Tucker Carlson: ICE Raids, LA Riots, Strong Economic Data, Politicized Fed, War with Iran?

Jason Calacanis 0:00 Can I ask you a question about the nicotine pouches?

Tucker Carlson 0:03 Yes.

Jason Calacanis 0:04 Does it melt in your mouth, or do you have to spit it out later?

Tucker Carlson 0:07 You can spit it out, you can swallow it, or you just savor it. I mean, you throw it in like, uh, you would a dip of tobacco.

Jason Calacanis 0:13 Okay.

Tucker Carlson 0:13 But you just let it sit there and then it-

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:15 (smacks lips)

Jason Calacanis 0:15 (sighs)

Tucker Carlson 0:15 ... suffuses your nervous system with life-giving nicotine.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:18 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 0:19 Uh-huh.

Tucker Carlson 0:19 And it, it really does feel like the hand of God is massaging you.

Jason Calacanis 0:23 But does it feel like-

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:24 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 0:24 ... the high of smoking a cigarette?

Tucker Carlson 0:26 It's simultaneously, if you can, uh, imagine the zen paradox, higher alertness accompanied by deep relaxation.

Jason Calacanis 0:36 Mm.

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:36 Wow.

Tucker Carlson 0:37 So you, you really are... No, no, it, it's a zen experience. You are like-

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:41 Yeah.

Tucker Carlson 0:41 ... catlike in your readiness-

Chamath Palihapitiya 0:43 (laughs)

Tucker Carlson 0:43 ... but you're fully relaxed.

Jason Calacanis 0:46 And how long does it last?

Tucker Carlson 0:47 I always have one going. Sometimes if things are, you know, if I need it, I'll, I'll put another one in. So I've got-

Jason Calacanis 0:53 Mm.

Tucker Carlson 0:53 ... 18 milligrams of nicotine, but that gives me an unfair advantage.

Jason Calacanis 0:57 You're banging 18 milligrams? Woo, that's impressive, bro.

Tucker Carlson 1:00 I, I don't like to because it, everybody else kind of recedes into the background and I become this kind of colossus-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:06 (laughs)

Tucker Carlson 1:06 ... when I do that and I feel guilty about it. Hubris is-

Jason Calacanis 1:08 Yeah.

Tucker Carlson 1:09 ... inevitable at that point, so I usually keep it to one.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:11 (laughs) I mean, I could use a new addiction.

Tucker Carlson 1:13 Oh, yes.

Jason Calacanis 1:14 (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:14 What's the gateway drug level, uh, what would you prescribe?

Jason Calacanis 1:17 This sits between caffeine and cocaine.

Tucker Carlson 1:19 We sell a three milligram, but you-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:22 Three, okay.

Tucker Carlson 1:22 ... you know, there's a transition like all-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:24 (laughs)

Tucker Carlson 1:24 ... all great addictions. Like it's not instant. You, you do vomit at first, but then-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:30 (laughs)

Tucker Carlson 1:30 But then your body acclimates.

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:32 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:32 It's kinda like heroin in that way, you know, like what you get-

Tucker Carlson 1:35 Exactly. Right.

Jason Calacanis 1:35 ... with your Ozempic. You just, you gotta power through-

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:38 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:38 ... ayahuasca. You, you heave twice and then you're addicted.

Tucker Carlson 1:42 Exactly. (laughs) And then enlightenment. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 1:42 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 1:43 (upbeat music) Love Tucker. Don't let your winners ride.

1:48 Brain man, David Sacks.

1:50 I'm going all in. And I said- We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

1:56 Love you, Wes.

1:57 I mean, queen of quinoa. I'm going all in.

2:01 All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, after Tucker Carlson's amazing podcast. That's right.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:07 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 2:08 Tucker is back here on the All In podcast with Chamath Palihapitiya, your chairman dictator, and the czar, David Sacks. Not from the White House, he's from The Suite, but he's here back on the program looking great. Look at the collar. Mm, Brioni. I ordered three or four Brionis after last week's show.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:27 Did you really do that? (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 2:27 Guys, I did. I'm getting in the Brioni. Well, I have the all-in expense accounts now.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:30 What'd you call it? Broni? Brioni?

Jason Calacanis 2:32 He'll be paying for it over 72 months. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:35 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 2:35 Two monthly payments.

Tucker Carlson 2:37 (laughs) The layaway.

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:38 You use Affirm or Klarna to pay for that?

Tucker Carlson 2:42 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 2:42 Hey, uh-

Chamath Palihapitiya 2:44 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 2:44 ... uh, Tucker, last time you were here, uh, you famously, famously... Gosh, we, we, it's been a year of feedback on your last performance. Thank you for coming back. We got a lot of crazy feedback from the private equity housewives, but I got more feedback (laughs) from that effect-

Tucker Carlson 2:58 (laughs) You did. They love me.

Jason Calacanis 3:00 Y- But you know what? You're in, you're in deep. You're in deep because I am here in LA and the Los Angeles studio wives group is really, really pissed off at you because they feel that they're the problem. They feel they're a much bigger problem than private equity housewives. So how-

Tucker Carlson 3:15 Y- You know that-

Jason Calacanis 3:15 ... are you a studio heads wives versus private equity wives?

Tucker Carlson 3:19 I know some of them, um, and they're absolutely a bigger problem, but there are fewer of them.

Jason Calacanis 3:24 Got it. So-

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:24 Yeah.

Tucker Carlson 3:24 ... kind of hard to get-

Jason Calacanis 3:25 So pound for pound-

Tucker Carlson 3:25 ... critical mass. Yeah, exactly. They're, they're a smaller threat. They're kind of an-

Jason Calacanis 3:29 Smaller.

Tucker Carlson 3:29 ... elite unit. You know what I mean? They're like Delta Force.

Jason Calacanis 3:33 Got it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:33 They have less money, too. You know, they don't get as much in the divorce as these private equity wives.

Tucker Carlson 3:37 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 3:37 Got it.

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:39 (laughs)

Tucker Carlson 3:40 So they-

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:40 I mean-

Jason Calacanis 3:41 They're coming in like a SWAT team. If you wanna send them in to deal with a very specific issue, great, but they're not gonna cause as much bedlam globally as the private equity wives.

Tucker Carlson 3:51 They cause a lot of misery, though.

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:52 As one Mackenzie Bezos.

Tucker Carlson 3:54 Exactly. (laughs)

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:55 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 3:55 Oh, my God. All right, listen.

Chamath Palihapitiya 3:58 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 3:58 Let's get a plug in here. All In Summit, fourth year, Tucker's coming this year, I hope. Uh, September 7th to 9th in Los Angeles. The goal, have the world's most important conversations, yadda, yadda, yadda. Blah, blah, blah.

Tucker Carlson 4:12 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 4:12 Apply for a ticket. Allin.com/yadda, yadda, yadda, or allin.com/summit to apply for a ticket. Freebird is out this week. So Tucker is here. And, my lord, a lot going on in the news. Let's start with

Jason Calacanis 4:25 the immigration protests/riots/ICE actions in Los Angeles. I'm actually here. Last Friday, protests broke out after ICE raided Home Depot, a fashion wholesaler. In total, 44 people were arrested by ICE, 10 times as many, (laughs) 400 and counting, from the protests. They even ran into, uh, ICE that is, ran into a strawberry field in Oxnard (laughs) , uh, to just randomly pick people up it seems. Uh, at least a half dozen Waymos were vandalized and burned, 20 plus businesses looted, and, uh, Waymo narrowed their area, and it's, uh, spiked to 30-minute wait times. Uh, so that's a first world problem. Riders throwing bricks, Molotov cocktails, shooting fireworks at law enforcement. Completely unacceptable. Two men were charged with throwing Molotov cocktails at officers. Ugh. Trump deployed the National Guard, 2,000 at first, then 4,000 apparently. And, uh, apparently there's a battalion of Marines here, 700 of them. Karen Bass instituted a curfew Downtown LA, 8:00 PM to 6:00 AM. And, uh, prosecutors, federal prosecutors that is, are trying to identify hundreds of people. Newsom, Bass denounced the raids, obviously, and, uh, they're blaming Trump for escalating the situation. Trump and members of the White House responded by calling out California's weak leadership. And now we have protests popping up everywhere else. New York, Chicago; Austin, DC. Tucker, you grew up in Southern California, I think. You-

Tucker Carlson 5:55 I did, yeah. LA and La Jolla.

Jason Calacanis 5:57 I mean, are these riots more or less than the Lakers, uh, championship? Uh, how concerning are they to you? Who's to blame?

Tucker Carlson 6:07 Well, as measured by violence, they're less profound than, you know, what happened in 2020 after George Floyd died. They're way less dangerous than, say, the Watts riot, um, or the Rodney King riots in LA. But they're much more profound. I mean, it, it really does... Uh, they're certainly a bigger deal than anything that happened in Fort Sumter, for sure, which kicked off the bloodiest war in American history. The federal government has, as a court duty, uh, the right and responsibility to enforce immigration law and police the borders. That's what the government is. That's what the federal government is, really. And so if you contest that, it is like a threat to disunion, fundamentally. I mean, I think there's a lot at stake. And we reached this point because a series of, paradoxically, weak federal governments allowed sanctuary cities to continue literally for decades. E- each one its own form of insurrection against the central government, and maybe, maybe you don't believe that the federal government has a right to pass laws restricting immigration. It's not in charge of the integrity of the borders. You know, that, that's a kind of philosophical or Constitutional case I guess you could make. But most people accept that those are federal duties, and once you accept that, you can't allow states or municipalities to flout the law any more than you could allow Central High School in Little Rock to keep Black students out or whatever. I mean, certainly federal troops have been called in for much less, and I think the longer this continues, the greater the threat of disunion, the greater the threat of reaching a point where you, I don't know, you can't drive from New York to LA. We take a lot for granted in the country, and the main thing we take for granted, I think, is freedom of movement between states. But you could easily imagine that ending, like, soon, in the same way that you can't drive from, uh, 'cause I've tried, from Sao Paolo to, to Rio in Brazil. Pretty first-world country, it's too dangerous to do that. You could easily see that happening here. So I think once the Trump administration commits to putting down the riots, to enforcing federal law by force, it kinda can't back away from that. Like-

David Sacks 8:08 Mm.

