He puts slightly more in.
Thank you, Jason. I was also in Uber with you too, by the way. Yes, yes. You did the Series A, I believe, or the B. What did you do?
We were in the B. You were in the B? Yes, you were in the Shervin round. Okay. Well, welcome to the program, Antonio Gracias. We’ve got a full docket today, and we might even have a special caller from the White House today. No promises, but you never know.
We are 17 days into the Trump 2.0 presidency, and it seems like the main character, gentlemen, is DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. They seem to have found a little known agency, USAID. Let’s unpack it and talk about USAID and DOGE, maybe in three acts.
The first one, let me just educate the audience on what USAID is. Most Americans probably haven’t heard of USAID. It stands for the United States Agency for International Development. It was established by JFK by an executive order back in 1961. The Wall Street Journal summed up its purpose as “make friends and influence countries in the American interest.” According to the USGov website, the purpose of USAID is to extend assistance to countries recovering from disaster.
You got a budget of about $45 billion a year under Biden, and that’s about 150 bucks per American per year. They have at least 10,000 employees, or did. And as of 2023, they had programs in 130 countries. Obviously, there are 195 countries in the world. The budget doubled under Biden from 26 to 45 billion. The budget was between 15 and 20 billion during Trump’s first term.
But the White House, and I guess Elon and the DOGE team found out about this USAID, went in there, and found all kinds of interesting spending. $2.5 million to fund EV charging stations in Vietnam; 2 million for sex changes and LGBTQ activism in Guatemala; 1.5 million to a Serbian LGBTQ group; 70K for a DEI musical; 47K for a transgender opera in Colombia. The DEI musical, by the way, is in Ireland. So if you make it to Galway, you can see that DEI musical. This went on and on, and it has become quite a story.
Antonio, you’re our guest here this week. You, me, Sacks, and Elon spent a little time at Twitter during the takeover, where I think a lot of these techniques were first put into action. Your thoughts on what’s happening with DOGE?
I mean, look, Jason, I want to thank you guys for having me. It’s great to see everyone. You can see the musical. I’d like to see a musical. No, I’ve booked it. We’re all going to the musical in Galway. What is it called? Is there actually a name for the musical? DEI the Musical. DEI, the Musical. Oh man. It’s a heartwarming story.
I apologize. Of getting a job that you’re not qualified for. I apologize. Yeah, so I think the DOGE story maybe starts with the Twitter takeover, right? So Twitter was spewing the woke mind virus into the world, which is why Elon did it to begin with. When we got there, as you know, it was basically breaking even. There was going to be $12.5 billion of debt to the company, so a billion and a half dollars in interest costs that there was no money to pay, which led to the turnaround, I think, which was the biggest turnaround of all time. It’s literally the biggest turnaround, I think, ever in history.
Second biggest tech deal ever done—80% of the people gone. That doesn’t include all the contractors that were there. The company’s now servicing its debt, and they just priced yesterday one of their bank deals at 97 cents. This is a huge win. It means the company’s doing extremely well. Other people bought the bank debt, and then the bank debt traded up to a little over 98, so 98 and five-eighths. You know, a giant business success, a rousing business success. Jason, you were there for part of it; you saw it. It was a disaster. This place was, you know, it was tampons in the bathrooms and every woke thing you could possibly imagine and no one in the office. It was so bad that the pens had gone dry in the conference rooms, which is incredible.
And I think that, you know, that’s how the—Sorry, you mean the pens had gone dry because they were never being used or because they were being used so much? They were never being used. We got there on the Halloween weekend, and we started whiteboarding, and, you know, no ink. Next pen, no ink. Yeah, I mean, everything, it’s incredible. But flowers were impeccable, food being made fresh every day for thousands of people and thrown away three times a day, tossed in the garbage. We didn’t give it to the homeless. It was just shockingly bad. Bureaucracy gone mad, bad incentives, people don’t care.
So it was both. I think this turned into two things. One was just stop the woke mind virus. You know, the interesting thing is they do extra brand safety checks there now, and they have 99% rating in brand safety now, right? So stop the woke mind virus from going in the world, number one. Number two, fix the company. And both have happened. It’s been a couple of years now, right? Three years now, and both have happened. Not even three years, two and a half years, really. And both have happened.
I think you take that—that was sort of the warm-up act for what’s going on at DOGE, which is, you know, the President of the United States, President Trump, wants to make America great again. That, I think, begins with making the government great. You’ve got to fix it. It’s a turnaround. This is the biggest turnaround of all time, and President Trump has the courage to do it. He’s got a great ally in Elon to make it happen in DOGE.
And so the numbers are pretty easy, right? We’re spending six and a half trillion; we bring in four and a half trillion. We’ve got to find $2 trillion somewhere. Interest costs $2 trillion a year. The bond markets were going up. The bond bond was going up a lot because people didn’t believe that you couldn’t stop spending, creating inflation. You see those trading down now as DOGE is starting to take effect. We’ll see it’s real, the stuff you’re talking about. It’s sort of extraordinary what’s happening in the—Elon said this publicly, right? Fraud, waste, and abuse. He thinks kind of 10% of the budget is probably fraud. I think it might be low, actually.
So you’re talking about, you know, $650 billion, a trillion in waste. I think that’s probably about right. That alone fixes the problem. But what’s really serious about it, Jason, for me and what scared me when we first started thinking about this—and look, I’m not there full-time. You know, I’m in and out a little bit and trying to help where I can, but I’m not there full-time. When I thought—when this started, I thought we had a democracy that had turned into a bureaucracy, okay? What I’m afraid of now is we have a bureaucracy that is about to turn into a kleptocracy. I mean, a Latin American style kleptocracy.
Okay, the stuff you’re talking about, that is pure fraud. And you’re making— we’re making some jokes out of it, the DA musical. But if you go into the data that’s coming out of USAID, what you find is, you know, there’s a lot of political contributions going on. There’s Politico itself being funded by USAID. I mean, that is pure corruption. That’s like a Latin American style autocracy. And we cannot let it go there. I mean, I think we’ve—this happened just in the nick of time, and I’m super grateful to all the people there.
You know, there are 80-plus people there, all patriots gone full-time. Okay, so Chamath, you’ve been watching this. You’re from Antonio. What’s your general take on what we saw in the first, I don’t know, 20 days of DOGE? Or no, 15 days, sorry, it’s 15 days of DOGE.
So let me try to give you a little bit of historical context because I think that that’s important. I think whenever I hear so many people breathlessly saying some version of WTF, as if this is totally new, it’s not new. And I’ll give you two examples, but one that I really want to double-click on. The two examples I’ll give you is that in 1941, the Truman Committee was formed because there was a fear that the spending by the Defense Department was completely out of whack. Over the next six or seven years—and this really gave Truman the credibility to then become Roosevelt’s vice president—was they found incredible levels of waste, fraud, and abuse during the war.
