All right everybody today on the All In Podcast we're joined by our friend Ben Shapiro and we have a full Docket including Trump's trip to the Middle East the executive order on Farmer benefits we talk a little bit about mock meat being banned in Montana and Friedberg is really upset. He drops at this box. Yeah on the tax bill being supported by Republicans all that and more on the number one podcast in the world not only in podcast stick with us.
What they got to try to figure out do daily mail stories actually end Because I've scrolled up like seven times. No, no, no, no, they never end those guys are like the methamphetamine of clicks It's like click crack. Yeah, they're like one more paragraph every time I see a daily mail article I'm like, okay Do I have 15 minutes here because I'm gonna put on one? I'm gonna look at the photos I'm gonna go to the right rail. I'm gonna click on the right rail. See that's disgracey odd.
Yeah, you go on the right rail You're a true degenerate. Oh, I love you right. Well, the day we feel the carousel for hours. Oh my god They call it the carousel my favorite daily mail story one time that Jared and Vanka Were over in our house and the paparazzi were following them around They like can you give us a tour of the area? So drove them outside for a hot second and the paparazzi immediately captured a picture of them on the back of our golf cart Because we're in Florida and me and my son in the front and the daily mail it was daily mail paparazzi and so the headline was Jared Ivanka unnamed driver and small boy.
If you want to come to our next event. It's the all-in summit in Los Angeles Fourth year for all-in summit go to all-in.com slash events to apply hold on one second. Let me do the intro properly Then this is gonna be so good right now. You're gonna feel so uncomfortable. It's gonna be amazing Go ahead and be creative. So look Ben has a hard out in an hour and 40 minutes So we're gonna get the show started. However, Ben. I we need to take a pause Jason will explain what happened last week. He is gonna issue a formal apology if that formal apology is not good enough I will step in over to you Jason.
Okay We remember so all-in podcast including Shamaf Polly Hapatia and myself Jason Kallikannis would like to Formally and respectfully apologize to poker legend Phil Helmuth for our previous comments about his relationship the polywood actor Timothy Shalamay and the Los Angeles celebrity community more generally on a previous episode of this podcast a number of inaccurate potentially legally actionable statements were made by the host regarding Mr. Helmuth It was strongly implied on this program that Mr. Helmuth was not acquainted with Mr Shalamay and it was further suggested that he had arrest and man held up the Oscar nominated performer during a social event In Miami Florida.
This was a flagrant misrepresentation of the facts for which we are sorry We here at all-in are committed to journalistic Responsibility and integrity and we hope to use this time to correct the record in fact As a noted bond vivant and publicly visible representative of the gaming community Mr. Helmuth is acquainted with many celebrities from the world's film television athletics business modeling finance and beyond The list of sorrub celebrity friends It's far too vast to list here in its entirety But we have prepared this section.
We feel demonstrates how his overwhelming popularity among This demographic Matt Damon Steve Martin Charles Barkley Bill Quentin Chloe Kardashian Mr. Beast the guy from Billions Tiger Woods Marlowe has Drake And of course Jay Z once again we here at all-in regret the era We should publicly apologize to Mr. Helmuth and recommit ourselves to truth and accuracy in reporting Thank you Jason that was great.
I would just like to add a couple of things Phil is my best friend Has been for a very long time I love him He does have a lot of Friends and he opens his role a dex To us And so to the extent that Phil was short because he was a little bit hurt last week Because we were ribbing him we rib him a lot we make jokes in the group chat a lot But it's because we enjoy it he enjoys it But I think the way that we said it really hurt his feelings. So Philly I love you.
We love you. We love you Phil We're sorry sorry Specifically I'm sorry because to be honest I probably started the whole thing and got everybody Yeah, we just ran half of it. Oh, sorry. We love you love you I called you a panda eating eating bamboo and I did not mean to say that you put your meat hooks Into Timothy Shalmet And I didn't mean to say that you took credit for and you know, didn't have a major contribution to the All-in-Pockets obviously But honestly you're the best you you've been really instrumental in a lot of these Important relationships that have joined our group.
So thank you and we love you and let's keep going Yes, absolutely and we wish you well in the world series of poker go get him Hope you hit go. get him rose grade is 17 18 19 who knows He's not playing in the main is not playing the main because the W so P are ridiculous and now they set up these tournaments is stupid We will do a better version by the way of the W SOP to analysis We will be doing an event during the f1 In Las Vegas where we will be launching our poker tournaments So for those of you who would like to have some quality high class poker tournaments and some ridiculous cash games Oh Let us know late November guys book it make sure you got five six days where you can pretend you have COVID The last race what about you Ben?
