Fixing the American Dream with Andrew Schulz

Summary

Podcast Summary: Fixing the American Dream with Andrew Schulz

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg welcomes comedian Andrew Schulz in a landmark episode aimed at dissecting and proposing solutions to what the hosts identify as a fractured American Dream. Released on March 15, 2025, the episode navigates through diverse topics, including economic policies, social security reforms, investment literacy, and the pivotal role of comedy in reflecting and shaping societal norms.

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1. Introduction and Guest Arrival

The episode kicks off with host Jason Calacanis enthusiastically introducing Andrew Schulz as the first comedian guest in the podcast's history. The camaraderie among the hosts is palpable, setting an engaging and relaxed tone for the discussions ahead.

Notable Quotes:

• Jason Calacanis [00:00]: "We're really excited today because for the first time in all-in history, we have a comedian."

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2. Comedian Andrew Schulz's Journey

Andrew Schulz shares his unconventional path into comedy, emphasizing resilience and authentic expression. Transitioning from managing restaurants to stand-up, Schulz highlights the importance of building a genuine connection with audiences through platforms like YouTube, bypassing traditional media constraints.

Notable Quotes:

• Andrew Schulz [72:48]: "I was 700 in my bank account. I was like renting out the room where I slept in, and I would sleep in a closet in my apartment. And it just... worked out."
• Jason Calacanis [75:19]: "Andrew Schulz picks me. There you have it, Mom."

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3. Innovation in Fertility with Yamanaka Factors

Chamath Palihapitiya introduces a groundbreaking discussion on Yamanaka factors, explaining their potential to revolutionize in vitro fertilization (IVF). By transforming skin cells into stem cells and subsequently into egg cells, this technology could democratize fertility treatments, making IVF accessible regardless of age or egg viability.

Notable Quotes:

• Chamath Palihapitiya [03:29]: "You can create egg cells from skin cells, so you no longer need to harvest eggs from women."
• Andrew Schulz [05:25]: "This is a nice workaround for the people that are trying to ban IVF."

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4. Tariffs and Economic Policies

The conversation shifts to the controversial topic of tariffs under former President Trump. The hosts analyze the effectiveness and strategic vulnerabilities of using tariffs as a negotiation tool, comparing Trump's approach to poker strategies. Chamath elaborates on China's systematic responses, highlighting the complexities in international trade negotiations.

Notable Quotes:

• Jason Calacanis [23:05]: "We're changing the rules, so you have to go to him. And he loves that."
• Chamath Palihapitiya [22:59]: "Tariffs may not work or they're actually going to have to stick, which can be really ugly."

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5. Social Security and Investment Proposals

Chamath presents a visionary proposal to overhaul the Social Security Trust Fund by investing in the S&P 500 instead of U.S. Treasuries. He argues that such a shift could transform Social Security into the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, thereby enhancing wealth distribution and participatory investment among Americans.

Notable Quotes:

• Chamath Palihapitiya [41:16]: "Imagine if every American born gets a thousand bucks put into a Vanguard account."
• Chamath Palihapitiya [42:04]: "If we invested the Social Security Trust Fund in the S&P, it would grow to $15 trillion today."

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6. The American Dream and Financial Literacy

A significant portion of the episode delves into the erosion of the American Dream, attributing it to high housing costs, inadequate financial literacy, and unequal access to investment opportunities. The hosts advocate for early financial education and systemic reforms to ensure equitable participation in America's economic success.

Notable Quotes:

• Andrew Schulz [39:44]: "When you feel like you're not part of the success, it breeds disillusionment."
• Jason Calacanis [53:20]: "This is an incredible proposal, Freeberg."

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7. The Role of Comedy in Culture

Andrew Schulz emphasizes the role of comedians as keen observers and commentators of societal trends. By pushing boundaries and addressing taboo subjects, comedians can foster critical conversations and provide nuanced perspectives that resonate across diverse audiences.

Notable Quotes:

• Andrew Schulz [74:34]: "Great comedians are great observers of culture."
• Andrew Schulz [82:44]: "Brutal transparency is needed. Be really honest with the people."

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8. Personal Investment Stories and Psychology

The hosts share personal anecdotes about their investment journeys, highlighting the psychological impacts of market volatility and the importance of patience and resilience. David Sacks recounts his experiences with the stock market's highs and lows, underscoring the necessity of emotional fortitude in financial endeavors.

Notable Quotes:

• David Sacks [60:07]: "The markets are brutal. They inflict psychological damage."
• Andrew Schulz [67:49]: "Remove the fear and encourage participation in the market."

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9. Concluding Remarks and Banter

The episode concludes with lighthearted banter among the hosts, reflecting their camaraderie and diverse personalities. They discuss upcoming performances, personal anecdotes, and humorous exchanges, reinforcing the show's blend of insightful dialogue and entertaining interaction.

Notable Quotes:

• Jason Calacanis [93:30]: "Andrew Schulz picks me. There you have it, Mom."
• Andrew Schulz [98:36]: "We are still dreamers."

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Final Thoughts

In this episode, All-In adeptly weaves together serious discussions on economic reform and investment strategies with the engaging and relatable perspectives of a comedian who has navigated his own path to success. The thoughtful analysis presented by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, complemented by Andrew Schulz's insights, offers listeners a comprehensive exploration of the challenges and potential solutions to restoring the American Dream. Through a blend of expertise, personal stories, and humor, the podcast provides a multifaceted approach to understanding and addressing the socio-economic issues facing America today.

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Notable Quotes Recap:

• Chamath Palihapitiya [03:29]: "You can create egg cells from skin cells, so you no longer need to harvest eggs from women."
• Jason Calacanis [23:05]: "We're changing the rules, so you have to go to him. And he loves that."
• Andrew Schulz [72:48]: "I was 700 in my bank account. I was like renting out the room where I slept in, and I would sleep in a closet in my apartment. And it just... worked out."
• David Sacks [60:07]: "The markets are brutal. They inflict psychological damage."
• Chamath Palihapitiya [41:16]: "Imagine if every American born gets a thousand bucks put into a Vanguard account."

This comprehensive summary encapsulates the essence of the episode, ensuring that listeners gain valuable insights even without tuning into the full-length discussion.

Transcript

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the All In Podcast. And you can subscribe to us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Yada yada. You know the drill. We're going to go to Miami for an epic F1 weekend All in podcast live on stage Saturday, May 3rd. A couple special guests go to all in.comevents to buy a ticket. And we're really excited today because for the first time in all in history, we have a comedian. We have somebody talented on the program.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Ain't that the truth.

[Jason Calacanis]

You know him.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Ain't that the truth?

[Jason Calacanis]

Ain't that the truth?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Real comedian. Someone that knows how to make good jokes. All right, Andrew.

[Jason Calacanis]

I feel like that was a dig to me, but okay. Andrew Schulz is here.

[Andrew Schulz]

How we doing, boys? Thank you for having me, Schulz.

[Jason Calacanis]

Pleasure. You just. You got a. You're on heater right now. You took time to come on the All In Pod. Thank you for doing that. Your Netflix special.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes.

[Jason Calacanis]

He's Crushing it. Top 10 around the world. It's called life.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. L I F E. Pretty cool.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's about your low sperm. Countless.

[Andrew Schulz]

I am the face of sperm. So.

[Jason Calacanis]

Which. That's kind of like crazy because you've got a mustache of a 70s porn star. How.

[Andrew Schulz]

I think I'm overcompensating. You know, I think I got to trick people with the stash, when in reality. Yeah, yeah. The balls.

[David Sacks]

You're firing blanks, dude.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's bad. Yeah, it's.

[Jason Calacanis]

This special is so good. The special show.

[Andrew Schulz]

Thank you for watching, man. I appreciate it.

[Jason Calacanis]

We all watched it. It's hilarious. And you got three old guys here who also have had to deal with some of these issues we've all had to deal with.

[Andrew Schulz]

You guys have ivf? You guys do IVF for the babies.

[Jason Calacanis]

Chamath, you wanna be honest here or are you au naturale? Did you hit the three from half court logo shot? What happened?

[David Sacks]

My first four kids were natural. My fifth was ivf.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. I don't think we're surprised. There's like two billion of you guys. You know, it's. It's easy to get the job done.

[David Sacks]

You know, there was a. There was a period. There was a period after the Facebook ipo. I swear to God, I would look at chicks on Instagram and get them pregnant. It was.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, really?

[David Sacks]

It was brutal.

[Andrew Schulz]

Are they coming to collect?

[David Sacks]

Hope not.

[Jason Calacanis]

How many settlements you got, Shimon? How many NDAs?

[David Sacks]

Freeberg is our.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

We're off to a hot start here, Freeberg you look like you have a low sperm count, but you have a fourth kid on the way. But apparently. What's the story? Are you au naturel? This is. For the first time ever, nobody knew this. Breaking news. Freiberg au naturel, with your 3.5 babies.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

100%.

[Jason Calacanis]

100%.

[Andrew Schulz]

Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

A vegan who's shooting with a sniper rifle.

[Andrew Schulz]

I love it. I don't believe it. I don't believe it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I'll find you guys a great study about veganism and libido.

[Andrew Schulz]

Is that right?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah. Very impressive.

[Andrew Schulz]

What does it do? Reduce the woman's.

[Jason Calacanis]

Exactly.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Exactly.

[David Sacks]

Oh, my God.

[Jason Calacanis]

I know a place with the best roast cauliflower. Let your winners ride Rain Man David Sa.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And instead we open source it to.

[Andrew Schulz]

The fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Love you, Queen of quinoa.

[Andrew Schulz]

By the way.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Can I just tell you how much I hate cauliflower? Everywhere I go. That is the dish. I had it for dinner last night.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's the main course.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah, it's the main course that I trust.

[Jason Calacanis]

Having a. Except it's disgusting.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

There's two things they offer you. Portobello mushroom and roasted cauliflower.

[David Sacks]

That's what Sean does every time you show up at the house.

[Andrew Schulz]

Are you a impossible meat guy?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

No, I don't like that stuff. It's gross. Not funny. Okay.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah. By the way, you guys want to hear a quick science corner? So you know how we talked about Yamanaka factors?

[Jason Calacanis]

There is a roaring. Yes.

[Andrew Schulz]

Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

He's like, yeah, I don't care.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

This is nice and topical.

[Jason Calacanis]

Anyway.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Sure. Let me hit this real quick because I know we're never going to get to it because you guys just bullshit around talking about politics.

[Jason Calacanis]

Science talk.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Sheltie, you know how you can use Yamanaka factors? We talked about these. To basically turn a cell into a stem cell.

[Andrew Schulz]

Right, of course.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And that's what goes on in the lab. Andrew, you're familiar with the Yamanaka factor.

[Andrew Schulz]

Everybody knows about the Yamanaka factors.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You've been all over it a while.

[Andrew Schulz]

Dude, I've seen squid game. Yeah, absolutely. You think I don't know about the Yamanaka factor?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

We're not gonna get. I can tell you.

[Jason Calacanis]

You didn't visit the Yamanaka.

[Andrew Schulz]

You were in Kyoto, went to the Yama factor. And I swear to God, a guy showed up 15 minutes late and he stabbed himself in the stomach right there. Right there. He killed himself right there. Yeah, it's called Sudoku. Exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

He did Sudoko in under a Minute.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Okay, never mind. We'll come back to the science. So the interesting work going on right now is you basically can take any cell from a person's body, turn it into a stem cell, and then turn that stem cell ultimately into an egg cell. So you no longer need to go harvest eggs, and so you don't need to actually go get the eggs from the woman. You can make eggs from skin cells, for example. So in the next couple of years, there's, you know, there's a few little technical breakthroughs that are happening right now that will enable this, where fertility clinics may end up just taking a little bit of your skin cell, creating stem cells, creating egg cells, and that's how we're gonna end up doing IVF in the future at any age. So you can make eggs at any age, and you can ultimately produce offspring at any age. You don't need to actually have active, healthy eggs.

[Andrew Schulz]

And this.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You like that one, right? You like that?

[Andrew Schulz]

Because this is a nice workaround for the people that are trying to ban IVF because of the abortion protocol. They're based. Because it basically light believes, begins at conception as part of their belief. Right, but.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And the idea, you could take one egg cel. Exactly. Fertilize egg. Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

For those people who don't know, but, like, what you do with IVF is you try to harvest as many as you possibly can because not all of them are viable. And it's a pretty brutal process for the woman to go through. But if you could just grab something from the skin, you'd have almost unlimited eggs.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

When a woman is born, she has all her eggs in her body, and as she ages, those eggs get depleted, and eventually she doesn't have very good viable eggs left over. So this gets around that problem of not having viable eggs. We can be very selective about the eggs, and so there's a future here in the next couple of years where fertility becomes a simpler, hopefully easier, and more widely available service than it is today, where it's really challenging technically, and you've got to go do something that's invasive, and, you know, you've got to hope that there's good, healthy eggs, and there's a good number of eggs and so on and so forth. So really interesting stuff.