Before the war effort and then after Pearl Harbor, during the war process, over seven years that committee—this is in 1941 dollars they were tasked and budgeted with only $20,000 or $30,000. They spent less than a million. Inflation adjusted to 2023; this is where I found the data was about six and a half million they spent. You know how much they saved? It’s estimated they saved somewhere between $10 to $15 billion in 1941. That’s a quarter of a trillion, 2023 dollars.
The second example is we did this under President Clinton, and that was called the National Partnership for Reinventing Government. So the first thing that I think it’s important to acknowledge is this is not new. We’ve done DOGE twice before. Both have been successful. The Harry Truman one was incredibly important because it really set guardrails for how this can be done. Everything in that committee, it was a Senate committee, was unanimous, so it was Republicans and Democrats that found waste, fraud, and abuse everywhere. They saved an enormous amount of money.
The second, which is interesting, is these last two versions of DOGE were driven and led by Democrats, the same people today who are basically saying, “Hey, hold on a second. We have congressional committees or we have inspector generals,” and they lack the awareness to know that their own party was the driving force for this two times before. I think it’s important to just acknowledge that those methods are not good anymore, right? Because I think what we’re finding early days is the rot is super pervasive. There’s no accountability. And so I think you need people to look at it with fresh eyes.
And what is DOGE at the end of the day? What they are are read-only auditors of the truth. The press secretary in the White House made this very clear. It’s incredible the power that read-only access gives you. All it allows you to do is just take the data and present the data. They can’t manipulate it. And what they’re able to do is publish all of this stuff in real-time, and that’s why this is so important because if it went into a congressional committee, to be honest with you, it would sit there and stew for six, seven, eight, nine months. You would maybe get small little tidbits of it, but now instead, you’re just getting the full thrust of it.
And what is the biggest thing that I find concerning? I think it’s what Antonio said, which is that the media, who are supposed to be this intermediary layer that’s totally objective between the government and the people, were not independent at all but had all kinds of hidden incentives—$8 million to Politico, several million dollars to the BBC. I think it’s important to ask what’s going on. And by the way, that also has historical context. This is exactly what happened in the 60s and 70s where it turned out that record companies were paying DJs to play songs. There were huge sets of lawsuits and trial cases, and the result was a change in the law, right? And we call that payola now, which is you cannot take this money without disclosing it.
And so, had this money been absorbed by these entities and actually disclosed, maybe we’d be okay. But Nick, can you send me a link? Maybe you can throw it on the screen for these guys. This is a very simple manifestation of this cycle. We talked about this, guys, and we didn’t realize how connected it all was. But we were asking ourselves during the election cycle last year, why are all these articles buried? Why aren’t we really getting the truth? And it turns out that the people who were responsible for telling the truth, somewhere along the chain, were cajoled or just told not to tell the truth, influenced by all of this back-channel money that was going back and forth from the government to these folks.
Okay, yeah, let me just give some numbers to what you were referencing there. The USAID organization has been giving money, as have other agencies, to journals, databases, and subscriptions. There’s probably some amount of that that makes sense. However, when we look at this, during Trump, one spend on Politico was averaging around $1.3 million a year, but it suddenly ballooned up to $8 million a year under Biden. You can see the quarterly payments here on this chart. So there’s some normal amount of spend on publications or for a library at an organization. And so what we’re looking at here is all federal agencies.
Suddenly, during Biden, there is a very suspicious ramp up in spend to Politico. All of this is breaking; a lot of this hasn’t been verified yet. So we’ll put that caveat on it. And then there is a number of $34 million that’s been floating around. That’s all years back to 2008, not just 2024, and less people have that number juxtaposed or misattributed. When Politico was acquired back in 2021, they were doing about $200 million in revenue. So this would be about 4% of their revenue. It’s pretty significant. The BBC also received $2.7 million in funding from USAID in 2023. That was 8% of their annual income. That’s a little suspicious.
Thomson Reuters, which is the consulting arm of Reuters, they’ve received $120 million from the federal government since 2011. Half of that came during the Biden administration. New York Times hasn’t actually received all that much—$370k from the federal government last year. Under Biden, it went from $100k a year to like $300. So the New York Times data has been cleaned up a little bit. All of this is to say there’s spending going on with the press that certainly doesn’t look good and should be verified and challenged, obviously, and we are in a breaking news environment.
So we’ll see how that information shakes out over time, which is one of the great things I think about DOGE is they’re getting this information out there and citizen journalists are looking at public databases, Friedberg. And we’re having a conversation about this—two years ago, Friedberg, when you kept harping on every episode about our debt and, you know, about the interest payments two or three years ago, you were way ahead of the curve. Now here we are; we didn’t think anybody would ever take this cause up, and now it is the cause of the moment. What are your thoughts on the first two weeks of DOGE, Friedberg?
Magnificent. Okay, magnificent. I mean, what else is there to say? This is the eggplant emoji. It’s what we needed. If you zoom out on what DOGE is doing, I think the best way to describe it is zero-based budgeting. In organizations that go through zero-based budgeting, you do a cycle typically annually, where you take all of your op-ex, all of your expenses, and running a company or running an organization down to the studs.
You take it down to zero and you rebuild it up. You say, what are we trying to achieve this year from first principles? Based on that set of objectives, those goals, what do we need to do? What’s the minimal expense we need to run? You don’t start with last year’s numbers and say, what else do we need to do and start to add on top of that? You really do a hard level, high degree of scrutiny on every dollar moving out. And that’s what DOGE is effectively doing. They’re doing a zero-based budgeting on the federal government. They’re looking at every line item, and they’re asking the fundamental question, which I don’t think we talked about in the public discourse enough, which is what is the essential role of government?
And there is a great debate to be had around that point. Should government be providing humanitarian aid in international markets? That’s a good debate to be had. Should the government be providing security to nations that can’t provide security for themselves? Does the US government have a role in that? Should the government be providing loans for people to go to universities? Should the government be providing loans for people to buy homes that are overpriced, etc., etc., etc. And as we start to ask the questions of how we’re spending money, I think it ends up leading to the most important questions: what is the essential role of government? Which I think is the debate that needs to be had in order for democracy to last.
So I’m very happy to see the effort of DOGE, and I think that it’s the beginning of what I hope will be kind of a long-term process of asking the fundamental questions about essential government. And Antonio, zero-based budgeting was the first thing you sort of introduced when the Twitter takeover happened. Just what do we need in terms of design? What does the sales team need to hit these sales numbers? How many servers do we need?
And my Lord, the waste, fraud, and abuse at that company was shocking. They had buildings that were $100 a square foot, if I remember correctly, that were used for storage of the furniture from the previous building that had been upgraded, and we’re storing them in Class A office space. You referenced the commissary—20 people were having lunch a day, but they had never ratcheted down the amount of food they were making. So each meal was about $800 on average when you did the math for those 20 meals just in the San Francisco office.
Maybe you could talk a little bit about how the shock and awe campaign of just freezing spending and then seeing, hey, what actually is necessary to accomplish this task worked out at Twitter, and then how you see that being executed inside of our government.
