All In Podcast Episode 214 Recap and Notes February 7 2025

February 7 2025

Jason grifting for USAID (tongue in cheek!)
Ray Dalio episode with Friedberg was a big hit
- Government seems to be kind of following his recommendations
Antonio Gracias joins the program
- Legendary investor (Tesla, SpaceX, Uber, Athena, etc)
DOGE vs USAID
- JFK established it via EO in 1961
- Programs in ~130 countries
- Budget under Biden ~doubled from $26B to $45B
- Insane spending
- Twitter takeover
  - ~$12.5B in debt
  - Breaking even
  - Biggest turnaround in history
  - Company doing well
  - No one came into the office - pens had gone dry in the conference room due to unuse
  - Flowers were impeccable - 1000s of people’s worth of food being cooked everywhere and thrown into trash and not being even given to homeless
  - Fixed the woke mind virus
  - This is like a warmup for DOGE
- First he thought democracy was turning into bureaucracy
  - Instead its becoming a kleptocracy
  - Pure corruption
- Similar to 1941 Truman committe/commission
  - Formed due to concerns about Defense Department spending
  - Gave him credibility afterwards
  - Incredible savings - budget of ~$1M and saved like $20B+ in 1940s money
- Clinton administration also did something similar
- Democrats led last 2 versions of DOGE
- DOGE just has read only access - even that is so powerful - exposing all kinds of waste
- Media is corrupt - money went to Politico, BBC, etc
- Funding jumped under Biden
- BBC got like $2.7M
- Thomson Reuters
- Friedberg brought up government waste for like 2-3 years
- DOGE is basically doing Zero Based Budgeting
- When you stop the checkbook - the ones who cry the loudest are the ones committing the most amount of fraud
- US government just keeps spending money on everything - all spending gets approved
- People have no idea how the money flows
- In 1973 Congress took Nixon’s power away to stop payments - that is hurting us now - Executive can’t stop payments
- There is no controller - there is no reconciliation - whatever budget OMB specifies for a govt dept - treasury just complies
- When Trump EO to pause foreign aid went into effect - USAID defied their orders - so they came under focus
- Operating in other countries is imperialism - definitely the way its being done now
- Seems clear that many human rights issues were just embellished to keep this money cycle going
- How did Jason not figure out how to get into this grift? ;)
- US gov runs $2T deficit every year - we’re in debt $36T
  - NYT getting paid
  - Politico getting paid
  - Bill Kristol getting paid
  - 9/10 or so Ukraine media getting paid
  - Viktor Orban opposition getting paid
  - Polish left wing opposition getting paid
  - BBC getting paid
  - WEF getting paid
  - So USAID and washington folks circling our taxpayer money back to themselves and their interests
  - $40B a year - like almost $1B a week
- Democrats will lose folks to DOGE
- Western societies have pendulum fight of labor vs capital
  - Dems used to be labor and Republicans used to be capital
  - Trump made Republicans pro labor
  - Dems are most sophisticated liars
    - Under Biden
    - Record high stock market
    - Record high deficits
    - Record high illegal immigration
    - Record high wage suppression
    - This is all pro capital but they presented themselves as pro labor
  - Dems will struggle to get more than 15-20% of people
  - Rahm Emanuel oped scolding Democrats
  - They wear Eat the Rich on their dress but they instead ended up feeding the rich
  - This is how socialism always ends
Sacks
- Crypto framework
  - Need 4 committees across House and Senate to regulate crypto (finance and commodities)
    - First time all 4 said they would support crypto
  - Securities, Commodities, Collectibles
  - Market structure - need to understand what crypto asset is what kind
  - Founders need to know what the rules of the road are
  - Hoping to get legislation passed in the next 6-12 months - maybe sooner
  - To protect consumers - its better to onshore activity instead of letting it go offshore
    - Maybe FTX being in Bahamas was a problem
  - Market structure bill will define disclosure requirements, etc
  - SEC was basically just honey potting founders to come in and talk to them but then just prosecute them - there is no fair way for the founders to comply
- AI
  - Deepseek has validated the decision to rescind Biden EO
    - Shows that AI is not restricted to US
- Facilities people have never had people work late on Friday nights - for DOGE folks
- DOGE has been setup under an office setup during Obama administration
Sovereign Wealth Fund EO
- Usually natural resources based
  - Like Norway, Saudi, Australia, etc
- Could use a rotating roster of legends like Bill Gross, Druckenmiller, David Tepper, etc
- Might help define industrial policy in America
- Scott Bessent 3-3-3 plan
  - GDP growth of 3%
  - Deficit growth of ~3%
  - 3 million barrels of oil annually
- US (oil + natural gas + coal) has 3 times Saudi energy (oil)
  - Maybe use that as part of the fund
- Govt is bad at capitalism
- US social security will be bankrupt
Trump tax plan
Google down 7% 😟
- $350B revenue with $100B profit
- YouTube is Netflix inside Google
- GCP is AWS inside Google
- Their AI models are quite strong overall
- Seems market is concerned about their announced $75B AI spend
- Google is the best compute investor of all time
- Started with cheap hardware 1998-2005
- Then energy efficiency 2005-2010
- 2010-2016 better hardware for cloud
- 2021 - depreciation schedule to 6 years in data centers - using AI optimization on maintenance
How AI will affect jobs
- Drivers losing jobs due to self driving cars
- Analysts losing jobs to Deep research AI products
GLP1 research
- Researchers are able to mine VA data
- 1.2M people with diabetes who didn’t take anything, 215K who took GLP1s, 600K who took other medications
- There seem to some interesting results
- Anti inflammatory but muscle loss, etc - you have to increase protein diet and do weightlifting
- Which one is it - reducing obesity leads to gene expression or it’s the drug itself?