Do you like to gamble? You're playing the horses the ponies I can't say that I've been big on the gambling it hasn't worked out well for me I have I have an addiction so I wouldn't want that to get out of control, you know all right. Well, we will Absolutely take advantage of your addiction. Oh Ben have you ever have you ever rolled the dice? Have you ever rolled dice? No? I've never rolled dice. No, okay, so this is perfect. We have to take okay Ben.
We're you're coming to Our all-in-event in Vegas, and I'll tell you why You'll we'll do something on stage, but more importantly for me I'm done more importantly for me There is an incredible rule in crafts where when you have a virgin shooter somebody's never touched the dice Absolutely, I don't know what it is But you are the people that go off where you can make millions yes, I have seen this 20 times in my gambling life in Las Vegas.
I remember I took my father in life took my father in law and my kids Well, my wife was pregnant she was get out of the house My father in law took our three older kids to Vegas. He had never shot dice before he touched the dice broke the casino It is the most fun game Ben. I'm telling you so you need to come November 22nd. We'll make the arrangements We'll make sure you get out there. You'll have a really great time. You'll do something with us on stage and and Ben is gonna touch those little dice And he's gonna break the win And I'm going to be there to finance it So you are gonna get such great parenting and husband and vice from Shema Ben all of this dedication you have to your family.
We're gonna teach you a new approach Just just go off to Vegas and yeah, take your kids and your father in law and leave your pregnant wife at home She's just got work to do all right everybody welcome back to the oil and podcast really excited to have Ben Shapiro back on the program Yeah, I'll listen to the Ben Shapiro show, you know about daily wire and Ben you've been covering this trump middle east trip all week
So let's get into that as our first topic here as everybody knows trump was in the middle east He secured a huge investment from the Saudis 600 billion dollars 140 billion for a defense partnership and MBS Said he wants to make it a trillion A bunch of high-profile CEOs joined trump including friends of the show Elon and of course Dara from uber and he jassy from amazon who else was there Alex carp jensen tons of people including Our fourth bestie here diva sex was there.
He also closed a 200 billion dollar deal with Qatar or gutter Which includes 96 billion from Boeing to send 160 planes there with an option of 50 more And he removed sanctions against Syria middle controversial. We'll get into that To quote give them a chance at greatness he gave a speech at a Saudi U.S. investment forum in re-od Where he powerfully Outland his vision for a new middle east basically rejecting 20 years of American interventions and forever wars
And he gave big credit to a quote new generation of leaders including MBS For building better societies Ben what do you think here what we should take on the trip is this The best trump of all the versions of trump this did seem to me to be the best version seem to really comfortable with This category of leader In this region in particular where we go for sure.
I mean there's no question about that right me. He likes MBS He obviously likes the the emerald Qatar. He likes the the folks in in UAE We've known that for a while and and he's he's really signaling a a shift away from the Obama Biden policy Tour a lot of these places where Biden like to say the word democracy and then immediately divide off from Saudi Arabia on the basis of that and Chide MBS and all this kind of stuff and then try to cut a deal with Iran for example at the same exact time
Which of course pisses off the Saudis now trump is going over there and he's in deal-making mode And you can see he's in deal-making mode and his entire sort of approach to the Middle East is What he said in the speech commerce above chaos right? Let's do some business here And he understands that there are a lot of people in ksa Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and and also in Qatar UAE as well who are really looking to do business And I think there are a bunch of strategic aspects of this that are really good One of them obviously is driving these places away from China and the more business ties you have with places like Saudi Arabia or Bahrain UAE Qatar the further away they're going to get from China
I think you do have to be careful with Qatar in particular Which has some divided priorities shall we say when it comes to terrorism? Obviously Qatar that the case they will make to sort of steal man What what Qatar says about itself is that they have to have good relations with terrorists so that the West can talk with the terrorists on occasion To to not steal man the case they have two billion dollars to Hamas over the course of the last several years And have funded the American university systems that tune a six point three billion dollars for a country That has a grand total of two point six million citizens. It's smaller than the state of Connecticut in terms of its citizenship
It's been something like two-thirds what China spends on lobbying which seems you know pretty weird But with that said the idea of bringing Dollars into the United States combining on things like AI to it David tax has been working on over there Like that stuff is all really really good the the warning that I'd issue to present in Trump is just make sure that That you have strings attached to meaning clearly there are strings attached from the other side when you're talking about Qatar So