Yeah, thanks, Jason. It was pretty extraordinary. Actually, the Twitter experience—it was the first thing you do in a turn like that is try and get the checkbook, and just turn payments off, and then see what happens because there are lots of people that shouldn’t be getting paid. Sometimes they complain, and sometimes you find that people that complain the loudest are the ones who are committing the worst fraud. They’re the worst grifters in the whole game, right? The worst grifters are the ones who are saying they’re crying the most amount of foul.
And the problem, at least in Twitter, was that there were financial statements we could actually evaluate. There was an audited financial statement, and they were basically, you know, they were, in some ways, correct, I would say. There were some issues with user growth, DAOs, etc., and the Senate plans, but the actual cash flow numbers were pretty much correct. Here, the problem is much, much deeper, and it makes this zero-based budgeting question much harder, which is the way the government works.
A department just basically asks for money from Treasury, and they send it out. We all run businesses; there’s a reconciliation process. You have a contract; you issue a purchase order against it; something comes in; you check that it came in, services rendered. Then you issue a payable, and then, you know, a month later, you pay it, right? That doesn’t happen to the US government. There was that process is broken; it used to happen; it’s broken now. And so literally, money’s flowing out.
I used to ask myself this question: why are the numbers always revised? Why are they always wrong? How can the government know how much money it’s paying? Just hit the button in the computer and figure it out. The problem is that button doesn’t exist. You know, we spent time early on, I was at Mar-a-Lago, trying to track through, like, how does the money actually flow? No one could tell us how it actually flows. Where is it going out? People didn’t know. And it’s totally crazy.
And it’s the reason—
But it all goes through Treasury, Antonio? Or can you just explain that to us?
Well, so I will try to explain it to you. I’m not sure I have full command of it; I’m not sure anyone does quite yet. It goes to Treasury ultimately, but it was supposed to flow through—the way it was supposed to work, it was changed in the 70s—in 1973. The Nixon administration in ‘71—let me go back—came off the gold standard, which allowed deficits. In ‘73, at the nadir of the Nixon presidency, Congress took away from the presidency the executive power—this thing called apportionments, which was the power of the executive to stop spending.
So Nixon was abusing it by stopping it because he didn’t want—and so Congress took it away from him. What that means today is the executive, as he reaches in, it’s very hard to just stop payments. So what’s happening is the government is put in a process where they would just have an authorized executive kind of stamp a bill that got paid. That broke. I don’t know when it broke, but it broke sometime. So the money flow now—a department gets a budget authorized to it by Congress.
It goes to OMB; OMB allocates the budget. That department then just sends a money request to Treasury to pay. It is not reconciled against what happened. This is one of the reasons—and that’s it. There’s no controller function like there is in a normal company. 100%. There is no controller. There’s no reconciliation. The reason they can’t pass audits is the reason this happens because you can’t audit something you haven’t reconciled. The only audit that I’ve seen is actually from the Social Security Administration, and when you read it, I’ve got one of my partners who have read the thing. It has just riddled with material weaknesses.
There are probably—you think there are individuals that have made millions or billions of dollars from missed payments overseas? Is this kind of what’s gone on in the missing money in Ukraine, do you think? Is it kind of found its way to the wrong places?
Yeah, I mean, so what I would—I don’t know what happened in Ukraine. I don’t. It’s such a crazy story. Yeah, it is shocking about Ukraine. I will say that I have business experience trying to work in businesses that had Medicaid and Medicare payments. I wanted to make that better, right? We use this to make the world better. And we just stopped because we found so much fraud. I mean, I’m certain that we literally have a rule here: government pay or in those areas, if it’s more than like a third of the business, we don’t do it. And in the services space, this is why. We just found continuous fraud in the companies we were looking at investing in.
Yeah, just threading these things together, you know, the really interesting thing with the Twitter pausing of payments was, you know, at some point, we were in a meeting at 1 a.m. on a Saturday, and it was like, hey, let’s turn the credit cards off to see what bounces and what happens. And then, of course, we start getting calls, and people started routing. Obviously, because they knew Saks was there, you were there, I was there. Hey, you know, a company who I shared an investor with or, you know, in another company said, hey, you know, we’re not getting paid for this. And it was like some SaaS software that nobody was using, etc.
So you start figuring out, to your point, okay, is this software even being used? There was so much software and services that had been paid that nobody had ever logged in to set up, so it was just being paid as pure graft. Now you said, Antonio, correctly, the people who come first, they’re probably the ones who are in on the biggest grift because, hey, you know, I figured out how to grift this money.
How USAID got to the top of the DOGE list, I think, is one of the most interesting aspects of this story. So if you remember, on January 21, Trump decided he would do a bunch of executive orders, right? And one of them was to pause foreign aid for 90 days. Okay, this seems reasonable. We’ve got to take care of our country. That was part of his mandate for becoming the 47th President of the United States.
So a couple of days later, the White House said, hey, this USAID leadership is trying to circumvent the executive order there. In other words, they’re just going to keep paying people, even though the executive order came out. That alerted the DOGE team. So Elon confirmed this on X. He said, “All DOGE did was check to see which federal organizations were violating the President’s executive orders the most, turned out to be USAID.” So that became our focus.
According to NBC, security officials at USAID tried to prevent DOGE from even getting into the building or accessing the systems. To your point, Antonio, the person who’s probably got the most to hide is the one who’s going to fight the most. Over the weekend, DOGE gained access to USAID, and then people started tweeting out all of this, you know, crazy spend and things that any American who looks at it and says, wait a second, if we haven’t fixed the goddamn water in Flint, Michigan, why are we sending money to Galway or in Ireland to do a DEI musical?
This makes no sense. And that’s, I think, the key piece of this, Antonio, is can you win the hearts and minds of Americans? Because some of this stuff, I don’t know if it’s legal or it’s not legal, or it’s against protocol, or it is protocol. We’re going to find out. There’ve been tons of legal cases and lawsuits that have been filed. But to your point, this is how Elon found out about USAID.
Jake, let me ask you a question. Where does that place you in your political philosophy around the importance of human rights abroad?
Great, great question. You know, I’ve always felt that the West should act in unison, and if the United States is the greatest economy or the strongest, we should lead. There is something called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United States—Eleanor Roosevelt wrote this at the UN, and everybody tries to hit those notes. I think it’s great that we try to reduce suffering in the world. But I think we should be doing it not unilaterally and not to try to manipulate governments.
That’s the piece of this, that USAID is obviously a grift where people are trying to steal money for their pet projects. And I don’t think they’re acting in unison and above board to look and say, “Okay, where’s the most suffering in the world? How can we help that?” You know, to me, that seems like a noble thing to do. And if the United States has the budget to help fight AIDS in Africa, or, you know, poverty, you know, there’s a chance that some of these human rights issues were embellished to try to get more money.
Well, I do think the—I did this tweet recently. So yes is the answer. If you look at Amnesty International, where I worked was one of my first jobs. They were working on people who were imprisoned, tortured, raped, murdered, systematic murder of dissidents for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, religion, etc. And then somewhere along the line, you know, the Amnesty International was tweeting about trans rights.