Tucker Carlson 8:08 ... I, you know? And that raises the question, who's funding these, et cetera, et cetera? And I think it's a really interesting question we should find out. I don't think the only arrests should be on the scene. I do think the drug cartels are involved, flexing their authority in California. They have a lot of control in California, as I'm sure you know. Et cetera, et cetera. But the bottom line question is, does the federal government have a right to enforce federal immigration law? Yes, and if states are out of compliance with that, it doesn't have any option but to force the issue.

David Sacks 8:36 Srikanth, uh, when you see this amount of power military, milit- literal military coming in, the dragging of, you know, handymen from Home Depot, as opposed to the strategic way this started, which was, "Hey, we're gonna go after the felons. We're going after the gang members, the really bad folks." And then this time, now it seems like, "Hey, we're just gonna roll up to a farm. We're gonna roll up to a Home Depot, just grab everybody. We'll figure it out later if their, you know, papers check out or not." Are you in favor of the, "Hey, all 20 million gotta go"? I'll call that the Steve Bannon position. Or are you into, in the 5% of alien, illegal aliens who are criminals, they need to go, but maybe a path to citizenship for the other 19 million? I think the president was asked a version of that question today, Jason, and I think what he said is there are people that have worked, for example, on farms for 20 to 25 years, or they work in the leisure industry, and he said, "We have to take a common sense approach to those people." Because if you do take those people, then it's creating a vacuum where these jobs could get filled by folks that are essentially criminals or other things. So, I believe that that's a reasonable starting point. What I would say is, where do we go? There are seven and a half legal, not illegal, legal immigrants in the United States waiting for their adjustment of status. Mm. Those are doctors. Those are lawyers. Those are scientists. Those are family members of existing American citizens. There's an entire body of people that I think we have to recognize that have been waiting in line, and their first act in America was a legal action to come in and contribute. And every time we start this conversation, we go to the plight of people whose fundamental first action was an illegal action without understanding that there has to be actually a more balanced approach. So yes, I think the president is right. Common sense for the folks that have now been here for a very long time, but we have to prioritize the people that started by saying, "We're gonna wait in line properly." And then there's people in the middle, but I think that there needs to be a way to give those folks a chance to get their affairs in order. But they should be playing by the rules. Got it. And I think it's unfair to reward not playing by the rules. Okay, so some middle ground between the extreme, all 20 million gotta go, and the... Let's call it. One example that I saw online, Jason, was give folks a stipend and a year. Yes, the stipend's been out there for a while, right? Yeah. To get their affairs in order and then to go- Kaisen said that, right? Kaisen. Kaisen said that, exactly. Yeah. And I think k- I think Kaisen's clip is actually the most, the most rational for the middle chunk. But I would really focus on these legal folks and say, what are we doing about those folks whose first action was to raise their hand, stand in line, and say, "I want to contribute by the rules that America sets up"? So reward them, and then punish the illegal folks coming in. Adjudicate everybody else. Or adjudicate everybody else. Love it. Okay, Sacks, I'm gonna play two clips for you here to level this up, and we can kinda look at this in a multi-decade way. Here's Reagan on immigration and then followed by Clinton.

Narrator 12:02 It is bold men and women yearning for freedom and opportunity who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over.They believe in the American dream, and over and over they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world, the last best hope of man on Earth.

12:38 All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected, but in every place in this country are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before. We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.

Jason Calacanis 13:14 Okay. Sachs, my question for you is, on a party basis, this seems to have flipped. We talked about this before on the program. Republicans wanted immigration, NAFTA, legal reg- reg- uh, even maybe an open border where workers could go freely back and forth from Mexico, kind of like the EU. And, uh, Clinton (laughs) wanted to deport folks so that Americans get, could have more jobs and that wages would go up. Now it seems to have flipped. Obviously, you're inside the administration. Disclaimer, disclaimer, whatever you, however you want to disclaim this. What's in the best interest of all Americans going forward? Because we have an interesting wrinkle here, which I'm sure you've been thinking about as the AI czar, which is, jobs are going away in a lot of key fact, key areas where robotics and AI are coming in. So, you have to contend with what the American people want and AI and job destruction or displacement that can be caused by it. So, so what are your thoughts generally? And, and I, obviously you work in the administration, so I want to give you that chance to explain personal versus administration position.

David Friedberg 14:21 Well, my re- reaction is that you're doing everything possible to avoid the fact that LA is on fire right now, and law enforcement is being assaulted by rioters who look like an invading army.

Jason Calacanis 14:32 Who? Me?

David Friedberg 14:32 They're rioting under a foreign flag. Yeah, you're showing clips of Reagan and Clinton. What the hell does this have to do with the fact that there are riots in LA right now?

Jason Calacanis 14:42 Oh, well, I was trying to level-

David Friedberg 14:42 This is the issue at hand.

Jason Calacanis 14:44 Oh, I, I was trying to level up the conversation to talk about the big picture of immigration, but if we want to get down to the law-

David Friedberg 14:48 No, you're changing the conversation. I think that, I think-

Jason Calacanis 14:50 No, no, I, I, I'm trying to expand it, but hold on, hold on, hold on. If you're gonna accuse me personally of, like, having a scale here, I'm happy to discuss law enforcement, January 6th, or this one. I believe you should not beat up cops. I come from a family of cops. You know that. We've been friends for over 20 years. My family is cop. My family is firefighter. We don't approve of throwing Molotov cocktails at cops, period, full stop. I am-

David Friedberg 15:15 Good.

Jason Calacanis 15:15 ... insulted if you even insinuate that.

David Friedberg 15:17 I didn't insinuate that, but-

Jason Calacanis 15:19 You said, "I."

David Friedberg 15:19 ... we have not discussed the issue at hand, which is-

Jason Calacanis 15:22 You can feel free to go micro.

David Friedberg 15:24 ... the fact that LA is burning right now. By the way, if you don't want to get deported, try not rioting under a foreign flag. I mean, it's just a stupid way to advocate for your position, if that's what it is. But that's, that's the topic of the week right now. I don't know why you're trying to uplevel this and talk about what Reagan thought 40 years ago. It's just not relevant to what's happening in the news today. Now, you asked, what is the, quote-unquote, "American position," if there is one. I can give you some polling on that. So first of all, voters approve of the ICE raids in Los Angeles by 55 to 37. That's plus 18. Voters support the administration's effort to deport illegal immigrants by 58-37. That's plus 21. They approve of Trump deploying the National Guard by 20 points, 59-39. Only 36% say the administration's gone too far, while 55% say it's about right or too little, so plus 19. And even the liberal, uh, Quinnipiac poll found that Democrats' approval numbers are at a new all-time low of minus 49, whereas Trump is now up to plus six in Morning Consult and plus eight in Rasmussen. So, I think the American people approve of what the administration is doing here. And just to fact check one thing you said in the introduction, you mentioned this fashion wholesaler that along with Home Depot, you made it sound like these raids were just happening willy-nilly, like there was some big roundup where they were just busting into places and seeing who's illegal, checking people's papers. That's not what happened. This fashion wholesaler is a money laundering operation for the Mexican cartels. This is according to Tom Homan. And many employees there are involved in very serious crimes, drug, gang, and violence, murder, child rape. And there were warrants for their arrest. So, the way that this whole thing started is ICE was serving criminal warrants that state and local authorities have no right to resist. That's how this started. It wasn't random roundups, okay?

Jason Calacanis 17:22 Okay, I was just, there's reporting that Stephen Miller specifically said just, he was disappointed with the number of people being round up and deported, and he said, "Just go to a farm. Just go to a Home Depot." So I'm just-

David Friedberg 17:35 Well, that's not, that's-

Jason Calacanis 17:36 That's the reporting.

David Friedberg 17:37 Okay, well, I have not been able to confirm that reporting. I don't-

Jason Calacanis 17:39 Okay.

David Friedberg 17:39 I personally don't believe it. I think that what Tom Homan said is that they were serving criminal warrants. That's how this started.

Jason Calacanis 17:46 Okay.

David Friedberg 17:47 Now, I think that part of the reason why the Democrats are so unpopular here is they're basically perceived as excusing the lawlessness by saying that it's only happening because the Trump administration's daring to enforce the law. And so once again, they're siding with looters, arsonists, and violent criminals, just like in 2020. And you, you see-

Jason Calacanis 18:07 Who's side, who's, who's siding with whom?

David Friedberg 18:07 This is Democrats.

Jason Calacanis 18:09 Okay, 'cause the Democrats-

David Friedberg 18:10 But, go ahead.

Jason Calacanis 18:10 They said no violence, so that was, many times Gavin Newsom said no violence, Karen Bass said no violence.They've been tweeting that, "Cancel me."

David Friedberg 18:17 They also... Okay, great. They also are saying that this is all Trump's fault, that Trump started this. Bass and Newsom said that the National Guard wasn't needed because LAPD had everything under control. But LAPD was at first told to stay out of the protests, and when the violence erupted and that forced them to step in, they were, according to their own chief of police, Jim McDonald, quickly overwhelmed. So this is McDonald. He said, quote, "We are overwhelmed. Tonight we had individuals out there shooting commercial-grade fireworks at our officers. That can kill you. They'll take backpacks filled with cinder blocks and hammers, break the blocks, and pass the pieces around to throw at officers and cars, even at other people." So according to their own chief of police, they needed the help from the National Guard. So that's the real issue here, is that Bass and Newsom had this policy of, of doing nothing and then engaging in denialism, pretending like there wasn't a problem, and then when the problem got too big to ignore, they pretend like it's Trump's fault for causing it.

Jason Calacanis 19:13 Tucker, what's your thoughts on should the Trump administration have had such a show of force if the reports are true, that they're randomly going, you know, to a Home Depot? If that is true, is that a, the right approach right now? Or is it, you know, a little too provocative and they should do this more strategically, in your personal opinion?