Also the United States should have strings attached so you mentioned Syria there if you're talking about You know getting rid of the sanctions on Syria. There's an argument to be made obviously Erdogan and in Turkey would love that because basically The the leader of Syria now Alljolani he changed his name. He's kind of like the prince of terrorists right he like he's the artist formerly known as alljolani now He's all Shira I thank him to change his name to he was al-Qaeda then he was ISIS then he's HDS He basically works for the Turks and so obviously the Turks would love for alljolani to have sanctions removed That's fine. I mean, I think there's a case to be made for it But you have to make sure that he actually delivers on the other end of that which would be getting rid of the terrorists in his country
What do you think bent about Qatar Qatar For people it's it's the same word just sent differently here in the west and in their country um Do you think we should have deep ties to them and is the steel man argument that their relationship with Hamas and the Muslim brotherhood Acceptable to you Ben Shapiro or do you think we should hold the line with them and say hey You got to cut off these relationships if you want to have a relationship with the United States I mean it seems to me that we have a lot more leverage in in the latter situation and and Qatar has obviously Paying some eight billion dollars to have this airbase on its own territory But then puts restrictions on how the United States can use that sort of airbase that airbase was previously located in Saudi
And so you know, it's my perspective that after October 7th for example The United States under Joe Biden should have gone to Qatar which which obviously has a deep relationship with Hamas as proven by the release of that American hostage While President Trump was in the Middle East which was done at the behest of Qatar That that probably the United States should have gone to Qatar and said listen the airbase goes away Unless all the hostages come out and the Hamas leadership goes into exile and you avoid the entire war So there is leverage that can be exerted I'm not sure that the leverage is being properly exerted on Qatar
Let's put this way I'm much more enthusiastic about the ties that President Trump is fostering with Saudi and UAE Then I am the ties that he's fostering with Qatar. I mean back in 2017 There's nearly a war between Saudi and UAE and Qatar I mean, that's how mad the relations were back in 2017 and President Trump was on the Saudi UAE side of that So moving Yeah, let's just say trust but verify I think would be a much better strategy than just trust Here's some stuff. We'll hope that you you give us back on back end
Shamaat, let's go to the business side here. Trump making a lot of deals. Little bit of a bruhaha over a four hundred million dollar playing given to Trump. Not sure how relevant that is or if he's even accepted it personally, and I'm sure you've got some thoughts on that. But what did we see there? I saw Send Deep, our friend from Grok. One of your investments was there. We're seeing a level of investment in collaboration between Saudi, UAE, and America and the West that, hey, let's face it, we haven't ever seen. They do seem to be leaning more towards, I wouldn't say democracy, but a lot of social reforms and a lot of women. What was pointed out by David Sacks in the business community there? I've made a couple trips there. It seems to have changed on a human rights basis more in the last three or four years than in the last, I guess, 20.
So what's your take generally on this position? Ben has of, hey, better they be doing business with us and let's build and foster these relationships as opposed to have them fall into the arms of Russia, North Korea, or China. Let's just go do a little cleanup on a couple of these things and I'll give you my take. Sure, first thing is we announced almost a two billion dollar deal, 1.7, I think, but it was what it was. For a rock did it deal, yeah, for AI inference. We're starting to build some enormous data centers in Saudi. I'll get to why Saudi is a critical place to do that. But they've been exceptional partners. We are the only inference company in the world with the next portal license from the United States to do this. So yeah, it was great. That's why Sonny was there, and Jonathan Ross, our founder and CEO, so that was really big for us. This has been a company that Jonathan and I got off the ground 10 years ago. It's been a long, long slog.
你对这个立场总体怎么看?Ben 的观点是: “嘿,还是让他们与我们做生意吧,我们可以建立和培育这些关系,而不是让他们投向俄罗斯、朝鲜或中国。” 我们只需对其中的一些事情稍作清理,我会给你我的看法。首先,我们宣布了一项接近 20 亿美元的交易,准确来说是 17 亿美元。这是关于在沙特阿拉伯建立 AI 推理的数据中心的交易。我会讲到为什么沙特是建立这些设施的重要地方。但他们一直是出色的合作伙伴。我们是全球唯一拥有美国颁发的推理技术许可证的公司。所以这很棒。这也是为什么 Sonny 和我们创始人兼 CEO Jonathan Ross 会在场,这对我们来说意义重大。这家公司是我和 Jonathan 在 10 年前创立的,这一路走来非常艰辛。
So yeah, there's a lot of commercial activity that happened there. Our friend Brian Yuko, who was just announced as the head of the commercial plane development group of Boeing, who's making all the next generation planes, was there. Kelly or broke, they announced the 160 billion dollar deal for Boeing's and a bunch of other stuff. Elon announced that Saudi allows Starlink now from maritime and aircraft usage. He also announced robotaxis are coming to Saudi. So the business community, I think, was quite central to this trip, which is cool.