And that’s the big focus. This is a very small amount of, you know, people on the planet. And I don’t think that those human rights violations in any way relate to the tragedy we’re seeing of people being murdered, tortured, raped, and caned and beheaded in certain places in the world. So there is a way to look at suffering and say, we should handle this first. And yes, somebody who, you know, feels they got misgendered, maybe that’s way down the priority list compared to systematic rape of women in these, you know, war zones.
Those will be the high order bits. And so this thing has gotten— the other fascinating thing, I think about USAID, which I’d like to get your thoughts on Chamath, is at what point did this switch from being the we should not intervene, right? The left’s position always in the 80s and 90s when we were growing up was we shouldn’t be doing these operatives in other countries. We should let democracy flow; let these countries figure it out for themselves. We shouldn’t be doing empire building; we shouldn’t be doing imperialism.
And then all of a sudden now it’s just such a grift that I think everybody’s got their hands in the pie. Lindsey Graham’s on some nonprofit that gets money from this. I don’t know if that’s above board or not. A lot of people who are formerly in government seem to be part of this NGO train. So the whole thing’s just turned out to be a grift. And it’s a bipartisan grift, obviously. I think it’s infuriating.
I think the biggest thing that we will have to confront is that many of the things that we thought were issues or problems may have actually been somewhat embellished because of this money cycle. Sure. And I think that that’s going to cause a lot of people to feel really—they’ll probably feel really foolish about some of the decisions they made. All the attempts at cancellation are going to look really dumb in hindsight.
Yeah. All right, I want to give some credit to our friend David Sacks here who’s coming online. Oh, okay, here he is. David, looking good? And the one thing I want to point out, this goes way back, I think maybe more than a decade ago, David tried to explain to me that neocons had taken over American foreign policy. And they were—well, your question about, well, why do the Democrats change? Why do Republicans change, etc.? The neocons took over foreign policy on both sides, Democrats and Republicans, and populated out this very activist mustard stance, which is bad for America.
And I think, Jason, that answers your question as to why the Democrats shifted. All right, with us is David Sacks. How are you doing, brother? Are you literally in the White House? I’m in the EOB. Ah, okay. There’s like a podcast studio, actually, in the EOB. Oh, fantastic. And you’re wearing a suit every day. Yeah, no, you’re right. I have to wear a suit and tie every day.
I was just listening to your conversation about DOGE. Jacob, I’m surprised that you never figured out a way to get involved in this USAID. I mean, everybody’s on the take except you. If I had known, I would have started an NGO. Where’s my NGO? You had everything except the money laundering. You had the grit. You had the virtue signaling. You had it all except the actual money.
Let me up-level this for a second. We knew the U.S. government runs a $2 trillion deficit every year. We’re in debt almost $40 trillion. And we also knew that any time anyone tries to cut anything in Washington, the whole city screams bloody murder. So the question is just why. Well, now we know. The money is all going to them. It’s like round-tripping to them. New York Times getting paid. Politico getting paid. Bill Kristol, perennial warmonger, getting paid.
Ukraine, getting paid. Like 11 out of 12 publications in Ukraine getting paid. Victor Orban, who’s the Prime Minister of Hungary, was saying that he’s very popular in Hungary. His political opposition is funded by USAID. In Poland, the left-wing political opposition is funded by USAID. And on and on and on it goes. BBC! You wonder why everyone in the U.K.—I couldn’t believe that BBC is getting paid. Every left-wing organization in the world seems to be getting paid by this slush fund, USAID, which disperses about $50 billion a year. That’s a billion dollars a week.
That’s actually a lot of money. And so it makes you wonder. The left, in general, tries to portray itself as a movement of the people, that it’s grassroots. This is the exact opposite. This is astroturf. This is basically money coming from the top down out of Washington to fund all these groups, maybe not even in the United States, like all over the world. So it makes you wonder, what is the real level of local support for these left-wing policies all over the world?
Yeah, crazy. So you did a big announcement this week on crypto and creating a framework, finally. I caught some of it. Maybe you could just tell us, you know, from the bottom up, what is the mandate from the president? And what is your advice to him on how to make crypto move out of the shadows, offshore, ICOs, craziness, to legitimacy? What’s the plan here to legitimize and regulate crypto?
Well, the plan was really spelled out by President Trump in his week one EO on crypto, and it’s all spelled out in there. The principles of the administration on crypto—the president said he wants to support the responsible use and growth of digital assets and blockchains across every sector of the economy. So the principles are all there. Yesterday, I was invited up to Capitol Hill to meet with the chairmen of the important committees that basically govern crypto.
So we had a press conference there to announce the legislative plan. You can see there; there’s Chairman Tim Scott, who’s the chair of the Senate Banking Committee to my left, and then to my right is French Hill, who’s the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. And then to the right of Tim Scott is John Bozeman, who’s the chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee. And then to the left of Tim Scott is G.T. Thompson, who’s the chair of the House Agriculture Committee. He’s out of frame right now.
But those are the four committees that govern crypto. And you may ask, why is the Agriculture Committee involved in crypto? And the reason is because the Ag Committee supervises the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, because commodities all came out of agriculture. So it’s interesting. You need four committees across the House and Senate to get legislation done on crypto.
It’s not just House and Senate; it’s actually two committees in each of the House and Senate. And so this is the first time where we’ve had four chairmen of the four key committees all come together and say that they’re ready to support crypto legislation. There were a lot of people on X who felt like this wasn’t a mind-blowing announcement. They wanted something that they could trade on right away. That’s not what this was. This was basically a statement of commitment from the chairs of the four committees that we’re going to get legislation done this year, maybe in the next six months. I mean, that’s really the goal.
And we’ve never had that before, so that is pretty monumental. I used to work in this because when I first launched ClimateCorp back in the day, we actually were selling commodity contracts online. So we set ourselves up as an exempt commodity trading platform. And so I remember all this old legislation. There was the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, if I remember when they deregulated the energy markets.
But one of the features of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act was that they created this concept of an exempt commodity contract, which was where you’re not delivering a physical good. And that’s basically what weather derivatives were and energy derivatives and other kind of indices were created that didn’t have a tangible physical supply. And it was still kind of shoveled in the commodities world.
That’s why the legacy of all this stuff kind of sitting with agriculture. Is that the way this is likely going to move forward? Is it going to look like a new extension of exempt commodities and kind of treated like that versus being securities?
The question you’re describing is called market structure. What are the definitions going to be? Because digital assets can be many things. Some digital assets are cryptocurrencies; they’re actually currencies. Then there’s things that are crypto securities. Then there’s things that are commodities. Bitcoin actually is regulated as a commodity right now.
And then you’ve got things that aren’t securities or commodities, or like collectibles, like NFTs, things like that. So there are all these different categories. And one of the things that the market needs is just clarity around the definitions so that founders know what the rules of the road are, and they can actually just comply with them. So giving them those definitions and describing how a crypto project could start, for example, as a security, and eventually the protocol could become decentralized enough, or maybe it becomes a commodity—that whole idea—that’s called market structure.