[Andrew Schulz]

This is awesome.

[David Sacks]

Schultz, did they sit you down and give you, like, the embryos that. That were viable and the grades and the gender, and you pick one. And what did you pick?

[Andrew Schulz]

We just picked the best. So this is a lot of pressure on that first one. Like all the other kids Afterwards, I feel like. Don't have as much.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Come out of the gate strong. Have a good first quarter, and then whatever.

[Andrew Schulz]

100%. 100%.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's all good. So I gotta ask you.

[Andrew Schulz]

Wait, you didn't say if you had ivf.

[Jason Calacanis]

I was about to. I'm about to put it out there. I didn't have ivf.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

But the first time we had the first kid, wife says, hey, I'm ovulating. I said, put me in the game. Boom. First shot, half court logo, pregnant, bang. Then she says, I want to wait before I have the next one. It's a little traumatic to have a kid. And she waits six years. Then we try for a year. Nothing for one year. So now I'm like, oh, man, we waited too long. It's a lot of pressure. You talk about this in the special. It's like, for women, this is anxiety producing. So she's like, you got to go get checked out. And this is when the most humiliating day of my life occurred. I don't know, Andy, what it was like when you went. But they found all these grifters.

[David Sacks]

Can they. Can they identify grifters through the microscope?

[Jason Calacanis]

No, no, no. I walk in, and the thing opens, and there's three women at the counter at the reception, and they're like, hey, Jason Calacanis, you're here to give a. You know. And I'm like, yeah, I am. And then they walk you to a room.

[David Sacks]

Oh, that's the spookiest thing.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

They walk you to a room, and then they open it up, and it's like some nightmare scenario where There's a Motel 8 room and there's a couch that's about three feet. Three feet wide, by the way. There's a towel on it, and there's.

[David Sacks]

A towel on it. And that sofa is not cloth for a reason.

[Andrew Schulz]

No, it's like, no, it needs to be cleanable.

[David Sacks]

It's a cheap.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's very much like the hotel you're in Chelsea. I don't know what's going on with the Netflix budget.

[Andrew Schulz]

Why do you think maybe they could.

[Jason Calacanis]

Put you in the Four Seasons or the Peninsula?

[David Sacks]

It's so brutal.

[Jason Calacanis]

So you did this, right?

[David Sacks]

You had to go the grainy television with the porn.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's like, oh, you're lucky you got the tv.

[David Sacks]

No, I went. I went to the phone. I went to the phone.

[Andrew Schulz]

Nothing. I didn't even have. Have any service in there. Which was like another thing that was. It was annoying.

[Jason Calacanis]

So what did you do?

[David Sacks]

You roll it exted no spank bank. You have to go back.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's what I'm talking about. The Rolodex. You roll through all the memories.

[Andrew Schulz]

Think about the memories, man, of my wife and only my wife, nobody else.

[Jason Calacanis]

That was all those great moments with your wife.

[Andrew Schulz]

Great moments.

[Jason Calacanis]

Maybe there was accidentally one or two that got left in from when you were on the road.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's possible some, like absolute would jump into the dreams that I had with my wife. That might be possible. I would never want them to be there.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, that was the director's cut.

[Andrew Schulz]

There's nothing I could do. But yeah, it is also funny how, like, we dramatize our experience. We got the easiest thing to do in the whole thing. We just gotta go into a room and jerk off. As if that's hard for us. But we're like, the room is destitute and brutalist and the furniture was uncomfortable.

[Jason Calacanis]

You know, speaking of jerk offs. Uh, yeah, speaking of jerk offs, Gavin Newsom's got a podcast.

[Andrew Schulz]

This is so. I think that this is like, this is a great idea. Despite what you think about his politics. Is he a plastic bag in the wind? Yes. But it is a great demonstration of, like, how Americans admire bravery or courage and we don't, like, put. And I think that's what the Democrats kind of displayed in the last election. I don't want to get too political about this.

[Jason Calacanis]

Like, no, sorry, but like, your opinion, one man's opinion.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's more just like I respond to culturally. I don't give about the tribalism and politics, but I'll just be honest with you. So having him have, like, Charlie Kirk right there, who's like a professional arguer. That he is. Whatever. You know how, like, some people are autistic for dinosaurs. He's that for arguing. Right. And like, sit across from him to even address the French Laundry. I was like, okay, this is actually the right thing to do. So as. As easy as is for us to sit here and go, okay, this guy wants. Just wants to be president. Like, this is a dumb thing. Like, blah, blah, blah. It's actually what the Democrats should be doing. So I think we need to reward. I think we need to reward this behavior. We want more conversation. We want conversation with people especially that, like, you may disagree with. And like, the second podcast he put out, I thought was the most impactful. There was one piece that was incredibly impactful. He's talking to some guy. I don't know who he was. Some guy grew up in San Francisco. He's like savage Michael Savage, you know, he was talking about the taxes and, like, he's paying all this money in taxes in California and what does he get from it? And then Newsom said that, like, yeah, rich people are going to pay more, but your actual, like, functional tax rate, if you're middle class would be more if you lived in Florida because of the other stuff you get taxed on. This is the type of information that, like, you guys might be privy to, but the average person doesn't. They hop on.

[Jason Calacanis]

So you're saying he's, like, being human and addressing real issues instead of, like, culture war issues and just talking like.

[Andrew Schulz]

I think he's going culture war. Like, that's culture war. But he's actually putting out valuable information that defends the positions he may have taken in government that the average person doesn't really know. Like, the average person like me just goes, all right, I'm in New York. I'm getting clipped at 50% and 5% city tax. Like, I'm getting crushed. But if I lived in Florida or Texas, I'd save 13% and it'd be a complete wash when there might be someone making 50 grand a year. And they move from California to Texas and they lose money. And they don't know that because they're just listening to rich guys on podcasts talk about how much money they save when they move to Texas.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, you don't have to take a shot at us, but, yeah, okay, I moved to Texas this year.

[David Sacks]

It was more of a shot at me and Friedberg, but go on. Okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

Chamath, your thoughts on Gavin's new podcast. What do you think? You know, you were. There was famously a little dip of the toe where somebody made a podcast. I'm sorry, a landing page that you were going to run for governor. We had a little fun with that. What do you think of Gavin? What do you think of his podcast?

[David Sacks]

I think he's an excellent politician. It's clear he's starting the 2028 campaign. Okay. I think he's done a really good job so far. I think Schultz is right. He is unwinding all of the.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Kind.

[David Sacks]

Of landmines that the Democrats have stepped on. I think he's learned what Kamala did wrong, and now he's taking this very narrow path, which is like, I'm going to basically disavow all the stuff that people don't care about. So all the gender woke ideology stuff, I don't think you're going to hear him talk about. He'll try to drive A narrow wedge on these economic issues. So, I don't know. I mean, I think it's going to create a really dynamic 2028 campaign if he gets momentum. By the way, his popularity has gone up, which is insane. Which after the fires and all of the ineptitude in California, all of the corporations that have run away, all of the people that have left the chaos in San Francisco, after all of that, he started a podcast and his popularity's gone up. It's really incredible.

[Jason Calacanis]

Coming around the horn. Friedberg, what do you think of Gavin Newsom?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Look, I think the podcast was brilliant. I think when I watched it, I was hooked. Because there are two things that I think were critical in how he runs it. Firstly, is he is showing, for the first time, I think, that I have ever seen a Democrat do or a Republican in modern politics, active listening to the other side. It seems so crazy that this is some sort of special event and special concept. But this active listening moment where you see a politician, it totally breaks down the walls where you immediately feel on guard or on offense against that person, because if someone's actively listening to you, you actually feel like you're on the same side somehow, and you're trying to come to a conclusion together. And so what that does is it invites the person on the other side, in this case the audience, the listener, to be with Gavin. Part of the kind of coming together. The second thing I think he did that's really brilliant is so much of the modern political bimodalism, where you're in one camp or the other, means that everything is a one or a zero. You know, Andrew talked about this. We're all generally. I think none of us would consider ourselves political party affiliates. We are all generally people that like to think for ourselves on a topic or an issue. And we don't care about what party is associated. But the way modern politics has evolved is you don't debate the topics. You debate the 1 or the 0 because of what the party says. My party says this is the position. Therefore, I'm a one and you're a zero. And the other side says, I'm the one, you're the zero. Meaning everything has to be binary. I'm completely right, you're completely wrong. And I think what Gavin has done is he's shown that these are not ones and zeros. They're 80, 20 or 60, 40 or 55. 45. And he's willing to acknowledge that. He's showing that, you know what, we might be only 45% right. And on so many topics. The Democratic Party has ended up slightly wrong. They're 45, 55. It's not that they're a 0 or a 1. They're slightly off on taxes, they're slightly off on social issues. And they're off just enough that they lost the election. Just enough that they lost the election.

[Jason Calacanis]

Brass tax. Brass tax. Andrew 2028. Trump's running for his third term versus Gavin Newsom. Who do you vote for?

[Andrew Schulz]

I mean, we gotta run it back for a third term for Trump.

[Jason Calacanis]

No doubt.

[Andrew Schulz]

Of course. No, obviously I believe no, but theoretically.

[Jason Calacanis]

If it wasn't a third term, Gavin versus Trump, who would you go?

[Andrew Schulz]

I mean, I gotta see what his policies are and I gotta see where America is. I think the big misunderstanding with this last election is that at least the Democrats who are still trying to vilify these figures on the right, what they don't understand is they think that this was some populist election where people just fell in love with Trump and they just loved it so much they would just do whatever he says. What I think is harder for them to grapple with is the self reflection of a rejectionist vote. So I think people rejected the Democratic proposal 100% and they went with what the other alternative was, which was Trump. And that's a way tougher pill to swallow. You have to look back at everything you've done and go, wow, we're off. We're not listening to the people. This guy listens to the people. I mean, it seems like I'm fluffing Trump here, but like, I would say that his greatest skill is listening to what people say. And I think a lot of times there's this Ivy League pretentiousness in the Democratic Party where it's like, we know what's better for you. And I know you say you want these things, you don't really want them. Let us, we've studied and we've talked about it in our little thought experiments in class, so we know what you need. You just shut up.

[Jason Calacanis]

Condescending. It's condescending.

[Andrew Schulz]

Exactly. So I think that, like when people go, ah, the food is giving me cancer. And then he appoints the guy who says the food is bad to run the food. The American people go, well, that kind of seems like a good thing. I like that. You know, it is like an acute understanding and listening to what people are saying. And sometimes to his disadvantage, like he came out against that they were putting some like, tax on people who drive into Manhattan or whatever. Like, yeah, congestion pricing and Congestion pricing. Initially, people really rejected it. Right? And then so he was like, we're getting rid of congestion pricing. And, like, two weeks after they put that congestion pricing thing, everybody I knew with a car was like, this is the greatest thing the city has said.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, you can actually move. Right. You can take a taxi. And it's faster than government reach is good.

[Andrew Schulz]

Bureaucracy, lock it down. Nice.

[Jason Calacanis]

Like, yeah, you want a car, stay in the boroughs.

[Andrew Schulz]

Exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

So you don't get a car in Manhattan.

[Andrew Schulz]

Explain to people it's a little bit egregious. I mean, you and I do, Jason, but everybody else have it. Exactly. Our lives should be different. You know what I mean?

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. Absolutely. But what's the point of us having nice cars if we can't drive them whenever we want? Yes, yes. And, you know, we grew up at a time on the Lower east side. You know, you could go to Tribeca. We could go to a club Limelight. You could park outside the Limelight at night. You could go to Palladium. You could park on 14th Street.

[Andrew Schulz]

I park right on 14th Street. Okay. I go, not a problem. Used to be a church, right? And then, you know, I sniff.

[Jason Calacanis]

Can I just have ecstasy? You do a little.

[David Sacks]

Whatever.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's four in the morning.

[David Sacks]

Listen, you need to know, goofballs, between your stupid mustache and your Ozempic turkey neck, I am totally turkey neck. Go to something useful.

[Andrew Schulz]

Well, we could let Chama sit there in MacGyver's funeral outfit, tell us that we're goofballs. I don't know. This guy's wearing a vest with a collar. He looks like he's going to joby wake. I can't believe that he would even talk about the way that you're dressed and how you look.