Tucker Carlson 19:33 Uh, well, considering that we have American troops in over 100 bases around the world in countries most Americans can't identify, it's a little weird to be shocked when, on that rare occasion they're used to keep the second-biggest city in the country from burning down. It seems like a pr- a pr... The point of having a military is to keep foreigners from burning your cities, and these are foreigners, as David said. They're foreign nationals committing crimes beneath a foreign flag. So that if there was ever a time to use the US military, it's then. And as noted earlier, you can't allow the states to be flagrantly out of compliance with federal immigration law. And I have to say, the core question for me as an American is a f- really a fairness question. So the idea that, you know, people are breaking the law but it's cool because they're doing essential services, like, well, you know, I pay a lot in taxes. Maybe I pay 80% and that feels like enough to me, and hey, man, do you really have a right to collect the, the last 20%? I mean, isn't 80% enough? Like, back off. I don't have the right to say that as an American citizen to an IRS agent. I won't hip in jail if I do that, or if I break any law, by the way.

Jason Calacanis 20:36 So rule of law, critically important, but wait-

Tucker Carlson 20:38 Well, no, but not only that, it's a double standard, and, and I live in a place where a lot of the population subsists on food banks, and where there are very few jobs, and it really is one of those places that NAFTA destroyed, whose economy NAFTA destroyed. And to see, in the place where I live, immigrants get preference on housing, on jobs, which is actually true, and I know that liberals watching will be like, "That's not really true." It is true, actually. And I, and I wonder, 'cause the real number is not 20 million, it's closer to 50 million, uh, I think that's true, uh, illegals in the United States. Clearly they can't all be deported by ICE, but I also think if you have a system that hands out meaningful grants, in effect, cell phones, travel vouchers, housing vouchers, free education, food stamps, to people who are here illegally, or who are here legally as refugees, you are going to draw the world's poor. And I think it's fair to ask, do we want that? How do we benefit from that? And are we giving more to foreigners than we're giving to our own citizens? And the answer is yes. And like-

Jason Calacanis 21:37 So-

Tucker Carlson 21:37 ... how dare you, at a certain point. Like, you get a revolution if you keep doing that. That's too much. It's too offensive.

Jason Calacanis 21:42 Got it. So I think we all agree, no violence on cops, shut the southern border, and giving a crazy amount of-

David Friedberg 21:48 Jake Allton, do, do you think-

Jason Calacanis 21:48 Hold on, let me just finish my-

David Friedberg 21:49 ... do you think the National Guard should never have been brought in?

Jason Calacanis 21:51 Let me, hold on, let me finish, let me-

David Friedberg 21:52 You like being asked questions, don't you?

Jason Calacanis 21:53 I, I will, just-

David Friedberg 21:53 Do you think the National Guard should be brought in, yes or no?

Jason Calacanis 21:56 If the local police can't handle what's going on, of course they should be brought in. Sure. I believe that. During-

David Friedberg 22:03 But Bass, Bass and Newsom-

Jason Calacanis 22:04 I believe that, hold on-

David Friedberg 22:04 ... are questioning that decision. They're, they're-

Jason Calacanis 22:05 Y- you asked me the question. I believe they should have been brought in for January 6th, for BLM, or for the LA riots if the local police can't contain them. 100%, I believe the National Guard should have been brought in for January 6th when they were beating cops, I believe they should be brought in now if cops are being beaten, and I believe they should have been brought in during BLM when cops were being beaten. I am pro-cop. I come from a family of cops. So you can ask me the question seven different ways.

David Friedberg 22:31 So you, you agree that Newsom... So Newsom and Bass were out of line when they say the National Guard should not have been brought in?

Jason Calacanis 22:35 I think... Well, number one, I think they should call the National Guard if they can't control it. I'm not on the ground-

David Friedberg 22:40 But that's their criticism of Trump-

Jason Calacanis 22:42 Yeah.

David Friedberg 22:42 ... is that he called in the National Guard. You agree that that was necessary. It's obviously necessary. Just look at the TV. The city's still on fire.

Jason Calacanis 22:49 I mean, if-

David Friedberg 22:49 The cops are completely overwhelmed. By the way, I find it comical that-

Jason Calacanis 22:53 Well, you're not letting me finish this sentence. Hold on.

David Friedberg 22:54 ... when 50... Well, let me finish this o- one point. Then we're, then you can speak.

Jason Calacanis 22:57 Yeah. Thank you.

David Friedberg 22:58 I find it comical that-

Jason Calacanis 22:59 Permission.

David Friedberg 23:00 ... the Massachusetts governor called up the National Guard when DeSantis sent... Remember when he sent the 50 migrants over to Martha's Vineyard?

Jason Calacanis 23:07 Yes.

David Friedberg 23:07 And they all freaked out, and they literally called the National Guard in because 50 migrants all of a sudden had been flown into Martha's Vineyard.

Jason Calacanis 23:14 Yeah, they did. Yeah.

David Friedberg 23:14 Okay, but-

Jason Calacanis 23:15 W- was that to-

David Friedberg 23:16 ... you can have, you can have thousands of-

Jason Calacanis 23:18 ... to process them or because there was riots?

David Friedberg 23:19 Well, that was when DeSantis was making a point about-

Jason Calacanis 23:22 Okay.

David Friedberg 23:22 ... you know, about-

Jason Calacanis 23:22 But that was to process them. They, they weren't rioting on Martha's Vineyard. These were just salt of the earth folks, yeah.

David Friedberg 23:27 Nonetheless, the National Guard was brought in. And, you know, you can have thousands of-

Jason Calacanis 23:30 Yeah.

David Friedberg 23:30 ... people that are rioting in LA, but somehow-

Jason Calacanis 23:32 Absolutely.

David Friedberg 23:32 ... the National Guard shouldn't be brought in?

Jason Calacanis 23:33 I, we, we're in agreement, so you can try to force me to disagree with you, but I'm in agreement. Any time the cops are overwhelmed, I think the National Guard should be brought in, period, full stop. So we're, we're in agreement on that. What I'm trying to get to is, Tucker, if you believe there's 50 million people, let's say the number's 30 million, we, we, or we split the difference between the two, 35 million, whatever it is. My question for you: how many should be deported by ICE at $20,000 a person, which is the estimate that, you know, both sides seem to agree is what it's gonna cost? Should we deport a million? Should we deport 10 million? And then how, Tucker Carlson, would you deport them?

Tucker Carlson 24:08 Well, I think the goal has to be full compliance with the law for everybody within our borders, citizen or f- foreign-born, illegal refugee, green card holder. If you're in the United States, you obey our laws, and if you don't, we make a good faith effort...... to enforce them, despite how powerful the political blocks which you belong may be.

Jason Calacanis 24:30 So you're all 50 million.

Tucker Carlson 24:31 So, so of c- well, of c- by definition, or else, uh, w- why wouldn't I apply that same-

Jason Calacanis 24:35 Okay.

Tucker Carlson 24:35 ... standard to my taxes, right? So-

Jason Calacanis 24:37 So no path-

Tucker Carlson 24:37 ... but how do you do it? Of course-

Jason Calacanis 24:39 ... to citizenship? Yeah, let's get into that.

Tucker Carlson 24:41 Right. So, well, that's a hostage situation. It's like we've got 50 million here already. We've lied about the number for 30 years now. "Wow, it's 50 million or 35 million. We need them, everyone gets a path to citizenship." Th- you know, that's a kind of crime actually. But the first step, and it, the phrase has been devalued, but self-deportation, if you have a system where people come to the United States to make their own way and take advantage of the freedoms offered and the economy, uh, and they're allowed to participate in the economy, then I think you could have a system where people really admire immigrants in the way that they did when I was growing up, and that I, I still do in some ways. I mean, and so my favorite people are immigrants, and they all tell the same story. "Came here with nothing, built this great life." But you make everybody cynical and you sort of destroy the idea of th- the virtue of immigration when you hand people-

Jason Calacanis 25:29 100%.

Tucker Carlson 25:30 ... stuff and give them preference-

Jason Calacanis 25:31 100%.

Tucker Carlson 25:31 ... when they arrive. And we don't talk enough about what that actually looks like.

Jason Calacanis 25:36 You're absolutely-

Tucker Carlson 25:36 If- we spent a lot-

Jason Calacanis 25:37 So how do we-

Tucker Carlson 25:37 ... more than $20 grand a person right now in subsidies to people-

Jason Calacanis 25:40 No, Tucker, Tucker is-

Tucker Carlson 25:41 ... who aren't even allowed to be here.

Jason Calacanis 25:42 Tucker is totally right. And they, and they also pay into Social Security too, right? To the tune of a hundred million a years.

Tucker Carlson 25:46 Oh, point... Oh, okay. Right. I think-

Jason Calacanis 25:47 No, no, that's just what was reported by our government. You, if we want to get conspiracy cornered, that's not true-

Tucker Carlson 25:52 I think those are fake-

Jason Calacanis 25:53 Okay.

Tucker Carlson 25:53 ... I think those are fake numbe- look-

Jason Calacanis 25:54 Okay.

Tucker Carlson 25:54 ... does anybody really believe that 50 million illegals is a net benefit to the US economy? Are you serious? Have you been to our cities? No, of course not. It's not. It, it, and then, uh-

Jason Calacanis 26:04 Uh, I actually think probably, uh, uh, a large number of them are a net benefit because they're working in jobs that Americans don't want to take, and we're at 4% unemployment. So who's gonna take all those jobs if they get deported, Tucker?

Tucker Carlson 26:14 Well, aren't, but w- weren't you just saying that we're on the cusp of a, of a labor revolution where some, even 20% of American jobs are going away in two years?

Jason Calacanis 26:21 Well, that could be, yeah, so that's the, that's the nuance in this discussion is five years ago, we might be actually-

Tucker Carlson 26:25 Well, it's not, it's not just nuance-

Jason Calacanis 26:26 ... dealing with labor destruction.

Tucker Carlson 26:27 It's like a brick wall-

Jason Calacanis 26:28 Yeah.

Tucker Carlson 26:28 ... we're about to hit at high speed, and I don't understand having accustomed an entire generation of tens of millions of immigrants to government handouts what the social fabric is gonna look like when that stops.