There was a bill in the last Congress by French Hill, who is the chair of the House Financial Services Committee now, that passed the House with 71 Democratic votes. So it was fairly bipartisan. But then it went nowhere in the Senate because, frankly, the Banking Committee at that time was run by Sherrod Brown, who is anti-crypto. So it got stopped in the Senate right away.
Now we have Republican control of the Senate, and Tim Scott’s the new chair of the Senate Banking Committee, and he’s expressed support. I think now we could get a bill on market structure like FIT21, again, which was French Hill’s bill last Congress. I think we could do a revised and updated version this Congress.
And that was one of the things they all—the chairmen expressed support for. So I think there’s a pretty good chance we could get this done in the next six months.
What’s the opposition, Sacks? I guess it feels to me like with the market structure question being addressed and answered, you would have also more protection for consumers because now businesses know the rules of the road. They follow the structure that protects consumers, etc., etc. Why would people be opposed to moving this forward, moving the legislation forward, getting this all behind us?
Well, I think this is an area where there’s a really good chance of having bipartisan support, like we did in the last Congress. The House bill got over 70 Democratic votes. I think in the Senate, we’re going to need seven votes, seven Democrat votes to get to 60, right, which is the number you need if you don’t go through the reconciliation process.
And I think there’s a good chance this passes with significant Democratic support as well as Republican. It’s not going to be unanimous or anything like that because there are still forces that are hostile to crypto in Washington.
Do you think it’s going to be a discrete bill? I mean, it seems like you’re going to have to get a border security and energy and budget bill passed, so it seems like everything’s looking towards reconciliation, in which case would this be an adjunct, like an add-on?
The question is what you can get through reconciliation. So in order for a bill to go through the reconciliation process where you only need basically 50 votes, it has to have a budgetary impact or predominantly a budgetary impact. I think it’s called the Byrd rule.
And that rule was definitely pushed pretty hard in the last administration. Remember that the Biden administration got the Inflation Reduction Act passed through reconciliation and all those subsidies for clean energy or whatever. So they’ve opened the window pretty wide on what can go through reconciliation.
But that’s the question. There’s one other bill that I think is going to move pretty quickly here, too. So I just mentioned the market structure bill. The other area is stablecoins. Senator Hagerty—he’s on the banking committee—just released a stablecoin bill. There’s counterparts in the House.
And what the four chairmen indicated is actually they’re going to take up stablecoins first and then market structure will follow very quickly. So I think we could see a stablecoin bill passed Congress in the next several months.
Saks, I guess the question is the SEC was, and Gary Gensler were the blocker previously with crypto. And they just said, hey, listen, there’s an existing set of rules here. Just follow those rules. Obviously, those rules don’t exactly apply to the innovation happening in crypto.
So the question, I think, after stablecoins, which feels like a layup and a great place to start, that’ll be a great early win. And it just makes people— I guess that would just reinforce the dollar supremacy, right, if it’s tied to the dollar. So that’s good for America.
But maybe you could talk to protecting consumers because we all saw in the first couple of generations of crypto all kinds of grifts and ICOs and things that were never delivered. So how do you balance those two things? Protecting consumers who may get really enthusiastic about this versus, you know, people who might try to prey upon them?
Well, the first thing you want to do if you’re going to protect consumers is you want to bring the activity onshore. Because obviously when all the activity gets driven offshore, then it’s hard for regulators to supervise it. Moreover, it’s hard for the market to know who’s a good actor, who’s a bad actor, what’s a good project, what’s a bad project.
So the first thing you want to do is have the innovation happen onshore in the United States. By the way, it’s probably not a coincidence that the biggest fraud in the history of crypto, which was FTX, was based in the Bahamas. Yeah, a little bit of a tell, a little bit of a tell.
And it will be an even stronger tell when the good projects feel like they can come back into the United States, and then you’ve got the shady ones in the Bahamas or in other countries that are going to stick out like a sore thumb. Everyone’s going to be able to understand that, oh, those guys are too shady to operate in the United States.
So the number one thing we need to do is bring the innovation onshore. In terms of the framework, I think the market structure bill is going to define here’s a security, here’s a commodity, here’s what you have to do, here are the disclosure requirements around creating a crypto project. So all of that will be in the bill.
And then in the meantime, the SEC has created a new task force under Hester Peirce, who’s a SEC commissioner. And she is already starting to do work in that regard to define a better regime at the SEC for crypto projects.
You mentioned that Gensler said that the SEC’s doors were open to crypto companies; they should come in and talk to us and work with us. That was very disingenuous. Crypto companies would tell me they would go see the SEC. The SEC would tell them nothing about what the rules were, but they would have enforcement people in those meetings just writing down everything they would say. And the next day they would get sent a Wells notice.
So the truth is the SEC was not cooperating. They were not providing any clarity. They were just honeypotting founders, basically, to come in, and then they would immediately investigate them. I mean, it was really terrible. Look, we expect founders to play by the rules and abide by the law and be compliant.
But when you won’t tell them what the rules are and then you prosecute them, there’s no fair way for them to comply. So the most important thing is to give them a framework. I think the SEC now is doing that. They’re starting to do that already. And then legislatively, we’re going to have a bill that does that moving through Congress over the next few months.
This is absolutely awesome. We’re super encouraged that you’re doing this, and we really appreciate you coming on the pod. I wish you could participate in the other three or four crazy discussions we’re about to have, but we understand you’ve got to stay focused on the mission. Anything on the AI front that we can look forward to in the coming weeks that you’re working on? I know that’s the other part of your mission.
Well, the big thing is, like I talked about last time, the president rescinded the Biden EO, which was this hundred-page monstrosity of burdensome regulation on our AI companies. I think that decision has been proven even more right in the wake of DeepSeek because we know that China has basically caught up or they’re very, very close to catching up.
It felt like that Biden EO was written in a vacuum in which the US was the only player in AI. That if we imposed a bunch of burdensome rules on our companies, that somehow that wouldn’t allow China to catch up, right? I think it’s pretty clear that China is very, very competitive. If we hobble our AI companies, it’s going to run down to China’s benefit.
So I think that was a very good decision. What the president said in his EO is that we should devise a new AI action plan to replace that Biden EO, and we’re working on that right now.
All right, James, any fun anecdotes from DOGE you want to share?
I’ll give you one anecdote, which is I’ve been working late here a number of nights at the EOB, and I won’t tell you where the DOGE guys are based, but I know where their office is. So I just went by there to say hi. The whole room was full of young coders. I think they were engineers, but they’re wearing like suits and ties. So that’s a little different. But they were all working really late. I mean, they’re working there late on a Friday night, and the facilities people don’t know what to do because they’ve never had people like asked to stay late on a Friday night before. So they’ve had to create new facilities access for these guys.
They’re like, you’re coming to the office and doing work? We don’t have a protocol for that. How does that work? We’re going to need to get you a key or a badge to come to the building.
Well, it’s absolutely awesome to see the progress you’re making in the first two weeks and continued success. We’re so proud of the effort. All right, thanks, guys.
All right. Do you guys think the Democrats are going to lose people over their opposition to DOGE? Like, is DOGE really viewed as oppositional to Democratic party interests? This is—
For the average person?