With respect to the plane, just to do some cleanup, this is a gift that is being handled between the Department of Defense and the Department of Defense of Qatar. If and when that plane does get transferred over, it will then be scanned and retrofitted to military grade spec that then can be used by the then sitting president of the United States. And while people want to be up in arms, just to be clear, this has happened, and Qatar specifically has done this multiple other occasions. You may dispute the countries, you may not like the fact that it's happened, but they've given a plane as a gift to the leader of Iraq, to the then sitting leader of Turkey, to the then sitting leader, I believe, of Yemen. So there are customs, I guess. And again, who am I to judge these customs? But that's to us may seem excessive or untoward or maybe an attempt to graft, but to them is just that. Just a sign of deep respect or a relationship building.
I think that we should not overjudge this thing and let the do-do do their job, and it's a gift to the United States of America. Move on. I don't think it's a particularly big deal. What is the big deal here is what Trump did that I think is historic. I think the most important thing to recognize is that we, America, has been a global hegemon since World War Two. But I think that what we did was we took our eye off the ball, and over the last 20 years, and particularly the last 17, we have seen China slowly erode our global influence through an initiative that they frankly were very open and honest about and branded called Belt and Road.
In Belt and Road 1.0, what China did was use the balance sheet of China to invest incredibly aggressively and thoughtfully in all these critical geographies of the world: Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Specifically in the Middle East and specifically between Saudi and Qatar, China, I think, has invested about 200 billion dollars over the last 15 years. What does that do? It allows them to exert influence and economic cooperation, hard power, and soft power, right?
In one week, the sitting president of the United States announced two trillion dollars of investment from those countries into the United States. What does that effectively do? I think what that effectively does is say that the Middle East is turning a page, that they are beyond these regional conflicts, that they want to thrive as a society and that they are 100 percent aligned with the United States. How do you know that? Because I don't think that there's another two trillion dollars of deals to be done with any other country other than America. That's number one. And then number two, the reciprocation of how American companies are investing in that region is to the tune of several hundred billion dollars.
Now, why is that region critical? It's critical for two things. The first is that when you draw a thousand mile radius around Saudi Arabia you touch four billion human beings—four. Half the global population is within a thousand mile radius of Saudi. And so if you can establish cooperation and strategic alignment with that area it is an incredibly important thing to do. The Saudi coastline as an example is thousands and thousands of miles. These are all these huge strategic things that we've known in the context of other conflicts and other geopolitical things that we've done for decades.
But what Trump basically did was clean the slate he wiped the floor with all this neo-con establishment nonsense. That's what his speech did, which we can talk about in a second. But he created and forged an economic alliance that I think is going to be very difficult for any other country to undo. That is what I saw: two trillion dollars. That is an enormous bet for a country to make on it with another country; and I think the fact that he did that with Saudi and Qatar and UAE speaks a lot to a really important strategy.
Freeburg, your thoughts on this trip and the growing and deepening relationship between UAE, Saudi, and the United States, and apparently Qatar as well? I think the biggest moment was the speech that Trump gave; it underscored, I think, a really important narrative shift for me. This was a powerful embrace of Saudi, Qatar, of their choices, their way of life, their way of being. Basically showing I would say respect to those peoples without judgment, which I think is quite different from leadership of the past.
I'll just highlight the mainstream media narrative is, oh my gosh, Trump goes to Russia, Trump goes to China, he goes to North Korea, he goes to Saudi, he embraces dictators. For the narrative has been that these individuals in leadership positions in these countries are dictators, and Trump embraces dictators. He loves Xi, he loves Putin, he loves Kim Jong-un, he loves MBS. That's a bad thing because the liberal view, and I would say largely the American view in the past, has been that there's right and there's wrong.
There's our way of governing, and then there's the other way of governing; and the other way of governing is always wrong, that our form of American democracy is the only model that is right and all the others have to be wrong. And fundamentally that's a colonial mindset is what he's highlighting in the speech. He's saying that the point of view that all others are wrong means that they should come around to our point of view, our model of democracy, our model of governing.
In the speech, he basically underscored that that's not really the case anymore. We are no longer going to be colonizers where we are going to enforce our view of government on the rest of the world and say this is the only good path. But there are other paths, and we can respect them. We can work together so long as we aren't harming one another so long as terrorism goes away, which he underscored in his speech has gone away.