[David Sacks]

This is custom. Laura Piano. Boys, this is Laura Piano.

[Jason Calacanis]

Really? Why does it look like you got it at Zara? All right, listen, more importantly, let's stay on track.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes, yes. We got to stay on track. Can I tell you guys something about tariffs from a layman?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes, please.

[Andrew Schulz]

You guys are acutely aware of maybe how these things affect markets and yada, yada, yada, and most people don't have any fucking clue. So the average person, right? I look at this, and I'm like, man, it kind of sucks that you gotta, like, negotiate your, like, your bid for a car that you're gonna buy publicly, right? So this is my assumption, and maybe I'm, like, a little bit more optimistic than most about the administration. But if I go to buy a car and the car is listed at 100k. And I go, offer the guy 80, right? I don't want everybody around me yelling out loud, how can you insult him by offering him 80? This is an insult. And then I can't go to them. And I go, I'm actually trying to settle at 90. I'm just saying 80. So he comes down a little bit. But the unfortunate thing when you litigate these things in front of the entire world is that they look at that first measure, this 200% tax, and Trump can't balk at it. He can't go, yo, I'm just fucking. I'm just playing around with that number. I actually just getting them to come down 20% or 10%, getting to come down anything is a win. He can't say that because he loses all his leverage. So he's got to sit here and then get criticized by, I don't know if it's half the country. I don't know who really ends up caring about what these tariffs do. Obviously, there are repercussions in the market. I got a buddy of mine building a hotel out in Joshua Tree, and he's like, I don't even know if I can get brought into the country from Canada. So it does affect people in real time, but it's impossible to do these negotiations with any leverage. If you have that people within your own country questioning your ability to negotiate in real time. That is what the layman would think.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Well, I do think you're right in the sense that in the early days when Trump was talking about tariffs, initially, everyone was like, oh, my God, he's going to use tariffs. He's unpredictable. And then the narrative became, he's using it as a negotiating tactic. The problem is, just like in poker, once everyone knows that there is this kind of action, it's exploitable. And so this is now kind of an exploitable mode of negotiation where everyone now assumes he's just trying to negotiate, so no one actually takes him seriously. The question now, is the response going to be that he's going to be serious about it, or is he actually exploitable? And you saw what China's response was. I kind of view China as like, AI. Like, stuff goes into China, the AI processes it and it comes back out. China is like, obviously, the way they're kind of structured, you have very little psychosocial bias like you do with other democratic governments. It's very systematic. It's systematically processed. Every piece of data is systematically processed. Every action is systematically processed. And so I think when you look at how the Chinese ambassador responded to Trump on Twitter a few weeks ago, where they're like, you want war? We'll give you war. This is a hot war or cold war, whatever you want. We've never seen that from an ambassador to the United States president before done on Twitter like this, let alone the Chinese ambassador. So I think it says a lot about how the Chinese AI is processing the Trump negotiating tactic or the Trump positioning statements on tariffs, which indicates that there may be. Now, I mean, we can talk about what game theory, optimal play might be in this kind of poker game, what's going to come next. But there's a real assessment that they've made on how far he is willing to take it. They've got a conclusive statement, and they believe that this is the fastest way to kind of win their negotiating position. But it says a lot about where this is all going. Everyone now understands or views this as an exploitable moment, which unfortunately means that tariffs may not work or they're actually going to have to stick, which can be really ugly.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, it could be painful.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Could be painful for everyone.

[Jason Calacanis]

Chamath, your thoughts on the tariffs and Andrew's position.

[David Sacks]

What is the. I think it's like 120 some odd years. Nick, maybe you can find this tweet that I had, but almost the majority of years as a nation, or close to a majority of the years as a nation, we had no income tax. And the way that we would fund the programs that we needed was not from insiders but from outsiders. And that's where the tariff was born. Right. It's people domestically in America don't pay any taxes on the things that they do. And instead, if you'd like to sell into the United States, you pay a reasonable tax. So this is the two summit years. So it's 126 years from 1776 to 1861. Then we paused it for a few years because of the Civil War. We restarted again in 1872. And you notice when it stopped. When it stopped was right around World War I, where this entire war machine broke out and we've never looked back. So I don't know. I think that one way to think about this is we're probably going to go back and explore. Isn't it better if we have this incredibly vibrant and rich country of 330 million people with a ton of purchasing power? What happens if we put the burden not on them to fund the American infrastructure and social programs and safety net, but if we put the burden on all the Companies in the other 7.7 billion people in the world, in the 185 plus countries that want access to these folks. Should there be exceptions? Probably. Should there be waivers? In very specific and narrow cases, absolutely. But I think that that's where these guys are going. And I think that you heard this, by the way, yesterday from Howard Lutnick. I don't know if you guys saw this, but he said the Trump tax plan is gonna cut federal income taxes to zero for anybody making 150k or less.

[Andrew Schulz]

Saw that.

[David Sacks]

It's crazy.

[Andrew Schulz]

What would the vulnerability in that be like, putting the burden on all of these expenses that we would incur on other countries? What would that vulnerability for us be?

[David Sacks]

There are two.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The first expenses, that's the key. If we keep the tariffs, if we.

[Jason Calacanis]

Charge them to come into the market, we charge them an extra 25%.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But we talked about this last week. If you cut the budget, then it can be net neutral. That's part of what they said.

[Andrew Schulz]

Got it.

[David Sacks]

But he's saying, what is the strategic vulnerability? I think the strategic vulnerability is 2. The thing with tariffs is, and you're pointing out this, let's just say today you say there's a tariff and then tomorrow you say, oh, we've found an agreement and we're going to take it off the table. One piece of logic would say, wow, that's great, we're able to change our mind on a dime. The problem for countries and companies is that they can't think in 24 hour blocks of time, right? They're making decisions in 5 and 10 year blocks of time. It's like, I'm going to go and borrow a billion dollars, I'm going to go and build a data center, I'm going to borrow $10 billion, I'm going to build tanks. Once you start that, you can't just stop it and then restart it. So that's one strategic problem, which is that if you are not careful, some of these markets that are really crucial. I'll give you one which we talked about last week. Right now, 95% of all of the energy we generate in America is from renewables. Whether you like it or not, that's just what it is. The reason why that's possible is because America has a very sophisticated market where all these people come from all corners of the world. Insurance companies, life insurance companies, banks, and they fund all of it. And the reason is they can take a tax credit, they can lower their effective tax rate, they get a higher rate of return. It's all super complicated. But the point is these incentives exist. If all of a sudden you play around with that market, half that energy would go away, electricity prices would rise, inflation goes up, and then if we have to go and compete against China for AI and a bunch of other stuff, where is the energy going to come from? You're going to brown out people, you're going to just turn their energy off so that you can fund a data center so that the TikTok algorithm is better. That's literally what we would have to decide. So that's one way. And then the second way is if you're providing a critical service or a good to American people for which there is no alternative, that becomes really problematic because that person can then pull that product and say, I can't afford to make it. The obvious example is if you make pharmaceutical drugs for rare diseases, what do you do? And again, those are all things that are like multi decade long decisions. You'd love to make them and unchange them in every 24 hours, but it's just not possible because you just make these decisions and you're stuck with them for a long time. That's where the tariff thing becomes problematic. If you change them often enough, if you implement them and you're like, this is what it's going to be. The world can adapt and people can figure it out.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, the other problem is just the communication of this has been terrible. We were on the program last week or two weeks ago, Joe Lonsdale's like, this is about fentanyl. So is it about fentanyl? Is it about getting rid of income tax at the federal level? Is it about supply chain resiliency? These guys get like a D in my grade book for communication. It's terrible communication. And this idea that you can't take Trump too seriously about his claims. Like, well, he said he was gonna overturn Roe v. Wade. He did it. He said he was gonna close the border and send people home. He did that. You know, he said he'd do a Muslim ban. He actually did that. So for every time he says something and you're like, that's cap. No way he's gonna do that. I actually think people are starting to realize he's gonna do something here with these tariffs. They're not just a negotiating position. And the other problem I think a lot of people have with this is it centralizes power. Anybody can go to Trump now and say, I want an exception, I'm a car company, I want an exception, I'm a Solar company. I need an exemption. And then now you've got everybody going to Mar A Lago to kiss the ring, to give him a donation, to bow down. And it centralizes more power with them as opposed to having rules. Yes, and we need to have rules in this country that apply to everybody, not just people who give a million dollars like Bezos and Tim Cook and everybody. And Zuck, the weathervane gave him. We don't wanna live in that world where you're just bribing Trump to get your tariff. And that's how people feel. That's how the business community feels. That's the reality right now. People are bribing Trump, giving him a million dollars to the inauguration to get close to him, to go to Mar A Lago, and it looks really bad. You need to have a clear strategy here for what the rules of the game are. And he's changing the rules, so you have to go to him. And he's. He loves that. That's actually, I think what he's trying to do is get everybody to go through him. It's a really clever hack, I think.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. And perception is reality. So you have to react to people's perception. Like, we can throw data points all we want at people and we can throw research and all this other shit, but if people aren't meeting you there, then you're not going to be communicating with them effectively. And I think that's something that, like, you know, especially you guys need to know. You guys have privy to information that the average American probably is not. And we can bitch and complain about how they don't read or how they're not looking up, you know, what happened in 1913 to change the course of American history and how we started. Or we can go, okay, we need to find a way to disseminate this information so that they can make these decisions and I guess, or feel comfortable with the results of these decisions.

[David Sacks]

Do you think America would be okay with this idea of taxing outsiders and then relying on it versus income tax paid by its own citizens?

[Andrew Schulz]

I think that the second half is really all that would matter. I think that people are thinking. I think the majority of people are thinking about the next week. So if you say that I don't have to pay taxes, like, and I think this is what Republicans are doing way better than Democrats right now is like, Democrats don't have Build the Wall. They don't have slogans. They don't have things that immediately tap into, like, core emotional feeling. Regardless, if you're going to do it or not. We want Greenland. Okay, that's cool. Democrats need eggs or a dollar. Democrats need things that like echo their sentiments and how they want to like take care of people and provide for the disenfranchised. But it has to be done in a way where it's digestible. You can chew on it. If you want to make housing more affordable, then you say, yeah, we're seizing public land, we're building 10,000 units. Like you have to tap into what Americans need, which is a feeling of not just comfort. Every American thinks they're going to be a millionaire. That's what this country drives off of. Right. It's every poor American that hope.

[David Sacks]

That hope. Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

And the second they stop thinking they.

[David Sacks]

Will be, or they can be, or.

[Andrew Schulz]

They can be, it falls apart and then some healthcare CEO gets shot. And people celebrate. They're celebrating because they no longer feel the hope that they could be in that position. Yeah, they feel so disenfranchised. They, they. And this is what like I'm telling you, like the, you guys of the world need to pay close attention to because there's going to be no empathy if anything bad happens. Oh, the stock market is down. No Americans are invested in the stock market. Like that's all you guys.

[David Sacks]

I've been saying it. No, no. I've been saying this for months. I've been saying it for months. Nobody cares about the stock market, nor should we. And the reason is because we, people who own these assets have overly benefited more than we've deserved for the last 15 years, ever since the great financial crisis in the United States. People who, as Jason said, could cozy up. And by the way, Jason, I think the claim that you made, which is severely true for how from 2007 up until now has played out because if you look under all the programs, if you could have lobbied Obama in those critical years of the gfc.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yep.

[David Sacks]

Oh my God. The amount of money that was. No, because we took interest rates literally to zero. Anybody like us who could have gone and gotten levered up and gone into the stock market was richly rewarded. And the problem is we left everybody else behind. And I think the great thing about Trump is he is going to reset that. He is going to take a lot of wealth away from asset holders. You're seeing it every day. 500 billion. 500 billion. There is no sympathy. I think it's fantastic.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's great to hear you even saying that because I feel like a lot of people that are in maybe your guys position don't Understand that disconnect. And that is important to understand. Like, even what happened in the Palisades, like in LA with, like the fire, the second people heard it was like rich people's houses. There was no empathy for it. They didn't.

[Jason Calacanis]

They own $4 million house. You. Yeah, it was like.

[Andrew Schulz]

And it. It is.

[Jason Calacanis]

I don't even have a house. I can't find a house. You burned your house down and you move, you went back, you went to your vacation house. Now, oh, I'm sorry, you're living at your ski house. That's a tragedy. Like, literally. You're right.