It’s a Rorschach test. I think the thing is that there was a coalition that the Democrats had, and there was a coalition that the Republicans had. The Republicans did a better job of reforming that coalition. Now I think what you’re going to see is a shrinking. I actually got this totally wrong. I don’t know if you remember a couple of years ago, but my thought at the time was, if the Republicans don’t figure out how to fix themselves, they were going to go and lose for the next 10 or 15 years.
And the reason I said that was they would walk into every midterm, and they would just get their ass handed to them. But I think they figured it out, that this is sort of this thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot is there’s a fight in Western societies, and it’s a pendulum, between labor and capital.
It used to be the thought—the conventional wisdom was that the Republicans were pro-capital and Democrats were pro-labor. The brilliance of Trump is he took over the Republican party and made it totally populist, which is to say pro-labor. The crazy thing about the Democrats is that they are the most sophisticated liars. Because if you look at what happened under Biden, you had record high stock markets. So it was purely in favor of asset owners—record high deficits, record high illegal immigration, record high wage suppression. All of these things are massively pro-capital, but they tried to present themselves as pro-labor. That entire ruse is now being undone. And all of this data—
What that does is it’ll consolidate the Democrats to a shell of their former self. It’ll take a year or 18 months. But I think unless they figure out how to totally hard reset, they’re going to be in a really difficult struggle to find a cohort of people beyond 15 or 20% of the population for a long time.
Well, and it’s so dumb to come out against waste, fraud, and abuse. So the best argument the Democrats had, it seems, was that, oh my God, people’s social security numbers or people’s privacy was being violated because they went in and looked at the data and how the money was wasted. This is the height of not getting the point and not reading the room. 100% of Americans don’t want their tax payments stolen.
They don’t care if you looked at their social security number. This isn’t a privacy issue that DOGE is looking at some database. And that’s what AOC and Schumer were doing. Oh my God, these people are looking at your social security number. They have access to your records. Who cares? What matters is how much money is being stolen from the American public. And anyone at any point in time could have picked up this issue. This has been going on.
I think you pointed out the last time somebody really addressed this in earnest was Clinton. So this has been going on. Obama, Trump 1.0, Biden—all of this grift has been going on. It’s only this time around that somebody picked up the free money and said, here’s an issue. Now we see what happens when somebody picks up the issue of stop wasting money. It is a popular issue. This is only going to make Trump more popular.
So Jason, I’m going to add what you and Chamath said. I think you’re both right. I’m going to give you a very concrete example. Rahm Emanuel is now back from Japan. Okay, he was Chief of Staff in both the Democratic White Houses post-Roosevelt, Clinton and Obama. And he wrote an op-ed this past weekend that basically said the Democrats have lost their way because they have forgotten what he calls kitchen table issues, the things regular people care about.
And Chamath, you’re right. The reality is they forgot about inflation. They forgot that inflation is terrible for the average person. It’s terrible for middle-class America. It’s okay for people that own productive assets because they just go up in value, but it’s terrible for people that are wage earners and that have any savings. It’s terrible for older people that are living off savings, terrible.
You know, Rahm makes this point that if the Democrats are gonna reconform in some way, reform in some way, they’re going to have to recapture these kitchen table issues, and if they don’t, they’ll just be about these fringe social issues—DEI, transgender, whatever—and that will never work. They’ll never come back into power.
Well, I mean, the crazy thing is like the democratic policies are meant to favor capital holders, but capital holders by and large deeply dislike the Democrats because of all of these other issues. So they have no home. There is no base from which to build from right now unless they go through a great reset. And part of it is that they have to understand that they are actually not pro-labor. They have been pro-capital, but that requires such a schism from the deepest believers of the Democratic party who thought, you know, eat the rich, you wear it on your dress; it’s so important to you.
In fact, actually, you were feeding the rich. You just—and the fact that you didn’t even know that is just pathetic.
Yeah, what’s funny is that, you know, Margaret Thatcher famously said that the problem with socialism, you eventually run out of other people’s money, and you run deficits, right? And you destroy the country. This happened in Venezuela. It’s always the end of socialism. It’s how it finishes, how the movie ends. We’ve seen it around the world. Just look South into South America.
We were heading that direction. That’s when I said earlier, I’m afraid we might become a kleptocracy if this doesn’t stop. And I’m so grateful to all the great patriots at DOGE and the government, the president for making it happen because we were heading that direction.
So the Democratic party is lost. They’ll continue to be lost. The interesting thing came up this week. On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order laying out a plan to establish the first sovereign wealth fund for the United States. For those of you who don’t know, a sovereign wealth fund is essentially an investment fund for a country. It’s almost universally based on natural resources. So Norway, Saudi, UAE, they all have Australia sovereign wealth funds based upon minerals or typically oil.
The United States is not known for having the oil reserves of the Saudis or UAE or Norway. This public investment fund would be apparently anchored by potentially the TikTok shares that Trump said he wanted to get half of by giving a license. A lot of that is unclear what this license would be. It’s never existed, but this is the concept. The treasury secretary and commerce secretary have been tasked with developing a plan over the next 90 days. And the plan should include, quote, recommendations for funding mechanisms, investment strategies, fund structure, and a governance model.
Chamath, you were tweeting about this. What is the point of having a sovereign wealth fund in the United States if we’re $36 trillion in debt? Shouldn’t we just pay down? I think it’s not—
Debt? Where’s this money gonna come from?
Yeah, well, it’s not an either or thing. And I think the point is that if there are assets that are minted effectively overnight, which I think the 50% share of TikTok would be, the question is what should you do with it and who should govern it? And I think this idea that if you had a group of five elder statesmen—so I’m just gonna throw some names out there: David Tepper, Stan Druckenmiller, Ken Griffin, John Doerr, or Mike Moritz, Bill Gross or some other bond guy.
My point is what you get are five people that are very sophisticated across all market categories. One of them could be the rotating CEO for some number of years. People should rotate in and rotate out. These are unpaid jobs because everybody that has these slots should be mega billionaires. So they shouldn’t be doing it for their own personal advancement, and they should deploy that capital. So as you sell down the TikTok shares, maybe as you sell federal lands and you generate more oil revenue, take it all and invest it on behalf of America into American companies.
I think that’s a great, incredible idea. And Tony, do you think the government should be in this business?
So I think it should, and I agree with Shamath that the governance is very, very important. I think he’s got a good idea there. I think it, for a different reason, is that we don’t have an industrial policy in America. Many of our strategic competitors around the world, in particular China, have a long-term industrial policy, and they put enormous amounts of capital behind the industrial policy. A sovereign wealth fund, I think, would be a stealthy way to create industrial policy in America.
So rather than having—
What does it mean, industrial policy in this context?
So—
Example.
In China, they want to build chip fabs, and they want to catch up to TSMC. So what do they do? They take the dollars of trade surplus they get from us every year, and they pour it back into making that stuff inside their country. For decades, part of the problem we’ve had with China is that capital’s free because the banking system just pushes money out to manufacturers, and they move the manufacturing because of the WTO from the US to China.