David Sacks 26:40 Yeah, can I say something? 'Cause I-

Jason Calacanis 26:41 Yeah, please.

David Sacks 26:41 ... I, I think-

Jason Calacanis 26:41 Get in here, Tremaya.

David Sacks 26:42 Tucker is saying something really important, which I agree with. What should immigration be in a highly developed nation like the United States? And my perspective is you have to come and say, "Well, what is the goal?" I think the goal should be to maintain supremacy. The United States is the most vibrant economy in the world. It's the most important military power in the world. It's the most technically advanced entity in the world. If we do not focus on maintaining our supremacy, I don't think any American wants to go through the process of going from first to not first. And if you look back in history at all of the other countries that have had to go through that transition, that is where revolutions and chaos happen. So we should avoid that. So where does immigration play a role? It needs to play a role, first and foremost, in technical, military, and economic supremacy. The problem, as Tucker says, is when you have five or six times the number of illegal immigrants as legal immigrants. All of a sudden, the idea of using immigration as a cream-skimming technique to reinforce the most capable people in the world to come here goes away because you can't have that conversation. We have people languishing for 10, 15, 20 years on visas, okay? Their kids age out, they all go back to India and other places. Why? Because we can't focus on that conversation, Jason, because we're focused on how do we give amnesty to folks whose initial action was breaking the law?

Jason Calacanis 28:19 Absolutely correct.

David Sacks 28:20 And this is where the whole immigration conversation devolves. We are missing the bigger picture and you-

Jason Calacanis 28:27 And-

David Sacks 28:27 ... need to deal... One second, you need to deal with the illegal immigration thing in an extremely foundational way where you can defend the decision. You started illegally and you have to now go and conform to the law.

Jason Calacanis 28:43 Which is where I'm trying to steer this discussion. Number one, we all agree on closing the border. It seems like there is a, a break in consensus here. Tucker wants to eventually deport everybody. You want to do something in the middle like Trump. Sax, I'm not sure what your personal position is or if you want to give it. Do you feel we should try to have a path to deport as many of these 20, 30 million as possible or do you believe we should have a path towards, uh, citizenship for them? What's your personal belief or do you wanna not get into that?

David Friedberg 29:08 Well, I, I remember when you asked that question to now Vice President JD Vance at all in summit, and he said that you basically address that problem the same way that you eat a sandwich, which is one bite at a time. So that makes sense to me. If there's 20 million illegals, you start with the top million who are violent criminals and gang members and you deport those.

Jason Calacanis 29:30 Hmm.

David Friedberg 29:31 And that is what ICE was doing. They were serving criminal warrants. And then after you successfully do that, then you see where you're at and you can address the next bite of the sandwich. That makes sense to me. Now, look, I, I think that we're not really addressing a really core part of the issue here, which is for a couple of decades now, conservatives were demonized and Tucker, in particular, I think you were demonized, for warning about the policies that have created the mess that everyone could see on TV right now. And that mess is we have a large unassimilated population of military-aged males who are basically rioting right now under a foreign flag as if they were foreign invaders. We basically have allowed a separatist movement into the United States. That's what it looks like to me.

Jason Calacanis 30:20 Hmm.

David Friedberg 30:20 And I remember when Tucker was warning about the, the policies that might create this on his show for years, you know, virtually alone.... probably alone on Fox News. You know, you were called a racist, this was great replacement theory, blah, blah, blah. How can everyone not look at what's happening on TV right now and say, "Tucker was right. You know, that was really dumb." And look, I say this as someone from a family, I'm, I'm one of the people that Ronald Reagan was talking about, you know, my family and I came over here, we're immigrants. But we came over here to assimilate, you know, we believe in the melting pot. That's all good.

Jason Calacanis 30:51 Be careful, you might get canceled for bringing up the melting pot. (laughs)

David Friedberg 30:54 No, the melting pot's good. I mean, I think that was-

Jason Calacanis 30:56 Yeah. No, the melting pot is-

David Friedberg 30:56 ... the classic American model.

Jason Calacanis 30:57 Melting pot is totally good.

David Friedberg 30:59 You bring in-

Jason Calacanis 30:59 I agree. You speak the language, you've got the culture. I'm just saying you could get canceled before you even invoke it. That's what you're supposed to do, like, why-

David Friedberg 31:03 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 31:03 ... would anyb- I came here because I wanted to be American and everything that American meant. If I was bigger, I would have played football. You know, like, there's all these things that I would have done to assimilate more and more. I believe in the culture of the United States. That's why people should come.

David Friedberg 31:18 Right. So we came here, we assimilated, you know, high skill immigrants, didn't have a lot but had good education and willing to assimilate. That's very different than what you're seeing on TV right now. And again, if the people on TV just wanted to protest immigration policy, in the way that you're talking about, I mean, you're describing it in this, like, very nice, genteel way, they would be peacefully protesting under an American flag saying, "We want to be here."

Jason Calacanis 31:44 Well, I, I-

David Friedberg 31:44 "We're willing to contribute."

Jason Calacanis 31:45 I think the issue with-

David Friedberg 31:46 That's not what's happening.

Jason Calacanis 31:47 I, I, you know, in my-

David Friedberg 31:48 You can see that, right? I mean-

Jason Calacanis 31:49 Oh.

David Friedberg 31:50 ... they, they look like foreign invaders.

Jason Calacanis 31:52 I would say-

David Friedberg 31:52 By the way, this is, like, the dumbest PR that, you know, if this debate is really about immigration, this is, like, the dumbest way for them to present their side of the argument.

Jason Calacanis 32:02 Yeah. I, in my-

David Friedberg 32:03 Because who wants to keep, in this country, a large unassimilated population that is proud to march, not just march, but actually protest and riot and burn and assault under the flag of another nation?

Jason Calacanis 32:15 I would say dollars to donuts-

David Friedberg 32:16 That's an intolerable situation.

Jason Calacanis 32:17 ... that the majority of the people who are doing the looting and rioting are not actually immigrants because they have the ability to be deported. The people who are doing that are the bad actors that we saw during BLM, the bad actors that we saw, you know, in LA when the Lakers win. I've lived here for a decade and I am here right now. I can tell you it's contained. And those, 80, 90% of those people are not the immigrants. The immigrants are hiding right now for fear of being deported. But, let's sort of talk about the, the path, but where, where do you guys want to go with it here? I mean, uh, I can give you my opinion if you want.

David Friedberg 32:50 Well, Tucker, I mean, I, like, I, I don't know, I mean, I want to speak for you-

Jason Calacanis 32:52 If you want some balance here.

David Friedberg 32:53 ... but I mean, I, I, I, I do think that, like, Tucker should feel vindicated on this issue for speaking about it-

Jason Calacanis 32:57 Tucker, you feel vindicated?

David Friedberg 32:58 ... for so many years.

Jason Calacanis 32:58 You feel vindicated?

Tucker Carlson 33:01 I mean, I never doubted it. I grew up, I was born in California in 1969 and I, my family got there in 1850. I have some sense of what the state was like, um, certainly through my childhood and it was an idyl- it was idyllic. And it's, it's, it's not. You know, the rich areas are great, Bel Air is great, La Jolla is still great, I think. I mean, there are gr- Mount Shasta's great. Lots of great places in California, um, but fundamentally, the state is a slum, it's a Latin American country, and immigration did that. And I say that as someone who is pretty pro-immigrant actually, my best friend's an immigrant. I mean, I, I've always admired, liked immigrants, um, I'm hardly anti-immigrant or anti-immigration, but the way we did it destroyed the state. Immigration is what made California into a slum and there's kind of no way around that. And so, that's not an argument against all immigration. I, I'm not making that argument. I don't feel that way. But, uh, it's an argument against what we did in California and rather than learn from that, we're doing it in every other state and I don't know why. And I think, you know, if the other side had a reasonable argument, they would proffer it, but instead, they call you names and try to turn you into some kind of thought criminal or whatever. I don't care, obviously, um, but it's a, it's a sort of measure of how, um, little they have to say in response. They're not actually trying to make the country better. That's kind of the main thing. I have always thought immigrants were great because they did make the country better, right? I mean, I, I think that's demonstrable. But the people pushing our current policies don't have that as a goal. This is a kind of punishment for something. And a lot of it's ethnic, actually. It's a, it's a kind of attack on the people who were born here. I don't know where that hostility comes from. You can feel it though, and I think it's foolish to deny it. That is a motive. They're trying to hurt the people who live here. And I, again, I live in a place currently where I see that happening, um, and it drives me totally bonkers. And the last thing I'll say is if you think the way we once did immigration was good and a lot of immigrants are awesome people, and I do think that, this is discrediting all immigration.

Jason Calacanis 35:01 100%.

Tucker Carlson 35:01 And it's turning people into pretty radical immigration restrictionists, who are like, "Look, I don't want any more immigrants."

Jason Calacanis 35:08 Yeah.

Tucker Carlson 35:08 Uh, you know? That's inevitable, um, but it's sad to see it.

Jason Calacanis 35:13 By the way, what you're saying is e- is the most true for immigrants. Legal immigrants look at illegal immigration even more negatively than native born Americans. Which makes sense, right? I mean, they waited in line and other people didn't. You would be really upset if somebody cut the line. Jason, what do you think? Obviously, there's a lot of emotion around this issue, I think numbers help. And I always look to see what is the consensus amongst the group here and amongst, you know, Americans. Everybody wants the border closed, Trump won on that, so okay, we all agree the border should be closed, so I think 80, 90% consensus in that. 80, 90% of Americans think we should deport violent criminals. Okay, we got consensus there. So then, what's left is what do we do with high skilled recruiting? I like to use the word recruiting and we had that discussion with President Trump here. He promised to put a green card on every degree. I agree with him on that. I think we should be recruiting at least a million or two million amazing people per year. One to two million amazing people, we should match that to what the needs of the country are. If we need energy, if we need doctors, we should match that. Where we probably disagree is, I think, the Democrats and the Republicans share equally in this issue that was created, that Tucker pointed out. Yes, there are 40, 30, 50, who knows what the exact number is, that's part of the problem. Here's a chart we made. This just shows you...... under each of the last, you know, uh, 50, almost 50 years, uh, of presidents, how many people, uh, net, uh, immigrated to the country. And as you can see, you know, it's been pretty consistent, you know, around three million per. And, uh, Clinton and Bush had a ton of immigration. Both, uh, Bushes were paid for... (laughs) A lot of their donations came from corporates who wanted free migration. America created this-

David Sacks 37:01 There's an out- there's an-

Jason Calacanis 37:01 Hold on, let me finish my thought, and then we can go.