[David Sacks]

It probably explains why we don't hear anything in the news anymore about anything that's happening with respect to reconstruction or any of the disruptions happen. It's a rich person problem, people.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a rich. And, you know, I think putting together what you just said, Schultze and Uchemov, Trump is a master at connecting with people and listening to them. I thought one of the greatest things he did during this last election is when he said no tax on tips. When he said no tax on tips, he was going right for Nevada, he was going right for that swing state, you know, to get those folks who live off tips. But what he was also doing is saying, I know that there's a bunch y'all that sometimes get cash tips. You put it in your pocket. It's the gray market. I get it. You know, I run a, you know, I got caddies who get a hundy from, you know, whatever, taking somebody out on the course. We're just going to make it official. You don't get taxed on tips because we know that you're, you know, you're the bottom third of the country in terms of your economic power. Those kind of statements really do connect with people. Trump has just mastered this. This party is. Trump is the Democratic Party that we grew up with.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's kind of crazy.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's kind of crazy, right? And then the Democrats became this elitist group that seemed to be in the pocket of business interest. I don't know what bizarro world we're living in.

[Andrew Schulz]

I think you tapped into it right there. It's like, I think that they could easily win the next election if they made it a class war, but they don't, because it feels like they're in the pockets of these billion dollar corporations. So they can't really, I mean, Bernie did it really effectively, right? Like this random Jew that lives in Maine or something like that is like, yo, we gotta get some Money from these rich people, give it back to the poor. And all of a sudden all of America turned him into like our surrogate grandfather. So you can.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then he got shivved by Hillary and the machine.

[Andrew Schulz]

And, and I mean, what did they say about his fans? Like they went very specifically, they were like, he has a, his. The Bernie Bros have a sexism and bigotry problem. Right. They made them radioactive. Right? So now you killed the working class. Now the working class is no longer supporting the Democratic Party. So who do they have left? They have the identity politics groups. So they can't piss off the identity politics groups because they're like, that's all we got left. They did the same with us during the election, right? They're like the podcast bros have a sexism and bigotry. They try to make people radioactive. And it's like that card's been played so many times that people are disensistic, don't work anymore.

[David Sacks]

I think there's one big shoe left to drop. I think we've started the process of really, really taking a bunch of heat out of the asset markets like equities. So we've taken trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth away. I think we're going to take trillions more. But the next big market. And this is actually where, Andrew, to your point, we reestablished some hope, I think for a lot of people is we are going to whack the housing market. It's just going to happen. And let me just say something, how.

[Jason Calacanis]

Is that going to happen? Chamath, explain it. Because there's 7 million homes that we still need to build to service just current demand. How does that actually happen with the supply demand problem in your mind?

[David Sacks]

There are a bunch of mechanisms that have to get cleaned up right now. So one mechanism is that there are a whole host of mortgages that are basically being propped up. It was a program that really got out of control under the Biden administration. Nick, you can find this article. It was in the Wall Street Journal. We are going to figure out how to get these two government related agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, out of what's called conservatorship. And these are the folks that are responsible for essentially wrapping guarantees around mortgages so that the mortgage market can function. The details don't particularly matter that much, but the point is that what we are doing is we are unwittingly propping up with American taxpayer dollars the U.S. housing market. Why is that bad? It is locking an inordinate number of People from that first critical step that actually makes them feel like they are winning and they're on their way to achieving their dreams, which is, can I make a deposit on a home? And then can I live this out? And you have these artificially inflated prices all around the country as a result of this. So I think this next wave is deeply beneficial to the middle class, which is there is no reason. You guys see it when you read the Wall Street Journal. I think it is the dumbest in the world when I see an article which is like, this house just is $65 million on 0.4 acres in some rando place in Miami. Malibu.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, I was thinking Malibu, but yeah.

[David Sacks]

But what is this? This makes no sense. And so when you re rationalize a bunch of equity values and you re rationalize the cost of a home, I think what you're going to do is you're going to allow a lot more people to find a more reasonable way to enter the housing market. And I do think that that's a really big step in allowing them to feel like they're part of the dream. So you lower asset prices, you can own some stocks. Maybe you own a 401, or if you've never had a 401 but your employer offers it for the first time, it may actually make financial sense to put a small amount of it in there. You've never been able to own a home. All of a sudden, home prices are whacked 30 or 40%. You're able to do that because of how Trump goes after the budget. When his rate of borrowing for the US Government goes down, your mortgage rate goes down. Now all of a sudden you can enter in because home prices are less and you can actually get a mortgage. They may all seem very random, but they can come together in giving 50, 60 million people a shot that they have been screaming since the great financial crisis they don't have.

[Andrew Schulz]

This is so huge because on, like, a core emotional level, you want as many Americans as possible invested in American success and excellence.

[David Sacks]

Totally.

[Andrew Schulz]

And the greater the delta between, like them and their first home or their first investment in stock, the greater that distance, the more disillusioned they become in America in general when they feel like, like you said earlier, like the way that you guys got into the market when you could basically take out loans for nothing, and then you saw these incredible gains, they feel left behind the second they feel like they're in on it. They own apartment, they own some shares of test.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's why crypto is so popular. Because they're like.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's their only access I got.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it's like. Yeah, it's like comedy in some ways. Like, all I need is a microphone or music. Like, there's a path for me. And crypto, obviously, is a giant scam.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's a scam, sure. But I can get a piece of this. I can get a piece of this. This American dream. And I would rather that they were invested in the. In a Vanguard account or something like that. I would rather they're invested in the entire market. I mean, there's this. This idea, and I'm sure you poke holes and tons of holes into it and. But this idea, like, every American born gets a thousand bucks put into a van.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. It's a friend of ours, Brad Gerstner, with this. Invest America is the concept.

[Andrew Schulz]

And regardless if the concept is good or not, the emotional connectivity to the success of American industry is really important. When you know, at 22, that you could get this thing that's been compounding for 22 years. You could pay off some college loans, you could put something down on a house. You could pay for trade school, whatever it is. I think you have a different energy towards America and its success. And then you have a lot less of these kids who are just like, America's this horrible place. And capitalism is bad. Yeah, capitalism is bad when you're left behind. When you're invested in capitalism, it's.

[Jason Calacanis]

Baby, absolutely. We're on the express train.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Let me give you guys. I did an analysis. I wasn't sure if I should put it out, but I'll tell you guys the numbers. The U.S. social Security program is meant to be kind of the retirement program for folks that don't have access to private retirement accounts. This program was set up in the 1930s after the Great Depression. And there's a trust fund, the oasdi, which is the fund that they invest the capital. So every year, we all put money in with our Social Security taxes out of our paychecks, goes in there, and it gets invested. You know what it gets invested in? It gets invested in one thing. U.S. treasuries, which have averaged about 4.8% return since the beginning of the program per year.

[Jason Calacanis]

Meanwhile, what if you put it into the market?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Meanwhile, the S and P has been averaging 11%. So here's the math. If in 1971, which was the year that we went off the gold standard in the United States, if we invested the Social Security Trust Fund in the S and P, the balance of the Social Security Trust Fund today would be $15 trillion. That would be roughly one third of the value of the total S&P 500, which would be jointly owned by all Americans who took their capital. Now, here's what's up. What's up is that the middle class people who had access to private retirement accounts benefited by buying the S&P 500, and the wealthy were able to access it. So all of the equity value that accrued from American enterprise and the prosperity of the American system accrued to the people that had access to the private accounts. Meanwhile, the people that only had access to the public accounts got stuck owning Treasuries. Today, the Social Security trust fund has $2.7 trillion balance. And based on the outflows and inflows, it's going to go bankrupt in 2032. That means Social Security is either going to get cut or the Fed's going to print a ton of money to keep Social Security benefits.

[Jason Calacanis]

Retirement age goes up a little bit.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

There's a lot of levers. Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

Wow.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

So I did the math. If you assume that The S&P 500 continues to grow at 10.5% a year on average, there's ups and downs. And sure, there could be basically drawdowns and all these other sorts of things. But here's important point. We could put about $500 billion in the trust fund today and it will not go bankrupt again and it will continue to grow every year. And then all Americans have participation in American enterprise. And importantly, this becomes the world's largest sovereign wealth fund ever. You don't need a separate sovereign wealth fund. We already have one.

[Andrew Schulz]

We have it.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It's called, it's called the Social Security Trust Fund. And what we' is, we've totally mismanaged it. And I went back to try and understand why this is the case. Why have we only ever bought Treasuries? Early on, the US Needed someone to loan money, so they basically forced the citizens to loan the government money in the form of Treasuries. But today, the Social Security Trust Fund owns Only less than 10%, about 8% of the total treasury bonds outstanding. The rest are owned by the Fed and foreign investors and private investors and others that want to own it. So why are we forcing all the American citizens?

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, we're propping it up for no.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Reason and we're discouraging access. So basically we've created through the Social Security system, we've created the deep inequity we see in this country. If instead we had allowed the Social Security system to invest in the S&P 500 to buy American enterprises to fund American businesses. Then every American would be wealthy. And that middle class that uniquely participated by basically arbitraging the market where they forced the treasury bond yields on the poor and they got to take access to the equity yields would have not happened.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, they had 401ks, right?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

They built a device. They had a device and they were able to participate with brokerage accounts and buying in the market. What we can do right now is we can fix it. And here's the important point. People will then argue, oh, well, what if there's a down year or two down years in a row? You know what? We're already going to be printing money to make up the hole in Social Security. We're not going to let Social Security go bankrupt. We're not going to let it dry out. So we're already going to print money to make the Social Security whole. So if that's the case, we can create a backstop for Social Security. We're gonna have to do it either way, but we might as well.

[Andrew Schulz]

It'll just be less.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

We might as well take on the back.

[Jason Calacanis]

Chelsea, go.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. No, no, no. Chamath, you were gonna say something.

[David Sacks]

The reason why we didn't do it goes back to what you said before, which is we have a bunch of. We had a bunch of very well educated, Ivy League trained people running these institutions. And the feedback, I don't even know what it said, but I can tell you what the memo said. There's too much risk. We've sensitized this model. It doesn't make sense. This is the safest thing to do. It goes back to just like we need a little bit more practical thinking. At the end of the day, why the S&P 500 exists is of all the thousands and thousands and thousands of companies in the world. You know how many companies in the world make more than a billion dollars a year? More than 20,000. And of that 20,000, the S&P 500 is just the 500 best. It's the best of the best of the best. So to your point, Friedberg, it didn't take a PhD from Harvard to figure out that if you just owned an index of the absolute 500 best things happening at any given point in time, competition, it would have gone up.

[Andrew Schulz]

Also, since when are Americans risk intolerant? There's something baked into the DNA of the people that decide to leave their families and move here.

[Jason Calacanis]

Totally immigrant country.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And to your point, imagine logging in like We've all had, I'm assuming, a 401k account. And I remember how exciting it is to log in and see the account. And Schultz, I want to say something that's really important. Like you talk about us people, like, you know, earlier on the commentary, which is something I hear a lot. My first job was making $4.25 an hour cleaning toilets in a pool hall in upstate New York. Chamath has similar stories. JCAL has similar stories. Like any of us that I made.

[David Sacks]

4:55 Canadian working at Burger King.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah. And I had like. And then the worst part about my job in the pool hall was that then the manager made me go play poker at his house and he took all the money back, which really, I.

[David Sacks]

Stole the chicken fingers at night to bring them home. My mom would whip them up.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But it was so exciting in my career, in my life, to be able to, like, go from that moment to the moment where I had a 401k and I could log in and I could see the businesses that I owned and I understood that and I saw the value go up and I got to participate. That. Imagine if every American, when you get your Social Security statement today, all it tells you is a dollar amount and how much you're going to get in the future. Imagine if you logged in and you got to see all the businesses you own a piece of and you got.

[Jason Calacanis]

To participate every single day lighting a Tesla.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And we can fix this. And by the way, we can solve both the sovereign wealth fund question and the Social Security trust fund question. Every dollar that's going into these sovereign wealth fund ideas or if they come to fruition, or in my opinion, and obviously I haven't spoken to Sachs about this, but the crypto fund and all this other sort of stuff, every dollar of that should go into the Social Security Trust Fund. And that Social Security Trust fund should be for the benefit of all Americans. And it should be equities, it should be ownership, it should be participation. In what? The American Dream.

[Jason Calacanis]

How about a blended portfolio?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The American Dream enabled us all to succeed and it should enable everyone else to participate in shares and equity in American enterprise that can come to market. So it's not about a thousand bucks when you're born. It's about an ongoing participation, putting your money in and having that money allocated in a way that America, that smart and wealthy Americans get to allocate it, which is into owning shares and businesses. That's it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Shelcey?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, no, I think it's great. I. Hopefully you guys don't feel like I'm like discrediting you by saying you guys. But I'm just trying to give you guys.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think it's a great, it's an important framing because it's like it, you're, you're 100% right. But like I, you know, we see comments on YouTube like oh, you guys. And I'm like, dude, I remember, like it feels like yesterday when I was in friggin debt. I graduated college with a bunch of debt and I went and like found a job and worked my ass off and I was working 20 hour days and never slept. And like, you know, it wasn't easy. I mean, I feel like very emotional about this right now. Sorry, Hang on.