That’s industrial policy. People say the Chinese have a long-term 100-year vision. The way it manifests is this industrial policy. We don’t have that here at all. And when we try to do it, we do like the CHIPS Act, and it goes through commerce.
We have government bureaucrats deciding how to spend $200 billion to modernize Intel, which needs to happen. I’d much rather have Ken Griffin, Bill Gross, any of the guys Chamath mentioned, deciding, okay, we have five industries in America we want to invest in. Let’s make great investments, right? I mean, let’s make great investments for America. They have to be economic; they’ve got to make money for us, but they’ve got to be good for the country.
I think that’s what most of these sovereign wealth funds do. Some of them make portfolio investments, but many of them, like the sovereign wealth fund in Saudi Arabia, the PIF, they’re making enormous investments domestically to remake the economy toward tourism, for example.
And I think this is a great idea. They’re literally building cities in Neom. They’ve got a dozen cities being constructed and trying to take an oil economy and shift it to a tourism economy, a technology economy, a private equity economy. Antonio’s totally right. Like Scott Besant, part of his congressional testimony, you guys probably saw this, was he laid out this thing that he has that’s called the 333 plan, right?
And the 333 plan says we want to see GDP growth of 3%. We want to see deficits that are no greater than 3%. And we want to have 3 million barrels of oil, right, produced domestically in the United States. But if you double-click on that, if you look at the total energy reserves in the United States, they’re three times greater than the total energy reserves of Saudi Arabia—three times across all forms.
So not just oil. If we actually go, as Antonio said, toward an industrial policy that’s pro-energy, where the incremental cost of energy is effectively zero, where we want just a gross abundance of electrons flowing in America for all the great ideas that could pop up, it is by definition going to generate an enormous amount of revenue for the federal government.
And so I think having the Sovereign Wealth Fund be the rainy day fund, if you will, right? That can bank a percentage of all of that, I think starts to do a lot of really good for the long-term strategic guidance of the US.
Freeberg, what do you think here? Is this something where we’re making the government too big? And now we’ve got the government competing with BlackRock and Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz, and they’re going to be on the board of technology companies and energy companies, investing in it. And then what happens when, you know, Obama, Biden, Trump, Bush— you get different people running these things, and then they want to do their pet projects.
It seems to me like this could be get awfully conflicted awfully quick. What do you think? Should this be a business our government’s in?
I think one of the things the government sucks at is capitalism. So I wouldn’t make capitalism the mandate of a sovereign wealth fund, certainly not when we have $40 trillion of federal debt. It doesn’t make economic sense; our cost of capital is 5%. That’s how much the interest is on this 10 to 30-year debt right now.
So it’s very hard to actually make real risk-adjusted returns when our cost of capital is so high. So I don’t think the mandate should be, hey, let’s put a bunch of capital in a pool, go and invest it, and probably make money for the United States. That seems silly. But my point about the government being really bad at capitalism is that the United States government owns and has access to and will acquire through other means significant assets and resources that should be monetized in a smarter way.
And so I would kind of think about the sovereign wealth fund as being more of a strategic vehicle for monetization of high-value government assets. So for example, if Trump does actually negotiate a 50% equity position in TikTok, that needs to sit somewhere. It should not sit in the Department of whatever; it should sit with a capitalist manager that then ultimately makes the decision on when and how to monetize that asset, return that cash to the Treasury, and pay down the debt.
Similarly, the US has large amounts of land, has access to other large assets that get transferred in seizures, etc., etc. So, you know, I don’t know if you guys remember all this, but there were like Bitcoin seizures that have happened over the years as the government has cracked down on criminal enterprises, then the government owns this Bitcoin. Do you think the smartest people are making the decisions on where and how to sell down that Bitcoin? I guarantee you not. I would much rather have a capitalist making that decision.
So I would view the Sovereign Wealth Fund as being less about raising capital from other means in the government, which effectively means borrowing money through treasuries because of the debt level we have, trying to invest it—as much more about, okay, what strategic assets can the US government monetize and use this as the mechanism for doing that? And then ultimately, I think the objective should be to return that capital.
I do think there’s also an opportunity for managing social security in a smarter way. So social security is functionally going to be bankrupt in eight years, the way the trust is set up, the cash that’s there, the assets that are there, and the demand on social security, given the aging population and the rising payouts every year.
So one of the other ways to think about this is what are the long-term debt obligations, which is ultimately the point of the sovereign wealth funds? And can they be invested in a smarter way? Why is the social security entities ultimately owning, you know, 3% yielding bonds when they could be owning interest in equities?
So I would kind of think about that strategic pool of capital being managed by this as well, and less about the mandate of go be a capitalist investor for the United States, raise money and make money. I think leave that to the markets. But when it comes to strategic assets, I think this could be a good vehicle for when the silver got shut down.
Yeah, we seized 144,000 Bitcoin, and that’s sitting somewhere in some Department of Justice. Yeah, they sold—I think they sold it. Yeah, no, I think we still have. I think that was like the idea was that was going to become the Bitcoin street. So I mean, you could also come up with the taxes to fund the DOJ. The DOJ sells these.
So like, who do you think of the DOJ is making the Bitcoin market decisions? And is that the right person to be monetizing these assets? I mean, they’ve been issued by security, I just want to follow up on, which is when you think about social security, $620 of our $36 trillion debt. And it’s actually a fake Treasury bill.
So just one of the things we figured out early days before the inauguration, I was like, that $6 trillion sits on the ledger; it’s just a paper ledger over. So actually, if it gets paid out, it’s also going to be very inflationary. It’s just a fake Treasury ledgered over at that pays a very low rate.
And here at Valor with my partners, John Shulkin has been reading, there’s only—the only thing we find is this audit in the government. The Social Security Administration actually has an audit. It has an audit. And when you go through the audit, it’s just riddled with material weaknesses.
There are probably—do you think there are individuals that have made millions or billions of dollars from missed payments overseas? Like, is this kind of what’s gone on in the missing money in Ukraine, do you think? Like, it’s kind of found its way to the wrong places?
Yeah, I mean, so what I would—I don’t know what happened in Ukraine. I don’t. It’s such a crazy story. Yeah, it is shocking about Ukraine. I will say that I have business experience trying to work in businesses that had Medicaid and Medicare payments.
I wanted to make that better, right? We use this to make the world better. And we just stopped because we found so much fraud. I mean, I’m certain that we literally have a rule here: government pay or in those areas, if it’s more than like a third of the business, we don’t do it. And in the services space, this is why. We just found continuous fraud in the companies we were looking at investing in.
Yeah, just threading these things together. You know, the really interesting thing with the Twitter pausing of payments was, you know, at some point, we were in a meeting, you know, at 1 a.m. on a Saturday, and it was like, hey, let’s turn the credit cards off to see what bounces and, you know, and what happens. And then of course, we start getting calls, and people started routing, obviously, because they knew Saks was there, you were there, I was there. Hey, you know, a company who I shared an investor with or, you know, in another company said, hey, you know, we’re not getting paid for this.
