DOGE updates + Liberation Day Tariff Reactions with Ben Shapiro and Antonio Gracias

157.58 - 159.04 Jason Calacanis

40% correct. Close enough.

159.24 - 159.961 Antonio Gracias

Close enough for hand grenades.

160.541 - 162.501 Jason Calacanis

Close enough. I'm sure they had no agenda.

162.782 - 178.469 Chamath Palihapitiya

Antonio, how does it work? So when you volunteered... Is it that you and Elon and Steve just kind of figure out, let's put a senior person at every part of the administration where there's real opportunity? Why did you end up at SSA versus someplace else?

178.75 - 185.714 Antonio Gracias

Interesting question. And by the way, it's great to see you guys, man. Thanks for having me on. I can use your laughs. You're really making me laugh. We're really proud of you, man. Thank you.

223.547 - 235.731 Chamath Palihapitiya

And so do you, Antonio, go in there with a Doge engineer as your kind of sidekick per se, or you just go there solo and you show up? What happens day one when you walk into the place? What do you do?

236.251 - 255.861 Antonio Gracias

So I brought with me two great professionals, John and Peyton from Valor. One of them an engineer, the other one I'd say a finance ninja. Both these guys are ninjas. And there was already a team there, actually, that was working with some great engineers. And one senior person, Scott Coulter, who's from, actually worked at Lone Pine, started his own fund, and had come here as a volunteer as well.

255.881 - 267.109 Antonio Gracias

So they were already doing some work, actually, particularly on the enumeration part of the system. So that is the system that you have numbers, the whole cleaning of the database, the numbers, they had already started that project when I got there.

268.21 - 272.313 Jason Calacanis

And what is the mandate as given to you, you know, as part of Doge?

272.93 - 291.125 Antonio Gracias

Fraud, waste, and abuse. I mean, exactly what Bill Clinton talked about, what Barack Obama talked about, what all presidents, but maybe President Biden talked about going back in time. It was go figure out how to save some money. Man, this system's going bankrupt. It's going to be bankrupt in 2037. The country overall, as you guys know and talked about many times, is on its way toward bankruptcy.

1007.774 - 1016.757 Jason Calacanis

And also, they could be contributing to right, they could be paying taxes into the system. So I guess there's both of those possibilities. And both of those have fingerprints to mop. So yeah, good question.

1017.217 - 1035.77 Antonio Gracias

You know, the way this out, this is a very, it's massively complex, you can see the map I have on the whiteboard in our office, it's huge. And we're figuring it out right now. But let me just tell you this. And every benefit program we looked at, and this is just a handful of states, we found people on all the benefit programs. And we found them on unemployment. We found them on Medicaid.

1036.21 - 1046.178 Antonio Gracias

So adjacent to your point, people on Medicaid and unemployment, they're not contributing. They're taking out. They're mooching. There are criminals. I mean, look, we sent this data list to the National Targeting Center.

1046.718 - 1065.109 Antonio Gracias

And I don't want to get too far into the data, but I can tell you they found hard hits in the Targeting Center of very bad people, criminals and people on the terrorist watch list that are in this group. And so, yeah, I mean, it's a problem, we got to figure out how to deal with it. And the, of course, there are people that are also, you know, have jobs and paying the system.

1065.889 - 1072.051 Antonio Gracias

That's, you know, that's, that's also true. All these things are true. And we're trying to sort the data and figure out how to actually deal with it.

1712.416 - 1732.126 David Sacks

But really importantly, I just want to make sure, because when I talk to politicians from the Democratic Party about this, they say there's aspects of human rights doing the right thing for people in need that is motivating some of this behavior. Is that... a lie? And they actually have a different motive?

1732.827 - 1753.824 David Sacks

Or do some in the party think that way, but there are real kind of kind of call it a small group of highly influential folks at the top of the Democratic Party that recognize that this is going to grow the voter base. And they're they're kind of motivating this. What do you think is the construction of what sounds to some to be a conspiracy? And how much of this is really like widely understood?

1755.219 - 1778.345 Antonio Gracias

Look, Ben, I'll tell you what I have seen. I'll tell you the actual information. If you look at Social Security Administration, we set all the defaults to kind of max open, no ID requirements, right? You get a social security number before we got here by walking in an office, answering with a medical record and a school ID that had your name and your date of birth on it. That's it. Okay.

1778.785 - 1802.838 Antonio Gracias

We opened up. We set the defaults to open on Social Security. We set the defaults to open on pay, paying people out. And we set the collection defaults basically to zero. So that's how the system looks. I'm just reporting the facts. Do I think that the average person is a Democrat in Illinois or, you know, the guys I knew out of Chicago, they know this? They don't know this. They don't know this.