[Andrew Schulz]

It was hard.

[Jason Calacanis]

Listen, it was hard.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

It wasn't easy, bro.

[Jason Calacanis]

It wasn't given to you.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

None of us inherited. None of us inherited. We came to America and to see the joy of, to, to see what we all benefited from. I'm getting emotional about this, but it's like, well, it's.

[Jason Calacanis]

The American dream's broken, we gotta fix it. We need to have fix it for us right now.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

To have people talk about it as if, as if being successful and, and getting there is a crime. No, no, no, no. It's a dream.

[Jason Calacanis]

It's a dream. Chelsea, go.

[Andrew Schulz]

I think the framing, this is very important. Like my mom is also an immigrant, right? She came here from Scotland. She has no education, they stopped going to school. Like 14 or something like that comes to America and she's this massive success here in terms of like where she came from, where she got to, right? And what she was able to buy, she was able to buy a home in the East Village of New York City. She was able to buy a beach house like just off of like grind and hard work. And what she saw here, which I'm sure a lot of you guys also saw, is opportunity. She had ambition and opportunity. And I think that, that's what I think a lot of times that's what immigrants see when they come here because they probably come from places where they feel absolutely no opportunity. So the second they feel like there's a little of it if they work those 20 hours a week. I mean, I saw my parents grind totally. My work ethic just comes from watching them, you know what I mean? Just watching them just kill it every single day. So what I think that you guys are speaking to, which is really important. And I think it's important that people know your story as well, because it becomes more accessible when they see you Guys, and they know what you came from, and they know you're working at Burger King. And now you guys are worth billions of dollars. It's very important that Americans know that that's possible for them. Maybe not to hit a billion, but maybe to hit a million. Maybe hit 300,000, maybe to buy a house that's $100,000 that they're really proud of.

[Jason Calacanis]

And own it outright.

[Andrew Schulz]

And own it outright. And the fact that this is accessible, like what you just said to me, is just hope and abundance. Like, that's the messaging of what you just said. You said something that made it seem very simple to me. We put this money here. Everybody's now invested in the success of the American economy. And now when we see the stock market ticker, look, green, which is all the average person sees, green or red, we don't really know anything. But when we see green, we get excited.

[Jason Calacanis]

We go, wait, wait, yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

And now the number goes up and we start rooting.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Kimoth feels that way, too. Yeah. Well, he's getting excited right now, as you're saying it, but he's going to.

[Jason Calacanis]

Start crying, oh, wait, it's green today. It's been for a week.

[Andrew Schulz]

But think about, like, CEOs, right? Like, these people have become villainized. Right. And it's because we are not attached to the success of their companies.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That's right.

[Andrew Schulz]

When. If you. If your biggest holding is Tesla, but it doesn't, please believe you're not upset.

[David Sacks]

I think people think that their success now works against your best interests.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yes. Instead of working against your business.

[Jason Calacanis]

And the system's rigged. And the system's rigged and you can't be part of it. And you're being ground down. This is, I think, really good proposal, Freeberg. And if you look at housing, that's the other one. If I run for president, you know what my position is going to be, Chelsea?

[Andrew Schulz]

What's that?

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm going to build five cities with 3 million homes in each. And you can only buy them if you make under X amount per year. It's not going to be like the projects or like, you know, subsidized housing in New York. It's not going to be Stuyvesantown. Okay. It's going to be like, nice houses. It's pretty good if you can get it.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Stufan's not bad, but not like projects. I'm talking about like proper homes, like, built. We are the most innovative country, society ever created. I mean, since the Greeks, they were pretty great, too. But we could build five new cities. Why the can't we build five new cities with 3 million homes in it? Let's do some like Manhattan Project for housing and then healthcare. How the hell do we not have like good healthcare for everybody in this country? We're the richest country in the world, greatest economy, whatever. We should be able to solve those problems. And that's why people don't feel like they're part of this, is because basic housing, basic healthcare and your retirement, it's not like it's rigged against you.

[Andrew Schulz]

This sounds crazy, but for young people, I think they would forgive healthcare if they were invested in the market. And I think being invested in the market is just so daunting. But the feeling that everybody else is getting rich when you're not is the reason why I bought crypto not knowing anything about it. It's the reason why everybody else bought it. It's this feeling that the train is running away and you're not going to be part of it. So how do we get them to feel part of that success?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I think really importantly, you know, today, just, just to give you guys some other statistics, 60% of a middle class household's net worth is in their home. Only 10, 10% of their net worth is in owning the S&P 500 in index funds or whatever in their retirement accounts. And so by creating this American dream around housing and allowing the federal government to provide loans on housing, we've increased the cost of housing. We've created a very like destructive housing bubble in the sense that it has reduced people's exposure to participation in productive value creation, and that's through the ownership of businesses. Instead, we've stored our net worth in a house. And in order to keep the economy and the social structure stable, we've created policies that allow the continuation of the growth in the value of houses. So people feel like their net worth is incrementing.

[David Sacks]

And that's 100% right.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And that's unfortunately very.

[Jason Calacanis]

They restricted making new housing, which makes it worse with the restrictions.

[David Sacks]

Have you guys heard of Warren Buffett's most public failure?

[Andrew Schulz]

No.

[David Sacks]

Warren Buffett's most public failure was when he was brought on as an advisor to Arnold Schwarzenegger, when Schwarzenegger was running for governor. And Buffett kind of looked at the laws in California and there's a law in California when you own a home that when you pass on, you can pass it off to your kids and you can basically keep the cost that you paid in terms of setting the real estate taxes. And it's had an enormously negative effect in unlocking turnover of homes. And that's a large driver of why homes are so expensive in California. So Buffett looked at this and there was a lot of fanfare. Schwarzenegger's like, here's my economic genius. And first thing he said was, guys, I think we should repeal this law. He was gone two days later.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wow, he's not popular.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And by the way, there's a lot of other policies like this. You know, two days later he had to resign. If you do the true kind of like macro analysis, as an investor, you should probably have about 20% of your net worth in the US in real estate, not 60%. And so we need to give people the ability and we need to think about all the follow on and trickle effects of creating a set of laws, a set of policies that basically incentivize almost all of your net worth to go into a single asset, your home. And what that then means in the fact that we have to keep pumping up the value of that home and we have to have a system in order for people to feel like they're getting ahead, keep inflating and eventually people can't afford homes. And that's where we are today.

[Andrew Schulz]

When did you guys first started, start your education in, in the markets? Like at what age did you feel like you sought out?

[Jason Calacanis]

I bought my first stock in the company I was working for or the parent company? The company I was working for in 1989 when I was 18 years old.

[Andrew Schulz]

So 18. What about you, Dave?

[Jason Calacanis]

I bought $300 in stock.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I signed up for an E trade account in college because I saw that TV show called Bull. Do you remember that TV show? It was about investment banking during the dot com bubble. It was such a, no one knows that show. And I was like, man, Wall street is so cool. I want to learn about stocks because I was an astrophysics major. I didn't like, I didn't know what I was going to do after. I was going to go to graduate school or whatever. And then I got caught up in the dot com bubble and I started reading the Wall Street Journal every day. I would take it down to the frigging Plaza and I would read the Journal at school during lunch and I tried to learn about tech and business and markets. Cause I've always been a tech guy and I'm like, man, there's all these startups and this is how the markets work. So I set up an E Trade account, I put some money in it and I started and I bought some Stocks. And I read the Investor Business Business Daily on what stocks to buy. They had a rating. And I bought those stocks and they went up. And I'm like, man, this is awesome. Like, I love owning stocks. And that kind of kicked me off. And then I got an investment banking job after college and it totally changed my career trajectory. I was like, I want to go work in the tech industry and work in business.

[Jason Calacanis]

What about you, Chamath?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And it shifted it up for you.

[Jason Calacanis]

When did you buy your first equity?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

But by the way, sorry, let me just say one thing. What you asked is a really important question. I just realized this, Andrew, because my. My interest in that stock market thing at that time actually changed my career trajectory. And it really reset what I was going to do with my life to get involved in business and go work in the tech industry as opposed to work in science as a researcher. And that was a really big shift for me. So it gave me that kind of feeling of like, oh, I got to learn more. And then that. That kind of changed my career. Sorry, go ahead, chama.

[David Sacks]

I was 14 or 15 years old and there was a. This is when Rodney King had the kicked out of him and almost died. All these race riots in la and nothing had changed actually in America. But where I was growing up in Canada, the provincial government created a program that said, if you're a minority and you're on welfare, we'll pay for you to get a job. I was a minority on welfare. I got a job. And it was at a startup that was just going parabolic and their stock was going nuclear. And I lived in this part of town and I would see the controller of that company drive past me every day while I was waiting for the bus. And one day he stopped and I went with this guy, Sam Legg. He drove me that whole summer and he taught me, what does the company do? Why is the founder a billionaire? What the hell does this even mean?

[Jason Calacanis]

He unpacked it.

[David Sacks]

And so I saw firsthand what it meant to work not for a salary, but to get a stake in the thing that you're working for. I bought a couple shares, it went up, and it was great. But then I really fell in love with this idea that I could understand something and own a piece of it. And then it really accelerated when I graduated from college because I was like, Freeberg, I was in debt, and I was like, how the do I get out of debt? And I traded stocks on behalf of my boss, this guy Mike Fisher, who I thank to this day. And I Made so much money right before the dot com crash. He gave me the money to pay off my student loans.

[Andrew Schulz]

Wow.

[Jason Calacanis]

Wow.

[David Sacks]

And then ever since then, I was hooked. I was like, okay, I can learn this and I can deal with the vicissitudes of this. Look, the markets are brutal. There are moments where you just wake up and it looks like everything's working. And then there are moments, and this is what everybody needs to understand, though, if some of these programs work where it literally looks like the bottom is falling out. And I cannot describe to people the pressure you will feel on behalf of you and your family when it looks like you're taking a 30 or 40 or 50% negative downturn to your net worth. It inflicts a level of psychological damage that I cannot describe to you. And the bigger the numbers get. By the way, I told this story on Tucker, there was a period where I would wake up and I could just tweet and the markets would go up. They were like, what's he going to say next? And then it all stopped. And then there was a two and a half year period where, where I gave it all back and then some.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's frustrating. The Midas touch goes away.

[David Sacks]

It's beyond frustrating. It shakes you to your core. So if we do these programs, I think the Friedberg idea is just beautiful. It's lovely.

[Jason Calacanis]

What about you, Schultz?

[David Sacks]

When did you make the project just to finish? If we do it, we have to try to teach people how to deal with the drawdowns because that's where if you don't teach them how to deal with the volume, the volatility of losing money, it's great when everything's green. But those red days, man, how you comport yourself, how you act, how you treat other people in the red days are the only days that matter.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, it's a growing experience. What about you, Shilsi? When did you buy your first equity?

[Andrew Schulz]

I was probably 35. Oh, think about. So my, I mean, my parents.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

How old are you?

[Andrew Schulz]

I'm 41. So I was maybe even a little bit later now I might have like owned stock without even realizing it type of thing where like I had like a business manager who set up some retirement fund or something like that, but not me actively choosing a stock and buying it. My w. My wife's father in law is a very successful businessman and he's, he's, he's, I don't want to say like predicted the markets really well, but he has, I mean, he was in Nvidia like super early early, early, early, and a bunch of others. And we were like, sitting down and, like, Aspen somewhere. And he, like, said, hey, listen, what do you mean you don't own anything? He goes, hey, can you take a. You know, I don't know if we said 10 grand or 100 grand or something like that. He goes, can you just put it in these different stocks? I go, okay, sure. I open up this, like, E Trade account or whatever the it was. But an interesting thing right there is, like, you guys were so young, was 18, 22, 14. And to me, I think, like, the education of this is really important. Like, my parents did really well, but they're financially illiterate. Like, there is no passing on this, like, knowledge of, like, investing and. Yeah, what it means to invest. Like, they made their money by, like, working every single day for it. Not like you guys don't, but like, they were teaching dance lessons. So it's like, this is how much the dance lesson costs and you pay me and Maybe I'll have 40 people in the class. Okay. More people are paying, and now other teachers can also teach. But it was intimidating to them. It was intended intimidating to me. It still is intimidating to me.