David Sacks 37:02 There's an outlier here, Jason, though. (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 37:04 Oh, oh, well, yeah, Biden is the huge outlier.

David Sacks 37:06 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 37:06 We, we all agree on that. Biden let it go YOLO. And I understand people have a lot of resentment for that, and rightfully so. And if you bring in 10 million (laughs) people, you're gonna let... Get a lot of bad guys. But you put this all together, my belief is that this is a country of immigrants, and that this country does great when hardworking immigrants assimilate. I think we should take this raw firepower of these incredible immigrants who have been here for decades. If you've been here for 10 or 20 decades, pay a fine, pay some extra taxes, and we give these people a path to citizenship, and we recruit the top one-

David Sacks 37:40 You do that-

Jason Calacanis 37:40 ... to two million people.

David Sacks 37:41 ... before?

Jason Calacanis 37:41 Tha- That's my belief.

David Sacks 37:42 You do that before or after the people that have been waiting in line get a fair shake?

Jason Calacanis 37:46 I think I would start-

David Sacks 37:47 Before or after?

Jason Calacanis 37:49 I think you have to do it before, because we created this. And, uh, I, I know that that's not something that people wanna take ownership of, but America created the situation. Bush created it-

David Friedberg 37:58 America?

Jason Calacanis 37:58 ... Reagan created, Clinton. America, yes.

David Friedberg 38:00 Really?

Jason Calacanis 38:00 The country that we live in. Our government allowed millions of people here, and the Republicans did this specifically-

David Sacks 38:08 So you're saying-

Jason Calacanis 38:08 ... in order to get cheap labor.

David Sacks 38:09 Okay, let me, let me ask you-

Jason Calacanis 38:10 So we are-

David Sacks 38:10 Let me be very specific.

Jason Calacanis 38:11 ... responsible for what we did with these people.

David Sacks 38:13 Let's just say that you're an international-

David Friedberg 38:15 Not for the last eight years.

David Sacks 38:16 Let's just say you're an international mathematics Olympiad winner.

Jason Calacanis 38:19 Mm-hmm.

David Sacks 38:20 You get recruited to come to the United States-

Jason Calacanis 38:22 Yes.

David Sacks 38:22 ... on a student visa. You crush it. Let's say you go to MIT, and then you go and do a PhD at Caltech, and then you get recruited on an OPT visa by Google, and you're just crushing it.

Jason Calacanis 38:34 Awesome.

David Sacks 38:34 And, and you're saying that that person...

Jason Calacanis 38:37 Oh, no, sorry. That's a more subtle question. That person, we should recruit, as I said very clearly, recruit the top-

David Sacks 38:42 No, no, no. I'm saying they are-

Jason Calacanis 38:42 ... one to two million-

David Sacks 38:43 They are currently waiting in line, Jason.

Jason Calacanis 38:45 Yes. S- So-

David Sacks 38:46 So let's just say-

Jason Calacanis 38:47 So I'm saying, yes, let them in, and, yes, a path to-

David Sacks 38:50 Who do you prioritize? You have one ICE officer-

Jason Calacanis 38:52 You can do both at the same time. No, no, you don't.

David Sacks 38:53 No, you can't.

Jason Calacanis 38:54 Of course you can. We could rep- have one group recruiting, a million to two million highly skilled labor... Highly skilled individuals of the type you're describing, while having another group. We can do two things at the same time, Chamath. Absolutely, you can. You're, you're giving a false question here. Then we take the person who's been here for 20 years as a dishwasher, as a nanny, who has been an amazing citizen, who has been paying into Social Security. Give them a path, a compassionate path, and we, as America and Americans, should take ownership of the fact that we allowed this, and the people-

David Sacks 39:25 (laughs)

Jason Calacanis 39:25 ... who allowed it were Republicans and Democrats.

David Friedberg 39:28 Oh, my God.

Jason Calacanis 39:28 We allowed these people to come in, to work in-

David Friedberg 39:30 My head is spinning.

Jason Calacanis 39:30 ... our restaurants and fields, which is what Trump said today. Trump is in agreement with me.

David Sacks 39:36 That's not what he said. He said something differently.

Jason Calacanis 39:37 He said he wants to not have those people leave.

David Friedberg 39:40 It's just amazing to me that on this podcast, during the Biden years, you are echoing this party line that the videos of, you know, mass migration, caravans streaming across the border, going through the holes in the wall, you said those were videos cherry-picked by Fox News.

Jason Calacanis 39:57 No, what I said was-

David Friedberg 39:57 You've echoed the party line-

Jason Calacanis 39:58 Yeah.

David Friedberg 39:58 ... that there was no problem.

Jason Calacanis 39:59 No, I didn't. No, I didn't.

David Friedberg 39:59 Now all of a sudden-

Jason Calacanis 40:00 Oh, no, no, no. Fact check.

David Friedberg 40:01 ... now all of a sudden you're saying it was a bipartisan problem.

Jason Calacanis 40:03 No, no, fact check. I said we are... We don't know because we don't have the, the metrics and we don't have a good system, which we all agree on. There's no good system to count these people.

David Friedberg 40:11 Anybody who went down to the border was saying that it was wide open.

Jason Calacanis 40:13 Right, and as we got that data, I said, "This data on the ground shows we should shut the border." That's always been my position.

David Friedberg 40:19 Yeah, you suddenly became very empirical about the issue.

Jason Calacanis 40:22 I- I've always been empirical about it, and I've also been compassionate about it.

David Friedberg 40:24 This whole, like, both sides are to blame thing kind of ignores the fact that you had the Trump revolution in 2016. There is some truth to the idea that both parties neglected the problem. If you go back far enough, like, you know, Tucker will remember this, when Bob Bartley was the editor of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, they actually supported a constitutional amendment in favor of open borders. I mean, they really believed in this whole idea of-

Jason Calacanis 40:46 Pull that up, Na-

David Friedberg 40:46 ... free trade.

Jason Calacanis 40:48 Yeah.

David Friedberg 40:48 Open borders, free, free flow of capital and labor, okay? But that was a long time ago. And, you know, with the rise of Trump in 2015, 2016, it became a different party. Trump got elected on building a wall.

Jason Calacanis 41:01 Yep.

David Friedberg 41:01 And what happened? The Democrats fought him tooth and nail. They tied him up in litigation. He was able to build hundreds of miles of wall, but there were uncompleted parts of it. And when Biden came into office, there were large pieces of the wall that were still on the ground, just waiting to be erected. And Biden sold them off as scrap metal for two cents on the dollar. Do you remember this?

Jason Calacanis 41:21 Absolutely not.

David Friedberg 41:22 And then Biden-

Jason Calacanis 41:22 I, I, I'm in fa-

David Friedberg 41:22 ... and the Democrats proceeded-

Jason Calacanis 41:23 I have been in favor-

David Friedberg 41:24 Hold on a second. They proceeded-

Jason Calacanis 41:25 ... of legal immigration and closing the border.

David Friedberg 41:26 ... to just open up the border-

Jason Calacanis 41:27 So please don't frame it as I'm against that.

David Friedberg 41:28 Okay, just forget about you. I'm just... You, you said Democrats and Republicans are at blame for this. Not in the last f-

Jason Calacanis 41:33 Over 40 years.

David Friedberg 41:33 Not in the last eight years, no.

Jason Calacanis 41:35 Oh, yeah, no, no.

David Friedberg 41:36 Trump-

Jason Calacanis 41:36 Biden is the outlier.

David Friedberg 41:37 Trump wanted a wall.

Jason Calacanis 41:38 Yeah. Biden was the outlier.

David Friedberg 41:39 Biden-

Jason Calacanis 41:39 Yeah.

David Friedberg 41:40 ... opened up the border, and Democrats supported him in that, and they thwarted every Republican attempt to close the border.

Jason Calacanis 41:47 And they lost.

David Friedberg 41:47 For three years... Hold on a second. For three years, they gaslit and pretended it wasn't a problem. Then, when it became undeniable, they claimed that Biden didn't have the executive authority, so they would need a new act of Congress. That was also total nonsense. As Trump said in the State of the Union, you didn't need a new law, you just need a new president. Look, if you wanna go back 20 or 30 years, you can blame both parties. If you wanna talk about the last eight years, there's only one party to blame. One party.

Jason Calacanis 42:14 Uh...

David Friedberg 42:14 The Democrats. And that is why, you look at the polling right now, Democrats, their party, all-time low. It is... Let's get the exact number. Negative 49. 21% approve of Democrats, 70% disapprove, because they know that Democrats caused this problem, and Democrats are the ones denying... They're the ones basically making excuses for the disorder and the chaos right now.

Jason Calacanis 42:38 You are 100%-

David Friedberg 42:38 The only Democrat, the only Democrat who's actually talking-

Jason Calacanis 42:40 Okay.

David Friedberg 42:40 ... sense right now is the one with the head injury.Ironically, Fetterman is a lone voice here. I want to put up this quote.

Jason Calacanis 42:48 Don't make fun of his head injury, dude.

David Friedberg 42:49 No, I mean, it's kind of funny.

Jason Calacanis 42:50 Oh, dude. That's not...

David Friedberg 42:52 No, I mean, it's amazing, like, Fetterman-

Jason Calacanis 42:54 Come on.

David Friedberg 42:55 No, I mean, it's kind of sad but, look, I'm agreeing with Fetterman. Fetterman says-

Jason Calacanis 42:58 With the caveat that he hit his head? (laughs) He bumped his head and woke up with your position?

David Friedberg 43:02 I don't know what it is about Democrats. I don't know what it is about Democrats. It takes a head-

Jason Calacanis 43:06 That's cold.