And it was like some SaaS software that nobody was using, etc. So you start figuring out to your point, okay, is this software even being used? There was so much software and services that had been paid that nobody had ever logged in to set up. So it was just being paid as pure graft.
Now you said, Antonio, correctly, the people who come first, like, they’re probably the ones who are in on the biggest grift because, hey, you know, I figured out how to grift this money.
How USAID got to the top of the DOGE list, I think, is one of the most interesting aspects of this story. So if you remember, on January 21, Trump decided he would do a bunch of executive orders, right? And one of them was to pause foreign aid for 90 days. Okay, this seems reasonable. We’ve got to take care of our country. That was part of his mandate for becoming the 47th President of the United States.
So a couple of days later, the White House said, hey, this USAID leadership is trying to circumvent the executive order there. In other words, they’re just going to keep paying people even though the executive order came out. That alerted the DOGE team. So Elon confirmed this on X; he said, quote, “all DOGE did was check to see which federal organizations were violating the President’s executive orders the most. It turned out to be USAID.” So that became our focus. And according to NBC, security officials at USAID tried to prevent DOGE from even getting into the building or accessing the systems.
To your point, Antonio, the person probably who’s got the most to hide is the one who’s going to fight the most. Over the weekend, DOGE gained access to USAID, and then people started tweeting out all of this, you know, crazy spend and things that any American who looks at it and says, wait a second, if we haven’t fixed the goddamn water in Flint, Michigan, why are we sending money to Galway or in Ireland to do a DEI musical? This makes no sense.
And that’s, I think, the key piece of this, Antonio, can you win the hearts and minds of Americans? Because some of this stuff, I don’t know if it’s legal or it’s not legal, or it’s against protocol, or it is protocol. We’re going to find out there’s been tons of legal cases and lawsuits that have been filed. But to your point, this is how Elon found out about USAID.
Jake, I’ll let me ask you a question. Where does that place you in your political philosophy around the importance of human rights abroad? Great, great question. You know, I’ve always felt that the West should act in unison, and if the United States is the greatest economy or the strongest, we should lead.
There is something called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The United States—Eleanor Roosevelt wrote this at the UN, and everybody tries to hit those notes. I think it’s great that we try to reduce suffering in the world. But I think we should be doing it not unilaterally and not to try to manipulate governments. That’s the piece of this, that USAID is obviously a grift where people are trying to steal money for their pet projects. And I don’t think they’re acting in unison and above board to look and say, okay, where’s the most suffering in the world, how can we help that?
You know, that to me seems like a noble thing to do. And if the United States has the budget to help fight AIDS in Africa or, you know, poverty, you know, there’s a chance that some of these human rights issues were embellished to try to get more money.
Well, I do think the—I did this tweet recently. So yes, is the answer. If you look at Amnesty International, where I worked was one of my first jobs. They were working on people who were imprisoned, tortured, raped, murdered, systematic murder of dissidents for freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, religion, etc. And then somewhere along the line, you know, the Amnesty International was tweeting about trans rights.
And that’s the big focus. This is a very small amount of, you know, people on the planet. And I don’t think that those human rights violations in any way relate to the tragedy we’re seeing of people being murdered, tortured, raped, and caned and beheaded in certain places in the world. So there is a way to look at suffering and say, we should handle this first. And yes, somebody who, you know, feels they got misgendered, maybe that’s way down the priority list, compared to systematic rape of women in these, you know, war zones.
Those will be the high order bits. And so this thing has gotten— the other fascinating thing, I think about USAID, which I’d like to get your thoughts on Chamath, is at what point did this switch from being the we should not intervene, right? The left’s position always in the 80s and 90s when we were growing up was we shouldn’t be doing these operatives in other countries. We should let democracy flow; let these countries figure it out for themselves.
We shouldn’t be doing empire building; we shouldn’t be doing imperialism. And then all of a sudden now it’s just such a grift that I think everybody’s got their hands in the pie. Lindsey Graham’s on some nonprofit that gets money from this. I don’t know if that’s above board or not. A lot of people who are formerly in government seem to be part of this NGO train. So the whole thing’s just turned out to be a grift. And it’s a bipartisan grift, obviously. I think it’s infuriating.
I think the biggest thing that we will have to confront is that many of the things that we thought were issues or problems may have actually been somewhat embellished because of this money cycle. Sure. And I think that that’s going to cause a lot of people to feel really—they’ll probably feel really foolish about some of the decisions they made. All the attempts at cancellation are going to look really dumb in hindsight.
Yeah. All right, I want to give some credit to our friend David Sacks here who’s coming online. Oh, okay, here he is. David, looking good? And the one thing I want to point out, this goes way back, I think maybe more than a decade ago, David tried to explain to me that neocons had taken over American foreign policy.
And they were—well, your question about, well, why do the Democrats change? Why do Republicans change, etc.? The neocons took over foreign policy on both sides, Democrats and Republicans, and populated out this very activist mustard stance, which is bad for America.
And I think, Jason, that answers your question as to why the Democrats shifted. All right, with us is David Sacks. How are you doing, brother? Are you literally in the White House? I’m in the EOB. Ah, okay. There’s like a podcast studio, actually, in the EOB. Oh, fantastic. And you’re wearing a suit every day. Yeah, no, you’re right. I have to wear a suit and tie every day.
I was just listening to your conversation about DOGE. Jacob, I’m surprised that you never figured out a way to get involved in this USAID. I mean, everybody’s on the take except you. If I had known, I would have started an NGO. Where’s my NGO? You had everything except the money laundering. You had the grit. You had the virtue signaling. You had it all except the actual money.
Let me up-level this for a second. We knew the U.S. government runs a $2 trillion deficit every year. We’re in debt almost $40 trillion. And we also knew that any time anyone tried to cut anything in Washington, the whole city screams bloody murder.
So the question is just why. Well, now we know. The money is all going to them. It’s like round-tripping to them. New York Times getting paid. Politico getting paid. Bill Kristol, perennial warmonger, getting paid. Ukraine, getting paid. Like 11 out of 12 publications in Ukraine getting paid.
Victor Orban, who’s the Prime Minister of Hungary, was saying that he’s very popular in Hungary. His political opposition is funded by USAID. In Poland, the left-wing political opposition is funded by USAID. On and on and on it goes. BBC! You wonder why everyone in the U.K.—I couldn’t believe that BBC is getting paid. Every left-wing organization in the world seems to be getting paid by this slush fund, USAID, which disperses about $50 billion a year. That’s a billion dollars a week.
That’s actually a lot of money. So it makes you wonder. The left, in general, tries to portray itself as a movement of the people, that it’s grassroots. This is the exact opposite. This is astroturf. This is basically money coming from the top down out of Washington to fund all these groups, maybe not even in the United States, like all over the world. So it makes you wonder, what is the real level of local support for these left-wing policies all over the world?
Yeah, crazy. So you did a big announcement this week on crypto and creating a framework, finally. I caught some of it. Maybe you could just tell us, you know, from the bottom up, what is the mandate from the president? And what is your advice to him on how to make crypto move out of the shadows, offshore, ICOs, craziness