[Jason Calacanis]

Well, this is the, I think, the upside of crypto in some ways, also the upside of prize picks or, you know, gambling, poker. It's the upside of Robinhood and Coinbase and all these things being available. This generation, generation bet, like, they love to gamble. These young kids.

[Andrew Schulz]

This is my concern.

[Jason Calacanis]

No, but they're learning. They're learning how to take the downdrafts.

[Andrew Schulz]

They are learning. I think they are learning. So maybe, like, the barrier to entry is less. But my concern is that they're treating it more like gambling than investing. And I think that we've almost like, tricked the American public into thinking that investing is gambling, when the way that you guys are describing is it's not. It's like investing in the S and P and then leaving it there and taking those downturns and for it to come back up.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah, but here's the thing. You have to learn these lessons at the poker table. You cannot play poker without real money, or else you're not going to get the burn. You're not going to stay up at night.

[Andrew Schulz]

How do we.

[Jason Calacanis]

So that's what these kids are doing.

[Andrew Schulz]

How do we educate them? It's not every kid, right?

[Jason Calacanis]

The education comes from doing. And if you let these kids trade, they will figure it out over time. And then what happens is, like, you, they get married, they get a baby, they want to get a house. And then they say, you know what? I'm going to stop buying Meme coins. I'm going to start buying bitcoin. I'm going to stop buying bitcoin, I'm going to buy Nvidia and things with real revenues.

[Andrew Schulz]

They just get addicted to gambling all the time.

[David Sacks]

Exactly. I agree with Schultz. I don't think that. I think you're being super reductive, like, oh, they'll get on the all of a sudden understand Dave Swensen's Yale endowment asset allocation model bullshit. They won't. I have seen thousands and thousands and thousands of guys over time who deeply steeped in this business wash out and each to a one. The more sophisticated they get, they all fall to the same pressures, which is they don't know how to simplify and they don't know how to be patient. These are things that every human being needs to learn. And I don't think time in the market actually solves those two traits. Those are psychological traits that you have to go and figure out in a different way. You look inside yourself and you have to figure those out.

[Jason Calacanis]

Okay, yeah, fair enough. But between the choice of, hey, we're going to grow up blue collar. We have no access to these markets. We have no way to trade in them. We have no way to learn. And then today, I think the system we have today is better. Can people go off the jump the fence and lose all their money? Of course they can. But they could go to Vegas and do that. Prior to that, they could work with a bookie. They could do football sheets. I think they're learning. And when you use some of these modern apps and you look at the strategies and you see people on Reddit working on these stocks and their thesis, I think it's trending in the right way. There can always be more education. But this is.

[Andrew Schulz]

Let's hope.

[Jason Calacanis]

Don't bet on the jets, right?

[Andrew Schulz]

I said it before, don't bet on the Jetson. Does even know what compound interest is?

[David Sacks]

I agree with you. In fact, I'll tell you a great story.

[Jason Calacanis]

Work to do.

[David Sacks]

One of the best things that happened when I invested in the Golden State Warriors. I bought 10% of the team in 2011 or something. I got to meet all of them and I got to meet a lot of my heroes. And I remember one meeting where I sat with a goatee like player, let's just put it that way.

[Jason Calacanis]

We'll bleep it out. We'll bleep it out.

[David Sacks]

No, I don't want to say his name, but okay, fair enough. And he asked me the most incredible question. He's like, chamath, can you explain compound interest? And Schulz, I can tell you, I still have this spreadsheet. I just showed him a compound interest table, and he had no idea how 8% versus 10% is gargantuan.

[Andrew Schulz]

Over 50 years. Over 20 years. Yeah.

[David Sacks]

And to your point, it was illuminating that you're right. Unless you go and you jump into it and you live it. And, Jason, I agree with you. Like, there's nothing like, look, Stan Druckenmiller says the same thing. Invest, then investigate. Like, there's nothing like putting the risk on. Okay. There's nothing like playing a hand in poker. There's nothing like taking a shot at a different strategy. In blackjack, win or lose, you get feedback. But my point is, most people don't get better. And so that's what you have to solve, is, like, how can you make it interesting, fun? How can you talk about the losses? Like, this is a thing that I had immense trouble with. I still do today. I think I've gotten better with it, is to be able to talk about the losses. How do you talk about getting whacked for $4 billion? I can do it now, but it's brutal.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. It's done for a while. You know what?

[David Sacks]

You saw me.

[Jason Calacanis]

You're a better person since you said.

[David Sacks]

You saw me go through it. How ashamed was I for the two years that I had to unwind that shit?

[Jason Calacanis]

It was hard for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was hard.

[Andrew Schulz]

I mean, imagine your whole identity is built into you being successful in these markets.

[David Sacks]

And you measure it the wrong way. Like, you point to the number in the bank account, not the way your wife treats you, not the way your kids treat you, not the way your friends treat you. And then you're like, okay, well, I'm 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80% poorer, so I'm just that much less of a human being.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. But that's a good reality check to lean into family and those things that matter.

[David Sacks]

So my point is, like, if you can. If we can get people more into the market, I think it's an incredible thing, but you have to wrap it in these guardrails that have nothing to do with the market. Everything to do with who you are as a person.

[Andrew Schulz]

And I think, like, the first step is showing, like, what is the most simplistic version of the benefit of the market? I think it's compound. Interesting. I really think that that is if we Start there. Like, remove the stock market. Don't even talk about it. Just like, what happens if I left it in a savings account that's getting.

[Jason Calacanis]

4% and I don't touch it?

[David Sacks]

Right.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I. You know, the rule of 72. That was the one that opened my brain up. So the rule of 72 is whatever the percentage you grow per month divided into 72. So let's say you were growing 7.2% in the market per year. Divide that. It takes 10 years to double your money. So it's a time to double your money.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

If you were growing 7% a month, you know, on whatever your investments are, let's say you got a great business that's growing, like Facebook or something like that. That means you double the number of users or revenue every 7.2 months. Once you understand that, you can do it quickly, just like in poker. You know, the number of outs each card represents roughly 2% chance because there's 50 of them. Right. So they each account for about 2%. Then you can start doing this stuff in the back of your head. I had this idea, I think I talked about it here on the program of doing a kids investment club, and I bought the domain Kids investment club. I actually need to do this. I gotta prioritize this and find a CEO for it or do it as a nonprofit or something. Just, kids need to learn this early.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Robinhood or somebody should make an app where they can invest like a shadow, but it's, you know, like, with their parents. Maybe they can make the trade, the parent approves it. Something like that. There's something where we should be learning all this in high school. This should be like, what's more important than this?

[Andrew Schulz]

Remove the fear. Remove the fear. And the reason it's important is what we were saying earlier. Get the American people invested in American success, and you will find so much more patriotism. You will not find us nitpicking on all these little things that a lot of us maybe go, why is this such a big deal? Like the bathroom, like, most of us are unaffected. I cannot begin to explain how quickly we'll forget about the bathrooms when the S and p is up 15% and you're looking at your portfolio, and you're like, you could take a. Wherever you want. Okay.

[Jason Calacanis]

Absolutely. Yes.

[Andrew Schulz]

I had.

[Jason Calacanis]

You've got something else to focus on.

[Andrew Schulz]

Absolutely.

[Jason Calacanis]

Look at this. Hey, Friedberg, here's your time machine. Check it out. There's your favorite show. I don't want to make you more emotional, but there he is. Your guy, Stanley Tucci from bull. I think it only made t. I.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Think it only made it one season.

[Jason Calacanis]

One season. But Tucci gang in full effect.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I was such a tech nerd growing up, but I never thought about the business of technology. And then the startup boom happened and you got this bullshow on TV and I'm like, man, this is so much more exciting than sitting in a frigging lab doing mathematical modeling where I was like pulling my friggin hair out. I'm like, I want to get after that and the rest is history, you know?

[David Sacks]

Have you guys watched Stanley Tucci on HBO where he tours Italy and he does these little.

[Jason Calacanis]

So great. And on TikTok I've all seen it and I've seen him cook on TikTok. He's like, today is it rolling? It's rolling. Today I'm going to make you a fruit of the mer. It's got. But I'm doing it in the capaccio base and we're going to put. And I'm like, I just. Can this guy do ASMR or put me to bed at night? He is. I've got a man crush on Tucci.

[David Sacks]

Tucci's the best.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, he's. I would like to roll with Tucci. Can you imagine if we went to Italy and just had like a. Just roll with Tucci through Italy? Oh, I love that guy.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Any dream is possible, Jake. You could pull it.

[Jason Calacanis]

I know where. We're all dreaming here. We're all dreaming here. All right.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

We're still dreamers, by the way. Really important. Everyone should know that. I think, like there's no. The thing that a lot of people assume this is the true about humans in general is there's an end to the rainbow, but there isn't. You ride the rainbow till you die. That's it. And there's always hope. There's always dreams, there's always more and it doesn't stop. So it makes it fun.

[Jason Calacanis]

Are you taking the ketamine in Austin or something? What happened? You just got all full of smoking.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I'm a little hungover today. I started drinking at 10am yesterday.

[Jason Calacanis]

We went to. We went to the mothership last night.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, how was it?

[Jason Calacanis]

And we. Well, we hung out with a couple of your boys, I think.

[Andrew Schulz]

Who did you hang out with?

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Tony. Well, Tony, of course.

[Jason Calacanis]

Tony was very nice.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

And Shane Gillis was there.

[Jason Calacanis]

Shane Gillis was there, but he was big time. He was big time. There was a mob around. We didn't get to meet him. The guy Bert who Take. I didn't recognize. Yeah, he had his shirt on, so I didn't recognize him. Yeah, I was like. But then I saw the body shape and I was like, yeah, that's. That's probably. Probably him. When did you start in comedy?

[Andrew Schulz]

I was. I think it's almost been like 18 years or something like that.

[Jason Calacanis]

So you started in your early 20s in New York, going to the Funny Bone or what?

[David Sacks]

I have a question, actually. Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

How'd you get into it?

[David Sacks]

How do you keep your, like, how do you pay for your life before you make it? Like what, like, is it that you have a normal day job?

[Andrew Schulz]

I lived, I lived with my parents for like a very long time. Like, my parents lived in the East Village, so I was walking distance from like multiple comedy clubs. It was, you know, incredibly easy. I mean, I worked like with my parents for a little bit. Then I managed restaurants and I like just managed them.

[Jason Calacanis]

You managed restaurants in Manhattan?

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, I did. I started in Santa Barbara when I was going to college. That's where I did my first comedy gig. And then I managed a restaurant out in Brooklyn and. Oh, really? Not which one would I know it or biscuit barbecue.

[Jason Calacanis]

It was in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

[Andrew Schulz]

And then, then I started to make a little money in stand up and it was like enough to like buy a Mamoon's falafel. I like had like a five.

[Jason Calacanis]

You had falafel money?

[Andrew Schulz]

I had, I had a five to ten dollars a day budget. Like I could eat cereal for breakfast. And then I just. And I saved some money. Cause I was going to school, when I was going to school, I was working at that restaurant and I like saved some money and like I had a little pipe dream of opening up a bar with a friend of mine in New York. And then I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna spend this money trying to be a comedian. And I hope by the time I get rid of the money, I'm making money at comedy. And it came down to like $700 in my bank account. I was like renting out the room where I slept in, and I would sleep in a closet in my apartment. And it just. And it worked out. It just worked out. I started making a couple money, do a couple gigs, start touring, got on.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

The rest is history.

[Andrew Schulz]

And then it, then it kind of worked out.

[David Sacks]

Was there a moment that, where. Yeah, because when you, when, you know, when the cancel culture was alive and well, that's when I first encountered you. It was initially on TikTok. Actually, sure. And you were on fire because you were saying stuff nobody else was saying. And I thought, how does he even dare to pull this off? And yeah. Was there a moment that where you broke or you tipped or not?

[Andrew Schulz]

So I. You kind of like, it's interesting. You kind of break and then you go away. Like, so I. So I broke on like some MTV shows and I was, you know, doing all these things on MTV at my own shows and all that kind of stuff. And then I kind of, you know, the MTV thing kind of dried up and then I kind of went away. But I was luckily doing this podcast with Charlemagne and the podcast was very popular and that was like providing for me. And then I was doing some shows on the road and, you know, people would come out from the podcast, but. And then I really couldn't get any traction in stand up world. So when I was doing like comedy stuff with mtv, it wasn't really in the stand up world. And this because my standup maybe wasn't of the ilk of what was like, popular at the time. And I have a lot of empathy, by the way, for like the people who are just working at a network, they're producing these shows.