David Friedberg 43:06 It takes a head injury for them to talk sense. Okay? It's like a Bulworth thing. Anyway, Fetterman said, "My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement."

Jason Calacanis 43:20 In agreement. Yes. He's talking about January 6th?

David Friedberg 43:22 "I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, immigration, but this is not that. This is anarchy and true chaos."

Jason Calacanis 43:31 You were-

David Friedberg 43:31 So kudos to Fetterman, but he's the only Democrat out there, he's a lone voice condemning the violence.

Jason Calacanis 43:35 Tucker is our guest, and Tucker's our guest. I'm going to give Tucker the last word on this topic before we go onto the next one, and you are 100% correct, Biden, 10 million net im- immigrants, and Trump, three million, which sounds like a lot, but is actually the lowest in, like, ten administrations, the lowest since Reagan. Tucker, you're our guest. Wrap us up here. What should we think?

Tucker Carlson 43:56 I think that we should measure the health of a country, at least in part, by the condition of its cities, including the cleanliness of its cities. And by that measure, our country is collapsing. Our, our cities are a disaster and the, the richest part of the richest cities are fine, and the rest of them are just absolutely awful. And so I think that has got to be just job one. If you want to renew the United States, you have to make sure its population centers are clean, safe, orderly, but especially clean. There's something really important, and I know that the left just instinctively discounts that, but cleanliness is next to godliness, and your city is a reflection of your self-respect, how you feel about your nation, your patriotism. And if you allow it to become like Paris or New York, covered in graffiti and filth and random people from other countries selling fruit on the street and begging and having sex in ATM vestibules and just, like, the whole Midtown Manhattan, central Paris experience, like, that's a sign your civilization is going under. I think it's really, really important, and I do think, you know, that decay is not entirely caused by mass immigration, but mass immigration has made it much worse, and I just know that from walking around 'cause I like to walk around cities. I think it's a national emergency, and the riots are just the most florid expression of that. You know, a burning car is something you can't ignore, but we do ignore the condition of 6th Avenue at 49th Street. Like, how can a self... Or the condition of Penn Station or, you know, of our airports. Like, how can we allow that? Um...

Jason Calacanis 45:30 Yeah, it's so true.

Tucker Carlson 45:30 So if I were in charge, I mean, I would make... You go to Dubai or Doha or Moscow or someplace-

Jason Calacanis 45:37 Or when you and I were getting soba.

Tucker Carlson 45:37 ... that has a sense of itself-

Jason Calacanis 45:38 When we got soba in Tokyo, remember, two years ago, and we were talking about this exact issue. It just...

Tucker Carlson 45:44 Well, but it's true.

Jason Calacanis 45:44 Like, "Look how great it is." Yes.

Tucker Carlson 45:44 I mean, Tokyo is the most radicalizing experience for an American. Everyone who goes there is like, "I can't even deal with this, I'm so angry that we've put up with what we're putting up with."

Jason Calacanis 45:54 I had to talk you off the ledge in Tokyo, I remember.

Tucker Carlson 45:56 I don't know. You did, and let's not overthink it, I guess is what I'm saying. It's not even about the Constitution-

Jason Calacanis 46:01 Great. I like it, the city bench

David Friedberg 46:01 It's about litter. Yeah.

Jason Calacanis 46:02 Okay. Tucker gets the last word on that, and now David Sacks gets to take his incredible victory lap.

Jason Calacanis 46:08 Economic data's been objectively pretty great the last two weeks. Tariff revenue spiked, 23 billion in May, 2X from February, so there we go, we see the impact of a little bit of extra income. Inflation continues to come down and, uh, what are we at? 2.4% across the board. There's some pluses and minuses in there, we'll get into it later. GDP. Okay. This is the leading GDP prediction model from the Atlanta Fed. Could be as high as 3.8%. Again, this is a prediction for Q2. Q2's obviously not over, but this would be a pretty big jump over Q1. Despite all this positive data, the deficit remains the sticky issue. Some of our friends might have some issue with this and been vocal about it. In May, the US had 371 billion in revenue with 687 billion in spend. Not good. Big high burn rate. $316 billion deficit. We paid $90 billion in May in interest on the debt, almost up to 100 billion a month and, uh, there's a nice Sankey chart, uh, which we all like. We can double-click on that if anybody finds something interesting in here. Here's your deficit tracker. What I'll highlight here for you is those first two lines, 2020 and 2021, you gotta kind of give a mulligan there for the COVID years. And, uh, purple, 2025, we are a bit ahead of the last couple of years, we're at 13... Our spending now, and, and obviously the debt service is a big part of this, 13% above 2024, 20% above 2023, and 65% above 2022. The balance sheet of the United States is really bad right now. Sacks, I'm gonna start with you. This obviously has been an emotional, uh, issue and, uh, oh, apology, Chamath, I just noticed, forgot to hit publish on last week's episode, but let's let that go. Uh, I, it won't happen again. Sacks, what are your thoughts here?

David Friedberg 48:08 Well, I mean, you'll recall that back in early April, Jim Cramer predicted we'd see a Black Monday in response to Trump's tariffs, and that's all the proof that we should've known that we were about to-

Jason Calacanis 48:19 (laughs) You're a person, you're a person, Cramer.

David Friedberg 48:19 ... get a bunch of good economic news. Uh, and it wasn't, it wasn't just Jim Cramer. I mean, Larry Summers was on our pod with that big debate that we did and he was predicting doom. And what we're seeing now is good economic news is breaking out all over. So, Q2 GDP on track for 3.8% according to the Atlanta Fed. The May jobs report was above expected, plus 139,000. CPI, you know, inflation down to 2.4%. So, growth is back, inflation is low, and what you saw over the last few months was...

Tucker Carlson 48:50 ... the elites in both parties, I'll give you that. Have, they were scaremongering on tariffs and predicting doom, and they've been proven to be out of touch with popular sentiment and reality. Well- I mean, you don't wanna spike the football too soon, but things look really good right now. Yeah. And I mean, in fairness, when the Trump shock and awe with the tariffs, he came out pretty strongly, Sachs, you will admit, and the market did (laughs) tank massively for about 30 days. Tucker, what's your take on the economy today? (laughs) This debt, does it concern you? Uh, and I'm wondering what, 'cause there seems to be a little bit of a rift inside of the Republican Party on the BBB, not Build Back Better, but the Big Beautiful Bill. What's Tucker Carlson's take, I'm curious, on out of control spending, the deficit, and this bill, in relation to that? Well, I mean, I have the world's most predictable views. I believe in physics, so you know, an unpayable debt tanks your country at a certain point. That was preexisting. It's accelerated, as you noted. I, I don't know a single person who's got a, any kind of plan to fix it. I think we're just gonna ride it into whatever the point of oblivion is. But I would just say, on tariffs, you know, my, you've got the reverse Cramer. David was saying that's his m- measure of economic forecasting. For me, it's the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Whatever they're for is poison- (laughs) ... um, generally speaking. And anything that drives them insane is a virtue. And I just can't imagine a policy more perfectly designed to just make them, like, explode than, uh, Trump's tariff announcement. And I, and I have to say, I mean, I've been kind of pretty conventional Republican my entire life. I remember when I decided the Iraq War was a bad idea. That felt like an outlaw, you know, idea. When did you get- But the kind of la- ... to that point? What, what led you to that point of breaking? I got, I- Yeah. Uh, well, I went to Iraq, um, in December of 2003 to see where a friend of mine had been killed. And, um, so I was there right after the invasion, and I just immediately recognized this is not... We're, we're not a good colonial power because we won't admit that we are. We won't admit that we have an empire. Therefore, we can't administer, administer it in a rational way, um, just the obvious stuff. But anyway, the point is, the last remaining kind of unexamined orthodoxy in my head was free trade, and I happened to be, just by chance, at the White House the day of that announcement. And I remember thinking, "Man, if this works, what a caper." You know? (laughs) I mean, I don't know if it's gonna work or not- What is the best-case scenario- (laughs) ... in your mind of, you know, this tariff negotiation? Obviously, there have been multiple rounds of it. I'm not gonna use- Yeah. Uh- ... the term taco, but it does seem like we've shifted from shock and awe to maybe, like, kind of bore. It's kind of boring, like ... And, and that does seem- Well, but- ... to be Trump's approach, right? He, when in negotiations- Right. ... big bang- When- ... and then fall back to a reasonable position. So, I think we're in the reasonable position phase. What does success look like? I mean, God's willing- (laughs) ... I, I hope, I pray that's what we're seeing on Iran right now. Um, but you're absolutely right. I mean, that's sort of the nature of negotiations, of course. Um, and there is nothing in writing with China, so far as I know, and it'll be reassuring, I think, when there is. Um, but in general, we haven't seen what Jim Cramer and Larry Summers predicted, and that itself is amazing. It's amazing, and it, it causes you, someone like me, who's sort of on the sidelines of the economic debate but watching carefully, it does make you sort of wonder, like, what other absurd mid-century orthodoxies about economics have I internalized that just aren't true, right? Yeah. 'Cause that was the biggest of all. Tariffs are, you know, they caused the Great Depression. We know that. And, and so what if, like, you can have a kind of mixed approach with some trade barriers that are tailored to your benefit and that sort of works in a longitudinal way? If that's true, holy smokes. And it looks like it might be true. So, I'm just- Well, it's been true for the other side, right? They have been doing that exact policy. Well, exactly. No, it's to- totally right. So if it's true for China and South Korea and Australia, (laughs) why wouldn't it be true for us? It seems like we're the sucker at the poker table. Well, I think you're right. I guess what I'm, uh, all I'm saying, I'm making a pretty pedestrian point but I can't get past it, which is, this is so far from what the Republican Party stood for 10 years ago, which was neoconservative foreign policy, free trade, um, open borders, as, as you noted, maybe a little more than 10 years ago, but 15 years ago- Sure. Um, this is, this is the mirror image of it, and it just blows my mind and it's, it's such a better version. It's such a more reality-based, flexible, thoughtful, uh, version than we had before, and I'm just really... And most Republicans in the Senate are not even aware this is happening. They are the most recalcitrant people in the world, also the dumbest. So most of them, you know- (laughs) ... don't accept any of this, but just as an observer, I'm thrilled to see it. All right, Chamath, uh, your thoughts? Can I actually, can I ki- can I, um- Oh, yeah, sure. ... I was gonna say, go ahead. You go on, Sachs. Uh, no, no, no. You go. Yeah, I mean- I mean, I know you like to go right after Tucker. It's looking very engaging for you. Well, no, you got me thinking about these, um, unexamined- This is his dream. When you're on, he cannot in the group chat, he's so excited, Tucker, when you're coming on. (laughs) Come on. That is bullshit. (laughs) It's 48 hours of Sachs being like, "When does, when does the pod come in?" (laughs) "Is Tucker really coming?" And I'm like- That's how I feel about David Sachs, trust me, if you'd... You do. You do. If you had a camera at my dinner table, you would hear something similar. Oh boy, here we go. Go ahead, Sachs. It's, uh, it's great to have someone to the right of me on the podcast for once, you know? (laughs) It's not an easy task. I, uh- (laughs) We invited Alex Jones and Steve Bannon- (laughs) ... they, they haven't (laughs) responded. Tucker got me thinking about these unexamined orthodoxies, and that is a good way of putting it. I mean, you know, 'cause I studied economics in college and, you know, I learned that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff caused the Great Depression. And it's like, in hindsight you're like, "How can that even be true?" Like, a tariff is basically a tax rate on foreign goods, and you're saying that, you know, increasing taxes on foreign goods all of a sudden caused the Great Depression? It doesn't make any sense when you actually, like, just think about it. (laughs) Now, what caused the Great Depression? Well, I would say when thousands of banks went under and there was no FDIC and everyone just got wiped out by that. And it's a systemic risk, so, like, one bank failure leads to the next one. That's so obviously what caused the Great Depression is nobody had any money left. They all got wiped out- (laughs) ... when all the banks went under at the same time.