1803.258 - 1821.332 Antonio Gracias

So were there people at the top of the system that did this? Yeah. People created this policy. The former administrators of these agencies created these policies. I've seen them. I've read them myself. I've gone to the data myself. They've seen them. Now, this isn't everybody. If you're the average person out there who's a Democrat and you see what I've seen, you, I believe,

4047.899 - 4055.725 Chamath Palihapitiya

I'll take the other side of all of this. Yeah. I'll start with, again, there's no point prognosticating when they're just telling you

4057.31 - 4079.504 Unknown Speaker

what they intend to do nick you want to play the clip i could see in the next few years that we are going to have to have some kind of a grand global economic reordering there's something on the equivalent of a new bretton woods or if you want to go back like a treat something back to the steel agreements or the treaty of versailles

4079.744 - 4096.086 Chamath Palihapitiya

I mean, what is that just a kind of like refresher? What are we talking about? We're talking about commercial relations between, at the time, 44 countries, right? This is a big statement. I don't think that these kinds of things are said casually at a Manhattan Institute cocktail hour.

4098.024 - 4122.973 Chamath Palihapitiya

And I think that people understand if you're kind of like steeped in the history of it, how important these kinds of statements are. So I think I take this similarly to how I take Trump's rhetoric on tariffs. And I'm spending some time trying to now understand how are the scenarios that could play out? Because I think David is right if you assume the status quo, meaning what are the risks?

4123.874 - 4139.999 Chamath Palihapitiya

But what they're saying is, we're going to question this. We're actually going to go here and just totally rewrite that. If that happens as part of this scenario, All bets are off, in my opinion. I don't think any of us know with any certainty what a new economic framework would look like.

5670.504 - 5687.056 Jason Calacanis

etc. Like what is the plan here? Is it universal health care? Is it lowering their taxes? I mean, the administration says no taxes for people under 150k. We have to give something to the working man and woman of this country, the people who feel that they can't get rich, who can't get to the middle class.

5687.377 - 5705.383 Ben Shapiro

Does anybody here have a suggestion for that? I mean, I actually do have a suggestion and it's actually shockingly easy. President Trump has a visceral connection to blue collar workers in this country. Clearly, he has a visceral connection. He should stop preaching that blue collar workers are getting screwed and start preaching that they're succeeding because it's actually true. Okay, yes.

5706.363 - 5718.272 Ben Shapiro

Yes, I mean, I think that the fib that politicians always make bank on is the idea that, for example, the middle class in America is completely dissolved. That is not statistically true. The middle class has turned into the upper middle class, okay?

5718.372 - 5734.804 Ben Shapiro

And actually, all Americans, I say this on my show all the time, people have this, again, this sort of rosy-eyed view of the 1950s, which, again, was a historical outlier because the rest of the world didn't exist, it had been destroyed. But they also have this bizarre idea that you were better off to be 30 years old in 1980 than you are to be 30 years old in 2025.

5735.825 - 5756.019 Ben Shapiro

And all I can say is in 1980, the only dude with a cell phone was Gordon Gekko and he was a shoebox and he was holding it to his head. Okay, the reality is that everything in your life is better in 2025 on a material economic level than it was in 1980. And the lie that politicians tell in order to gain power is they say, you're getting screwed. Somebody is screwing you. I can unscrew the screwing.

6120.774 - 6138.477 Ben Shapiro

I mean, it'd be pretty horrifying to run for office. It seems like a terrible job. And I think the age to run for president is now in your 70s. So I have like three decades to consider it. But, you know, if I were going to run, I would be running on the basic idea that in this country, the only thing that you are promised is the adventure.

6139.384 - 6156.956 Ben Shapiro

And I'm not going to make you promises that I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not going to make you promises that I can't keep about how I'm going to fix your life, because the truth is, I really can't. All I can do is help get the obstacles out of the way so you can fix your life and you can make your life better. And I can help break the institutions that have a stranglehold on your future.

6157.176 - 6170.586 Ben Shapiro

And there, when you're talking about electricians and plumbers, the truth is that we have set up an enormous con game that is our higher education system, particularly in the liberal arts, subsidized by the taxpayer when most jobs that we're talking about right here do not require a college degree.

6170.606 - 6179.775 Ben Shapiro

And there's so many things that the Trump administration should be doing and is doing, again, that are great, that they could break the stranglehold on some of these things that allow for more opportunity.

6179.995 - 6196.089 Ben Shapiro

But I think the thing that people really, you know, the thing that I would say that I really think that maybe no other politician would say, and I can say because I'm not a politician, is your future is, in America, your future is in your hands. It is not in somebody else's hands. It is your responsibility. It is your responsibility to go out and strive.