[Jason Calacanis]

Like they.

[Andrew Schulz]

Their kids in private school. I want to tell a crazy joke about women or gays or whatever it is, and they're like, I'm not trying to get fired. And like, I'm just trying. My kids in private school, we just got them into Dalton. I don't want to rock the boat. Like, you know, reasonable, you understand?

[Jason Calacanis]

Like, I don't think that they're self preservation exactly.

[Andrew Schulz]

But I didn't want to change my comedy. So I was like, okay, where can I put it out? And luckily we're putting the podcast out on YouTube. It was successful. And I just started putting things out on YouTube and I started doing these shows and these shows started selling out. It was like really weird. Like, the first thing I put out, I sold out the next weekend. And I was never sold out.

[Jason Calacanis]

How many seats were.

[Andrew Schulz]

These are like 300 seat clubs. And you do maybe four or five shows a weekend and you get 50.

[Jason Calacanis]

Bucks a seat, 20 bucks a seat.

[Andrew Schulz]

You get a flat rate, you get two grand to do the weekend or something like that. And a lot of these times the comedy clubs would just like call people and say, hey, do you want to see this guy? And give away the tickets for free. It was really. The old model was basically, it's like a bar, so you just get the people in and they sell the drinks. So the weekend would sell out, and then another one would sell out. And I was like, holy. Maybe. Maybe there's something. There's a conversion rate that I didn't see. And I kept putting stuff out on YouTube. I would do a new clip every week for a year on YouTube. Then I put these special on YouTube instead. And then I learned very quickly that there was this huge, like, white space in the market. Like, the comedy on TV was corny and people didn't really like it, and nobody was putting out, like, the quote, unquote, like, real comedy. There's different versions of comedy, but I'm being very simplistic. And the more edgy stuff I put on YouTube and it just exploded. And, yeah, my career kind of really took off from there. And then Covid came around, and there was. I was able to be a little bit more honest because I wasn't tied to a network and worried about maybe losing my job at the network.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

And then it just. I think in America, we reward bravery. Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You just signed a Netflix deal, right? I mean, you did this show. Yeah, we're actually doing the show in Austin tonight, where we're going to talk with some folks about this general concept where you start out as kind of an independent. Say whatever you want, you're totally free. It's your own platform. It's your own voice. And then you go sign a deal with another platform. Like, are you now, you know, do you find it hard to trade the money for whatever might come along with that? There's restrictions. There's.

[Andrew Schulz]

There's two ways. There's two ways to look at it. Right. It's like, there's one. Like, I think that I don't want to give myself too much credit here.

[David Sacks]

There's.

[Andrew Schulz]

But, like, I think that what we did is created another marketplace for comedy that the streaming networks had to now compete with.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

So they were losing comics to YouTube because it was more advantageous to put your Comedy up on YouTube and build a following and then go sell tickets on the road. Whereas before, the only way you could, like, really make a big chunk of money on your comedy is if you got one of these fancy specials. Now people are like, I don't even want to do the special because if I put it on YouTube, I can tour for years and really build a fan base so they have this autonomy. The Netflix thing is interesting because, like, Netflix is the second biggest, I guess, streaming service on the planet. It's like YouTube than Netflix. So if I already have this huge imprint on YouTube, it would only be smart for me to now tap into the second biggest and see if there's some people there that aren't consuming my content on YouTube.

[David Sacks]

So then back to the. The guy who's got the. The kid at Dalton. Now, when you go and negotiate a deal with Netflix, are they basically silent or do they have not a single note? Yeah. So you do whatever you want, and it is what it is. Let it rip.

[Andrew Schulz]

Now, my last special was supposed to be with Amazon, so it was with Amazon, and they had some notes, and I bought it back from them, and I put it out myself.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Really? Wow.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, And I sold it. I sold it myself. And it was actually one of the coolest things ever, because I think I may be one of the only comics that actually knows what they're worth. Yeah, you don't really know what you're.

[David Sacks]

Well, walk us through that. So you do it. And what do the notes say? That you're like, yeah, it was two jokes.

[Andrew Schulz]

And, like, I get it. They make money selling toilet paper. Like, why are they gonna have this huge. You know.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

You made fun of the toilet paper industry. I got it.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

Big toilet paper, big tp, very powerful lobby.

[Andrew Schulz]

You know, what's funny is, like, culture has changed. And I feel like a lot of times the streamers are, like, downriver from culture. So, like, I bet now I would be able to put it out on Amazon and be totally fine. But at that time, it was maybe very edgy and a volatile time culturally, so I was able to put it out. And, you know.

[David Sacks]

But you had the choice, Right. You could have taken the jokes out and kept it, but then instead, you took the harder path, which is, I'm just going to buy it back.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

And I take the risk, and I'll figure it out later.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, I'm not risk averse at all. I actually enjoy risk. It kind of excites me. But what excites me more is, like, putting out the piece exactly how I want to put it out. And I can't, like, scream about censorship. And comedians should do the jokes we want to do. And then the second somebody gives me a big check, I go, whoa, we don't have to do the job. Like, I have to be at least consistent on that. And culture continue to change. And you got to give Netflix credit, too. Like, they took a lot of. They took a lot of hits for putting out comedy that some people thought was maybe a little bit too offensive.

[Jason Calacanis]

The Chappelle.

[David Sacks]

Chappelle stuff is really.

[Jason Calacanis]

That put him in the crosshairs.

[Andrew Schulz]

Exactly.

[Jason Calacanis]

They stood strong, right?

[Andrew Schulz]

Absolutely. They stood strong. And, like, seeing that gave me a lot of confidence. I was like, okay, like. And they literally, we just made the whole thing and they just gave us money. So, like, they were not involved at all in, like, the creation. So to say they. They were involved in giving us money for it, and then they're involved in the marketing, obviously, and their algorithm and getting it.

[Jason Calacanis]

That's all Sarandos. He's. He believes in comedy.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah. He's like a huge comedy fan from back in the day. I think people don't realize that about him. Like, you need somebody who actually loves the art and is not just looking at it as a thing that they can monetize. Like, there's a term this guy used that you have to find somebody spiritually aligned with you, and that's not mumbo jumbo. It, like, they truly understand the intention of comedy, so things aren't as hurtful or painful to them because they understand what you intend to do. So. And then I got interesting, too.

[Jason Calacanis]

They tried to cancel you. What was the joke? The mobs. Because they went after Tony Hinchcliffe twice.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And each time he went 10x. They came after Chamath on this program. That was the first level up. We got three times the audience after they tried to cancel Chamath.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

The White House released a statement.

[Andrew Schulz]

It doesn't. It doesn't. It doesn't really work when you have, like, core fans that believe in you. And I feel like you guys have probably built that, you know, the relationships you've built with your fans. There's probably people very grateful of the information that you give them. And so when they try to paint you in a certain light, you actually have, like, a hundred hours of time with those people that they know you to be more than that one statement that you've said. So now they're not as concerned about that thing you said that maybe is taken out of context or people have been offended by. I think the biggest thing that people miss about comedians is, like, you're allowed to be offended by the joke that I say. Like, you're allowed to react however the you want to react about it. You had your life, you went through some crazy shit. Maybe you're. Maybe you were bullied as. As a kid, and, like, you don't want other people to potentially have those feelings. So you see a joke that could elicit that, and you're like, I want to protect that from that. Protect them from that. That's kind of noble. I'm Like, I'm cool with that. If you yourself tell me you don't like me teasing you, I'm not going to tease you personally ever again. I want you to feel good, but it doesn't mean that I won't continue to make those jokes somewhere else. And I think my shows, like, I got the most diverse audience in comedy history.

[David Sacks]

Yeah, you do.

[Andrew Schulz]

So it's like you come out to one of my shows, you can't tell me that people don't like these jokes. And I try very hard to, like. Like, if I'm curious about your culture, you'll know it through the jokes. It's not some little bullshit. Like, I'll try to dive deep and even surprise you about something that I might know. And I think in that way, people start to feel seen and they don't feel bullied. They actually feel, like, represented, and they're, like, excited about it.

[David Sacks]

Look, you said something at the beginning which I thought was really interesting, which is you're like a. You have to. Great comedians are great observers of culture. So can you. Can you just tell us, like, just observe the cultural moment. What. We talked a lot about it, but I just want you to be. Maybe, like, put a point on it. Where are we? Where's America? What the hell is going on?

[Andrew Schulz]

Like, what's happened? What's happening?

[David Sacks]

However you feel that question, like, what the hell is going on?

[Andrew Schulz]

All time. Low confidence in institutions, low confidence in information. There's an obsession with conspiracy because there's. I mean, that's twofold. One, like, it's the easiest way for dumb people to feel smart. Like, when you know something no one else knows and you get to share with people. Like, there's that, like, dopamine hit where, like, I bet you didn't know this happened, you know? Yeah. But those thrive in times where there's not real transparency. So I think everybody's looking for answers, and nothing is exactly how it seems. And the only way to reinstall that confidence is, I think, like, brutal transparency. Like, you got to just be, like, really honest with the people. This is what it is. And we're Americans. We're proud people, you know, so we can get through whatever you say, but you got to tell it to us as it is. And I think we're just assessing relationships right now. And I think, like, when the economy is rough, like, you're seeing all the Jewish stuff right now. Right? Like, obviously with the conference.

[Jason Calacanis]

Crazy.

[Andrew Schulz]

Well, this is the thing you gotta understand, like, most people have never met a Jewish person like, most Americans have no clue what a Jewish person is outside of Curb Enthusiasm or Seinfeld. They don't know what it is. They think Jews are Upper east side New Yorkers.

[Jason Calacanis]

Like, yeah, the. Like Seinfeld or they think it's like Hasidim. Like, it's just like one or the other.

[Andrew Schulz]

Exactly. They don't even know what, like a Sephardic Jew. They don't know what an African. African Jew is. Or Morocco Jew. They have no clue what that is, and they shouldn't. They're like, how many Jews are there? They're like more people from Laos than there are Jews. Right? Like, it's like a very small population. So I think there's, like, a little bit of a disconnect. And, you know, when you don't know a people, and I think this is probably true, and I could be off, but I think there's like, an ambient feeling towards Jews from people who don't know Jews. It's an ambient light. And the stereotypes are probably not like, the best. They're not exactly negative. As long as the economy's good, right? They're like, oh, they. They're successful. They kind of stick together. They. They own businesses. They. Whatever. And as long as the economy's good, everybody's cool. And then eggs get expensive and you're behind on your rent and you don't feel hope and, you know, and then you start going, why do they got all that? What the. What are they about? Why are they. Why are they separatists? You know, like, I'm here proselytizing. I'm trying to get everybody to go to heaven, and they just got their own thing, and it's very easy for them to become this, like, other group. And then you extrapolate that with what's happening, like Palestine and Israel, and you get people to start, like, assessing, like, the relationship between America and another country. Like, you saw America become very uninterested in Ukraine quickly. Like, we, We. The second economy goes down, we start going, well, what do they do for us? What. Why are we giving them, like. And they're starting to ask similar questions about Israel. And there's a lot of anti Semites that are jumping on it, and they're muddying the whole thing. They're going, ah, this is what did they control the government? They do this all the. Every conspiracy.

[Jason Calacanis]

We told you so this time, by.

[David Sacks]

The way, you're speaking a profound secret that many administrations in government have known for a long time. And I think this is where some of the Mistrust comes from. I talked about this, maybe it was a couple months ago, but the most incredible stock market was actually under Biden. The most amount of money printed was under Biden. The most cumulative total budget deficits was under Biden. The most amount of share short term refinancing of debt was under Biden. And part of what you can explain is that if you keep the signals that everything is healthy or up, you're allowed to propagate all of these other things that would get very quickly recapitulated. And when you take the gas out of the market and you take the gas out of all these other markets and all of a sudden the price of energy is up and the price of this is up and the price of that is up, then you start to question, hold on a second. Why are all of these things as important? You know, the above the line, below the line conversation that we have tried to have several times on this pot.

[Jason Calacanis]

Jason. Yeah.

[Andrew Schulz]

And you have to like, meet people. You have to meet people where they feel in order to communicate with them. Right. Like they could. Like when people right now are like assessing like America's relationship with Israel, like it's, it's. And they, you hear these like, soundbites like, that's our closest ally. And then they go, well, what does that mean? It's like, well, let's explain to them what that means. Like, let's explain the importance of that relationship and how it's beneficial to Americans. Because if you don't explain it and you just go, just be quiet, whatever, then they start to look at these lunatics on Twitter and start to go, wait a minute, is that, is that true? Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then they're down the conspiracy hall.