David Friedberg 55:03 Right? So-

Jason Calacanis 55:03 Well, I mean, what... How do we take, uh, something that happened in the '20s and '30s and apply it to a much more (laughs) dynamic world-

David Friedberg 55:09 Well, but, well, what I think, wh-

Jason Calacanis 55:10 ... like today? It doesn't make much sense.

David Sacks 55:11 Uh...

David Friedberg 55:11 Well, I think what happened is we had all these post-war, meaning post-World War II, understandings that kinda got hardwired into the consciousness of our intellectuals. And if you think about the, the era right after World War II, the US was like the last great power standing, uh, it was us and the Soviet Union, but they kind of were... Had a different system, they were not part of the, um, let's say the, the free world, they're part of this communist bloc. So wh- in, in terms of the, the quote-unquote "free world," we were the only country that was relatively undamaged, and we had this giant manufacturing base. And so, yeah, obviously that the, the fewer trade barriers existed across the world, the better it was for the United States, uh, because it was our goods and our factories that basically were able to sell all over the world. And so we proceeded to define a world order in which we could just kick down every single barrier to free trade, because that's what benefited us. Now, I don't know that that means that that situation always benefits us in all times and all places. I mean, the big issue we have right now is that you've got a rising China and they have become the skilled producer in the world for all sorts of goods. They now have this giant industrial base that we seem to have exported to them, and again, it was, uh, uh, and we e- exported a lot of that because of this, um, free trade ideology that got so entrenched in our thinking that we just stopped thinking about under what circumstances this might not continue to be good for us. And so we've ended up becoming dependent on them for all sorts of goods that we now realize are highly strategic, and we're trying to figure out, well, how do we onshore these things, because it seems really dangerous now for us to be single-threaded on, uh, you know, uh, on-

Jason Calacanis 56:53 Chips, energy...

David Friedberg 56:54 ... potentially a- adversarial power...

Jason Calacanis 56:56 Yeah, we get it.

David Friedberg 56:56 ... for rare earths or, you know, rare earth magnets-

Jason Calacanis 56:59 Chips, medicine.

David Friedberg 57:00 ... and chips and med- pharmaceuticals and all these things. But, you know, our intellectual class just never seems to revisit any of its assumptions, they just kind of have these dogmas.

Jason Calacanis 57:10 Chamath, building on Sax's sort of codification of truths, heuristics, and not getting questioned, how much of it is we just codify, "Hey, trade, good," you know, "Open borders, good. Free trade, good," and how much of it is just incentives, like, I mean, rich people paying off politicians to have more free trade independent of party seems to be what's happened over the last 10, 20 years. It just made more sense to put workers and to send jobs to the lowest cost place to increase profits for American companies which, let's face it, although it may have hollowed out our manufacturing and created this weakness in the four or five areas you point out every week (laughs) that we need to reinforce quite eloquently, the real issue is we did that because we wanted to make money, we wanted to have the most highly profitable companies, and we did succeed, but maybe we succeeded too much and our companies benefited more than the middle class. You got Josh Hawley out there saying, "Hey, we should go to $15 minimum wage federally from this-"

David Sacks 58:08 Wrong.

Jason Calacanis 58:09 Yeah.

David Sacks 58:09 The wrong people won.

Jason Calacanis 58:12 Unpack.

David Sacks 58:12 In the early, in the early 2000s, I think that there was a war of ideas, and that there was a group of people that advocated for this reckless form of free trade and this globalist view like, every country is gonna meld into one mega-monolith country organization that'll get governed out of New York by the United Nations and its sleeve organizations. And that worldview won, but it was the wrong worldview, and it didn't acknowledge that we have competing philosophies, competing priorities, competing ideals of what the future looks like. And I think that we need to go back and reset all of those things.

Jason Calacanis 58:55 Hm.

David Sacks 58:56 If you just take where we are, if you can just put the Sankey diagram back up, there's a couple things that are really worth noting that people need to fundamentally understand. I said a couple weeks ago that I thought the GDP print was gonna come in hot. I think everybody now is sort of where I am, so let me give you the next thing that I think-

Jason Calacanis 59:15 Can I just ask you, though, why is it hot? Do you have a thesis on why GDP spiked so much, or potentially did? That's obviously a forecast.

David Sacks 59:25 I don't know the puts and takes yet, and I think when we see the print, we have... I have a way of forecasting this stuff, which is a bunch of signals that my team and also many macro teams all around the world, the bond vigilantes to the hedge fund guys, they all feed it to me. And what I was noticing was that we were gonna come in, I said, in the low threes. And I think, you know, if Atlanta Fed is right, I don't think they are, but I think it's gonna be in the low to mid threes. It's gonna be meaningfully greater than what people are expecting, so let me just give you my next prediction. My next prediction are two really important things. What this Sankey diagram looks at, which is a snapshot of the balance sheet and the health of the United States in May, misses, in my opinion, two very important things that have to change. The first, and this is a positive for the Trump administration and the United States economy, is we are run rating 300 to $400 billion above forecast in terms of our receipts, meaning the revenues that we will take in. And you get to that number by looking at the last three months of tariffs and forecasting forward assuming a reasonable balance here. So back to Tucker's point, yeah, we all thought that this was like a boogeyman that you weren't allowed to touch it and that if you touched the stove, you were gonna get burned. The mathematical reality is that this is actually gonna work out much better for us than we anticipated, and it's gonna be somewhere in the range of 300 to $400 billion of extra revenue per year. That's a huge win.So why is that important? That then sets up this next cataclysmic thing that we're going to see over the next 60 days, which is, what does Jerome Powell do? If Jerome Powell stays politicized, his incentive will be to keep interest rates where they are. If Jerome Powell looks at the conditions on the ground, especially when you start to see inflation stay in the low 2s and approach 2.0, the real thing that he's gonna be under tremendous pressure to justify is, why are you not cutting? And just to give you a sense of how important that is, if we cut by 100 basis points, that's another $300 billion. Now, in that case, that's not money that we get in, but it's money we don't have to spend. So if you add these two things together, we are, in the next 60 days, going to have to re-forecast the American balance sheet where this is, or we're actually gonna be able to positively forecast an extra $600 billion, $300 billion of incremental revenue and then $300 billion of savings. Jason, if that happens, watch out. What does that mean, watch out? It means that every single risk dollar is gonna run to America-

Jason Calacanis 1:02:31 Yum, yum.

David Sacks 1:02:31 ... every single one.

Jason Calacanis 1:02:32 Yum, yum.

David Sacks 1:02:33 Forget Japan, forget Europe. There is no place to put your money except the United States. So I think that we have to figure out how to get Jerome Powell on the side of America versus on the side of what could happen politically because I think that there's probably a version in his head that says, "My gosh, if I do this, it helps Trump. And if I don't do it, it hurts Trump." Practically, that is true, but the reality is, the conditions on the ground justify cutting.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:04 Okay, so you're predicting this $300 billion two different ways, in and out, $50 billion a month. It- it starts cutting this deficit pretty significantly. Your claim, uh, I just wanna be clear here, is that Powell is playing politics, not working towards the dual mandate-

David Sacks 1:03:23 The-

Jason Calacanis 1:03:23 ... which is very clear, controlled unemployment at the 2.0 rate and full employment. Your belief is that he's playing politics, yes?

David Sacks 1:03:32 I- I believe that these decisions are political. I think that the Federal Reserve has veered away from actually controlling the money supply in the best long-term interests of the United States and more towards what benefits the short term. And this ties back to how I started this.

Jason Calacanis 1:03:50 What is Powell's motivation?

David Sacks 1:03:51 Somewhere in the 2000s, Jason, we transitioned away from having the strategic 20-year conversation about what's in the best interests of America and instead we started to have these unipolar globalist conversations. And the people that got into these centers of power, the IMF, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve, the central banks around the world, they all worked towards an agenda that is now being undone. I'll give you an example of where this is now being undone. Just today, the World Bank undid a rule around being able to fund nuclear energy and you would have thought, "Well hold on a second, the World Bank steps in to backstop all these developing countries when they're in the middle of all this nonsense," right? And if you think about a country that's developing, what is the single biggest input to that country? Energy. And you think for the last 40 years of multi-trillion dollar bailouts we never demanded abundant clean energy in the developing world? Of course not, because it was a political decision.