[Andrew Schulz]

Like, you have to explain, like, I don't know what the mineral deal was about, but I know for with, with Ukraine, but I know for a second there are some Americans who go, oh, we're going to get some minerals out of that. All right. Minerals sound good?

[Jason Calacanis]

Like it's going to pay us back.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's that, it's that simplistic, right? So it's like, I think, I think that kind of communication is important and it will actually help understand these relationships, which I imagine are very important. I'm not privy to all the geopolitical decisions that are going on there. Who knows? Intelligence from Israel could have thwarted 20 more 9 11s. Yeah, maybe you can't say that because you expose the intelligence operatives you have in the field, but it would, I think, be helpful to understand the value of that for the everyday American. So that when you see something crazy on Twitter, you can go, okay, you're just a anti Semite and you're looking for a justification for your hate.

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, this is your point about Trump. Sometimes he has these, Take care.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

We'll see you later, bro.

[Andrew Schulz]

Take care.

[Jason Calacanis]

David, this is like, I think the.

[Andrew Schulz]

Point earlier about that right now, I just want to let you know.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

You just.

[Andrew Schulz]

The Jew talked about Israel and he's.

[Jason Calacanis]

Like, all right, I'm only one Jewish guy left. I'm ready to go. Way to go, Chelsea.

[Andrew Schulz]

This is how it starts, David.

[Jason Calacanis]

David.

[Andrew Schulz]

This is how it starts.

[David Sacks]

You drove him out. Thanks a lot.

[Jason Calacanis]

You drove him out. Right, Chelsea, when you said, you know, Trump's a masterful kind of communicator here. Biden gave all these weapons to Ukraine under the auspices of what's called a loan lease. They have to pay them back. But Biden never communicated that well, tell us. And then Trump comes out, he's like, you know what? We gave them 180 million. 180 billion. They're gonna give us 500 billion back. We're making a 40. He basically described a 42% compounded return.

[Andrew Schulz]

Sounds good.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yeah. Better than anything that's ever happened. I mean, he's out there in terms of his ability to communicate at chamath. As we wrap here, any final thoughts?

[David Sacks]

What do you think about Trump and how he's doing and what he's doing so far? And what do you think about Elon and Doge?

[Jason Calacanis]

Who.

[Andrew Schulz]

Okay, so Trump and what he's doing, how he's doing so far? Like, I don't know. Like, in other words, like, I don't. I don't know if I can, like, assess it right away. Maybe I'm giving him a little bit longer, like, landing strip or whatever than other people because I have a little bit more hope or optimism. Again, if you don't like the guy, you're going see how horrible this is immediately. But I'm going to give him a little bit more leeway to see if it doesn't work out. And it's really horrible, I'll be the first person to call it out. Like, I. He's in power. We should definitely check the people in power. But I'm hoping that these actions in the short term are beneficial in the long term. Is everyone going to work out? No. Doge is like, I'm so depressed about. Not depressed and stupid, but, like, I'm bummed about, because I don't think there's any American that is pro waste, inefficiency and bloat. This should be a bipartisan issue. Like, all Americans should be coming together, going, oh, my God, the DMV is going to get better. This sounds awesome. And I think, you know, I have a lot of respect for Elon, but I think sometimes on Twitter he's like twisting the knife a little bit and it's like, you don't need to twist the knife. Like, we all want this. This is something we can come together as a country and support. This sounds great. Don't twist it. Just kind of let it be. Show your wins. When you do something wrong, we can acknowledge the things that we did are wrong and we'll respect that. It bums me that this has become so partisan. And I do understand there are a lot of people on the left that are making this partisan as well.

[Jason Calacanis]

They're weaponizing.

[David Sacks]

There was this crazy clip between Rogan and Elon where Rogan was like, how does all this go down, actually? And he's like, well, I can't really speak about the corruption because I'm afraid it would get me assassinated. He's like, actually, if I tell you what, I know it was the weirdest two minute clip. And then they just kind of left it and moved on. And my brain was like, what are they talking about? What. What must be going on?

[Jason Calacanis]

I mean, there's a lot of money going out the door.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, but who's killing Eli? Like, if we are going to have World War 3, don't you want the guy that has the rockets that go to Mars on your side?

[David Sacks]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

You kind of want the super genius on your side for sure.

[Andrew Schulz]

Another thing that's like, really interesting to me, people keep going. People keep doing this things like, what is Elon's play? Like, what is he doing here? Like, is he actually going to take over? And it's like, Elon has been dealing with, like local government for so long, trying to push through. Like, he is not an American citizen. He cannot be president. He is at the highest position he will ever be in his lifetime in America. You can't get higher than being the right hand man of the president. Since you're not from America, you can't ever be president. So I think he's going to behave really well because now he's in the most powerful position he will ever be in. If you want to talk about, like, power plays, you got to watch out for J.D. that guy's a. That guy's high emotional intelligence. Like that. That's somebody that I would be keeping my eyes on if I'm Trump. But Elon, he's going to be a good. He's going to be your best friend. Because it's only downhill if he pisses Trump off.

[Jason Calacanis]

Interesting. Interesting little Manchurian candidate for J.D.

[Andrew Schulz]

No, no, no. I'm not saying that he's going to do anything bad, but he is like, don't. Don't treat him light. Like, we got this.

[Jason Calacanis]

Don't sleep on jd.

[Andrew Schulz]

New Yorkers, we do this all the time. We hear someone with, like, a Southern accent, we think they're a goofball, and it's like, that guy went from, like, a broken home to Yale, Appalachia to.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yale, and then the VP and he's 40. He's your age. He's like, 40.

[Andrew Schulz]

He called Trump Hitler or something, and he ended up as his.

[Jason Calacanis]

He said, I'm a never Trump guy.

[Andrew Schulz]

He's. So to say that he's not emotionally intelligent. Does it say that he doesn't know how to manage up or whatever that term is?

[Jason Calacanis]

He's sappy.

[Andrew Schulz]

Hey, keep an eye on him.

[Jason Calacanis]

Keep an eye on him. For sure. All right, listen, Andrew Schultz is playing at the Funny Bone on April 16th and 17th. He'll be the Chuckles on the 20th. Two drink minimum. Buy the veal. You know where to find them. Incredible. Incredible. Netflix special.

[David Sacks]

Who do you think? Who do you. Wait, last question. Who do you think is the funniest? If you had to just take a wild stab at who the funniest? No. Me, me, Jason, or Freebie.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, between the three of you. Okay, so you can say me, Jason. So Jason is the most, like, naturally inclined to be funny. He's probably just the most funny being around. Chamath will probably get the biggest laughs when he says something funny because he's like. He's not asking for much. Like, he'll just say something that's like a dart, and it will kind of, like, hit you, and you'll be like, oh, got it. And then I think David will, like, structure something really funny, and you'll be like, oh, that was a clever. I see how you did that right there.

[Jason Calacanis]

I. I was actually, when I was an astrophysicist, Chelsea, I am. So that would be myself. I did summer stock.

[Andrew Schulz]

How am I, like, I think if we're off the pod, I think Chamath says some, like, wild. That everybody goes, what the. I think you say that the most. That's what I would say.

[Jason Calacanis]

There you go.

[Andrew Schulz]

All right.

[Jason Calacanis]

Andy Schultz picks me. There you have it, Mom. I would like to clip that. And. Yeah, all right. Continued success. Come back anytime.

[David Sacks]

I like the way Schultz pronounces, but I may go to chamath. I like that. Yeah, chamath is too. It's too used, actually. We should go to a different pronunciation.

[Jason Calacanis]

I love chamath. Chamth is just so incorrect.

[Andrew Schulz]

It's tough with. I know you, Sri Lanka, but it's tough with the names from over there. Like my podcast co host, Akash. Right?

[David Sacks]

Akash, everybody.

[Andrew Schulz]

She's Akash. Now. I. His name is spelled with two A's.

[David Sacks]

A's.

[Andrew Schulz]

So it's like a you. If it's got two A's next to each other.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Yeah.

[David Sacks]

You want to go to the K.

[Andrew Schulz]

You would go there, but it's Akash, so it is tricky. But he said, like, his parents specifically picked a name he thought that Americans would be able to pronounce.

[Jason Calacanis]

Calculated that and like, they were trolling him.

[Andrew Schulz]

I think that's like a. I think that's a really beautiful thing for a kid like you. You go, bro.

[Jason Calacanis]

How much they could have named him John Steve if they wanted it for.

[Andrew Schulz]

They had to keep it real, though. They still had.

[Jason Calacanis]

They were keeping it real. They were keeping it real.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

8.

[David Sacks]

When I could. When I could read and write English well. 8. Okay. Because it was my second language. And when I saw my name written out, I was like, what the did they do to me here? What is this going. My middle name. My middle Name is like 15 other letters.

[Andrew Schulz]

Hold on.

[David Sacks]

My middle name.

[Andrew Schulz]

A name that has math in it. Like, they knew what they wanted.

[Jason Calacanis]

Yes. They were like, if you can. If you can pronounce this, you can solve the Pythagorean theorem.

[David Sacks]

So true.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

This is. This is harder than the Pythagorean theorem.

[David Sacks]

Be an engineer.

[Jason Calacanis]

Oh, he's.

[David Sacks]

I'm so proud of him.

[Jason Calacanis]

He's going to figure it out. He'll get us to Mark.

[David Sacks]

He's going to get us.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let me ask you a question, Andrew. Is it racist if I do an Indian impersonation? Because I know I can do Italian and Irish, but can I do Indian?

[David Sacks]

Oh, it's funny, bro.

[Andrew Schulz]

I think so. But I think it's like, is it the intent?

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm just.

[Andrew Schulz]

I don't even think it's the intent. I think if you, like, if you say certain things, like, if you say bitter, right? Like, if you say that, like, that's like my love. Like, you know, if you say little things that are more than just the sound, but if you tap into the culture like to let them know, hey, I didn't learn this from the Simpsons and I learned it from my buddy's family. Then I think you'll see people who are like, Indian, Sri Lankan, they'll be like, oh, he. Oh, he got. He's got friends. He got. He knows.

[Jason Calacanis]

I'm gonna. I'm gonna go ahead and. Until I make my comedian, I'm not gonna do it. I'm gonna save it to. When I get my Tony. Kill Tony set.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right.

[Andrew Schulz]

What's your Korean acts? Can you do that? Like, can we go through?

[Jason Calacanis]

I can go Korean because my wife's Korean and her dad. I'll tell you where my.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I can.

[Jason Calacanis]

Because my dad, my father in law, I went to China, he's an industrialist.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

He's there.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I said, hey, listen, I'd like to marry your daughter. And he said, okay. Two conditions. And I said, okay. And he said, do it fast. And he poked me, Andrew, so hard, like a reinforced poke with his finger.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

On my shoulder. Get a bruise.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

I'm like, off.

[Andrew Schulz]

Yeah.

[Jason Calacanis]

And then he goes. And I said, what's the second thing? He says, no refunds. He says it just like that. And I was like, okay, okay.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Marry a daughter.

[Jason Calacanis]

No refunds.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Do it fast.

[Andrew Schulz]

And I literally had to marry her.

[Jason Calacanis]

Within a year because he knew. He was like, listen, I got. He had four daughters. And he's like, I gotta move inventory.

[Andrew Schulz]

I love it.

[Jason Calacanis]

And I was the first. I married the oldest daughter. None of the other daughters could get married until I married my wife, which was the greatest thing I ever did. Three beautiful kids. You know how it is. And listen, good luck. You're going to have a second and third Shelton, I know you got some ads.

[Andrew Schulz]

I hope so, man. God will do it.

[Jason Calacanis]

Three is the right number. If you want to go. If you want to do a half elon, you can go with Chamat's plan. He's on six or seven, bro.

[David Sacks]

I'm on five.

[Jason Calacanis]

Five. And. Well, I mean, anything's possible. And then Freeberg's on four, I'm on three. I think three is the right number.

[Andrew Schulz]

I'm going to catch up, boys. I'm going to catch up.

[Jason Calacanis]

All right, listen, success. Thanks for doing.

[Andrew Schulz]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Jason Calacanis]

Let your winners ride Rain Man David Satch.

[Andrew Schulz]

And instead we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

[David Sacks]

Love you.

[Jason Calacanis]

Besties are gone.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

That is my dog thinking.

[Jason Calacanis]

Going to notice your driveway.

[Andrew Schulz]

Oh, man.

[David Sacks]

My habit will meet me at. We should all just get a room and just have one big, huge orgy because they're all this useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

[Chamath Palihapitiya]

Your be we need to get merch our.

[Andrew Schulz]

I'm going all in.