Jason Calacanis 1:04:50 Okay, Tucker, do you believe the Fed is playing politics here? It's kind of hard to believe if Powell was placed by Trump and Biden, he's b- there's consensus there, and his mandate is to get to 2.0 and full employment, he's kind of trending towards that. He's made a couple of cuts. The markets predict he is gonna make a cut. Here's Polymarket for September showing 80% chance of a cut. Let's take a look if that's changed since the last time. Uh, so in September, no, okay, well this has changed, uh, three, two. All right, so here's your Polymarket Fed decision in September, no change, 53%, 25 bips, 43, 50 bips, 3.8. So you put those two together you're- you're roughly at 47% chance of a cut, 53% chance of no cut, so 50/50 coin toss. Do you think the Fed is playing politics? Do I think the- And what is their motivation? ... Fed chairman, who li- (laughs) who lives in, who lives in Chevy Chase is a political actor? (laughs) Are you serious? What's his motivation then?

Tucker Carlson 1:05:46 I- I don't-

Jason Calacanis 1:05:46 W- what's his endgame? Why does he not want to cut rates or, or why would he not want to cut rates?

Tucker Carlson 1:05:50 Well, I mean, I think Chamath put it, uh, I think he put it-

Jason Calacanis 1:05:53 Does he want to stick it to Trump or something? What's his-

Tucker Carlson 1:05:53 ... he put it, he put it, well, of- of course. I mean he lives in a world in which there is no one who doesn't want to stick it to Trump. I mean, I know the ZIP code that he lives in very, very well. Um, I know the club that he goes to.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:03 Don't dox him.

Tucker Carlson 1:06:03 I know the world that... No, no, I would n- no, of course not.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:06 I'm joking, I'm joking.

Tucker Carlson 1:06:06 And I'm, I'm not mad at him, I'm just saying I- I- I know the world well and, um, of course no, uh, no one in that world wants to be seen, uh, helping Trump. And Trump has attacked him, by the way, in public, so I don't think that helps either.

Jason Calacanis 1:06:18 That is pretty pretty, uh...

Tucker Carlson 1:06:19 I think the structure of the F- Fed governance is very weird. I think, um, I'm not exactly sure what the Fed is. I've asked this question to a lot of economists including Larry Summers, never really got an, a straight answer, like how is it that, um, this is beyond political control? I mean, I don't know, if we're for democracy shouldn't voters have some say in how this is administered? But they don't. I mean there's no direct mechanism for voters to be heard, um, in this, the single most important institution of the American economy. How does that... Which is a crypto government organization, it's, you know, administering US dollars. I don't, I just don't understand it. I think it's very... The idea that you're gonna de-politicize it by making its leadership immune from the control of elected officials strikes me as the kind of like mid-century dumbness that got us NATO-

David Sacks 1:07:06 Totally.

Tucker Carlson 1:07:06 ... and a lot of other bad institutions.

David Sacks 1:07:08 The exact opposite thing happened.

Tucker Carlson 1:07:08 I just don't get it.

Jason Calacanis 1:07:09 The exact opposite thing happened.

Tucker Carlson 1:07:10 Yeah, exactly.

Jason Calacanis 1:07:10 The exact opposite thing happened.

Tucker Carlson 1:07:11 Thank you.

David Sacks 1:07:11 The exact opposite thing happened.

Tucker Carlson 1:07:11 Thank you. The paradox, exactly.

Jason Calacanis 1:07:13 Yeah.Sachs, what would the motivation of the Fed be here? I've asked this two times, can't seem to get an answer. What's the motivation of the Fed? Is it just to get to Trump?

David Sacks 1:07:23 Jason, let me give you another data point. Okay, now let's assume, let's use scenario play.

Jason Calacanis 1:07:28 Yes, please.

David Sacks 1:07:29 What happens if Powell rips in a 100 basis point cut right now? I'll tell you. So one part which is mathematical is the interest on the debt goes down, we save 300 billion. But there's something else that happens, which is the Fed does control the front end of the curve. Meaning, how do people borrow money for small amounts of time, from one day to about two years? If you make that cheaper, we know it's a test that's true as time, what happens is people borrow more money. That fuels more growth. That will end up in GDP. So what actually happens if you cut rates 100 basis points is not just the 300, but you can get this reflexive positivity in the economy. What that allows you to do is even if that causes a little bit more inflation, you're actually growing yourself out of this whole thing. So then you ask yourself, well, hold on a second, if the numerical justification is there to lower rates and it has all of these other positive externalities for the United States economy, why don't I do it? The only answer is political.

Jason Calacanis 1:08:38 I wonder if his-

David Friedberg 1:08:39 Yeah, let me explain Powell's-

Jason Calacanis 1:08:40 Hold on, let me teach you. Okay, so we're at 2.6% inflation, he wants to get it down to 2, feels like we're in striking distance. Maybe you could maybe give us a theory here, Sachs, of what would the political motivation be? I find it hard to believe that he's trying to sink Trump for some reason as opposed to maybe just being scared of inflation popping up above that three X handle which then triggers them to raise rates. So what's your theory here?

David Friedberg 1:09:08 If you're Powell, it's better to take the risk of being Paul Volcker than Arthur Burns. I mean, that's basically what it comes down to, because-

Jason Calacanis 1:09:15 Unpack that for people who don't know.

David Friedberg 1:09:16 Well, because what happened is Arthur Burns let inflation slip the leash in the 1970s and he's remembered as a horrible Fed chair. And then Paul Volcker came in and jacked up rates to, like, I think close to 20%.

Jason Calacanis 1:09:28 17.

David Friedberg 1:09:28 And caused a vicious recession in 1982, but by 1983 the economy had bounced back and inflation basically was under control, and then the rate cutting cycle started. And that rate cutting cycle went for like 25 years, and then Reagan got reelected in 1984. So you'd rather be a Volcker than a Burns if you're a Fed chair. Now, you raised the question is Powell political? Yeah, of course he is. If you go back to, was it 2021? So the first summer of Biden's presidency, we got that shock 5.1% inflation print in May of 2021 if my memory is correct. What did the Biden administration do? They sent Janet Yellen out to say it was transitory. And Powell got on board with the whole transitory narrative.

Jason Calacanis 1:10:18 Exactly.

David Friedberg 1:10:19 And as a result of that, he did not raise rates for six months. And worse than that, they continued QE. I think they bought like 180 billion of bonds in that time period, and that's what allowed inflation to get so out of control. Now why is it that Powell did that? Because he wanted to get reconfirmed. And yes, he was nominated by Trump originally but Biden renominated him and he basically wanted the reappointment by Biden, he wanted to get confirmed. And then the month after he got confirmed all of a sudden he shifted gears and started raising rates again once he was safely ensconced in his office. So he did the right thing in terms of raising rates in the face of inflation once he was free from those political incentives, but for six months he was intensely political and that cost United States dearly.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:09 Dearly.

David Sacks 1:11:10 Dearly.

David Friedberg 1:11:11 So now if you're Powell you've got PTSD from that whole experience and you're going to err on the side of not letting inflation come back. I think with inflation down to 2.4%, I think it is time to cut rates but he's fearful because again his incentives are to be a Volcker not a Burns.

Jason Calacanis 1:11:32 Yeah. And want to read a good book? Paul Volcker's Keeping At It, great book about Reagan going to him and trying to get him to cut rates. So this is a reoccurring story just on a quick-

David Friedberg 1:11:43 If he had done the right thing in the summer of 2021 we never would have had that bubble at the end of 2021. Remember?

Jason Calacanis 1:11:50 Yeah, clearly.

David Friedberg 1:11:50 Yeah, and that basically created a huge crash in 2022 and we could have avoided a good part of that if he had done the right thing. The Fed chair, it's not a hard job most of the time. I mean these guys sit in their ivory tower and then once a quarter they come out and do this and basically testify and say a bunch of things that no one can understand. But once in a while you got to get the decision right and he totally screwed it up in that one time where he had to get it right.

Jason Calacanis 1:12:20 Yep.

David Friedberg 1:12:21 And I would say this could be one of those moments too where I think he's being a little bit fearful.

David Sacks 1:12:25 I think that there's a simpler explanation quite honestly. If you look at Powell's history he was nominated as a governor by Obama then Trump picked him out of the Fed to be chaired but then he was reappointed by Biden. If you look at the vice chair of the Fed Phil Jefferson he was appointed by Biden. If you look at Michelle Bowen who's the vice chair for supervision she was appointed by Trump. Michael Barr appointed by Biden. Lisa Cook appointed by Biden. Adriana Kruger appointed by Biden. Chris Waller appointed by Trump. So I think the point is that there is a balance of power here if you look at political affiliations that tend to favor a Democratic...... view of the political landscape. And let's be honest, what benefits the Democrats more, a thriving economy and a shrinking (laughs) deficit going into the midterms, or the exact opposite?

Jason Calacanis 1:13:17 The reason I'm bringing this up, and I'm just harping on it, is he's a Republican who Democrats have opposed. So I'm, I'm just trying to s- reconcile this grand conspiracy that he wants to sink Trump-

David Sacks 1:13:26 I don't think it's a conspiracy.

Jason Calacanis 1:13:27 ... if he's a Republican. Yeah. (laughs)

David Sacks 1:13:28 I think it's just a general decision. I think these guys move the dot plots, and you can see it in the movement, okay? They're going away from reading the actual data and moving in concert with the data to giving themselves a window to let the data play itself out beyond a reasonable point and my point is, the beyond the reasonable point is the key part because when you talk to the large, sophisticated pools of money-

Jason Calacanis 1:13:53 Yeah.

David Sacks 1:13:53 ... many of them are like, "What is going on here?"

Jason Calacanis 1:13:57 All right. Currently, the big, beautiful bill is,

Jason Calacanis 1:14:00 uh, in the Senate, passed the House by a one-vote margin. Trump said he wants the Senate to pass the bill by Independence Day, July 4th. Uh, Senate math, Republicans have a 53 to