And by the way, I'm not trying to highlight or kind of prop Trump up for the speech itself. But I do think that this underscores a shift in the political viewpoint that has now come to power in America—that we are no longer going to have this kind of moral or socio-political framework that says it's our way or the highway, but we are now going to go to folks like Xi, like North Korea, like China and say we can respect your way of living, we can respect your way of governing, and we can have partnership and continue to build a world together without saying that if you don't follow our path, we're never going to be true partners.
So for me, the biggest thing that came out of this whole visit was that shift in narrative that I think really is different than before. what we've seen in the past and it counters a lot of how The mainstream media has kind of you know, framed his quote embrace of you know, different ways of governance And this was obviously a Republican position as well You know, just we're going to have a hard line on human rights and democracy and in fact The entire Republican position in terms of en globalist Clinton too Was hey, let's embrace China and we will lean them towards democracy that obviously didn't happen They did build a vibrant economy and took 400 500 million people out of poverty into a middle class
But here we're seeing something different You know, I've spent a lot of time in the region maybe four or five trips in the last couple years Less couple times I was there Women doing business dancing music and now there's alcohol in the kingdom in some select locations There's a casino coming to ua e we're actually seeing maybe this strategy of less judgment more engagement Actually result in more modernization.
So what's your take on this? I mean, I think that one one of the things that's happened in the media coverage of president Trump speech is this sort of false binary That isn't really what's going on So it was sort of posited as Neoconism versus isolationism and he mentioned both of those sorts of concepts in his speech But the reality is that I think we should be careful about how we define these terms What we really mean is that will Sony an interventionism has been completely rejected by the American people and my president Trump
President Trump is is saying that we are not going to go into these like to pretend that president Trump is being isolationist Is obviously not true. I mean, he's literally cutting trillion dollar deals with foreign countries and traveling there and making common bonds with them It's the opposite of isolationism in a lot of ways. It's a realism right he's a foreign policy realist who wants to make deals where he can make deals And he wants to make the best deal for America opposite of isolation if they're doing projects, you know in the Trump family and the plane This is the opposite of isolationism right exactly
And so I think that all the debates that are currently happening within sort of the Republican ecosystem Are sort of which version of realism are we pursuing right there? There's a more hawkish version of realism That suggests that you ought to be more skeptical I mean, I think that's where I am of you know what you want from these countries in addition to the money And then there's a sort of more dovish realism that says you know Basically as long as the deals go forward maybe no strings attached and that's it That's an interesting debate and it depends on sort of what levels of trust you have in various countries And again, I think it differs country to country
How would you be like that? I want to Ben I want to build on what you're saying and just ask a question because I completely agree that that rejection has all of these downstream consequences The most interesting consequence for me, but I would just like your opinion on this is Trump goes there cuts all these deals announces all of it. There's just an incredible show of force frankly, right? Economic force and political alignment And then within one or two days Iran case
Now we don't know what the final contours of that deal are going to look like But that also has incredibly important implications to the safety and security not just of that region But for everybody I don't know what you thought about just how I mean again That there was a capitulation, you know, so I this is where again I remain pretty skeptical I think that that one of the issues that we have when it comes to negotiations with the Ron that this sort of phrase that's been used by Saudi Israel UAE with regard to Iran is the Ron has never won a war or lost a piece
So Iran is very good negotiation They're quite sophisticated and how these they approach these issues and when President Trump says they can't have a nuclear weapon That's all we need to know all the rest is details But actually when it comes to things like negotiating a nuclear deal the devil is the details because Is it going to be JCPOA part two which is basically you can enrich to civilian levels with a certain level of transparency But also you get money and the money can be used for terrorism or for ballistic missile development or rebuilding your air defenses
And what what do those details actually look like and and you know obviously Qatar is very very close with the with the Islamic Republic of Iran and so they they've been negotiating again as sort of a representative of Iran in in those negotiations And so I'm going to hold off. Let's just say I'll be I'll be I'll be Until I agree with you they need to be in the penalty box for some number of years because they have not earned the trust of the world in that they that they can conform to these things and they're not going to do The various things once they get access to capital and funds or to you right So I think they have to earn their way out that that's right.
And I think that when when you look at Saudi Arabia I think that one of the things that that would would be interesting to see is President Trump said in his speech in Saudi Arabia that he would he would consider it an honor If they would join the Abraham Accords. I his signal accomplishment. Obviously during his first administration was the Abraham Accords the the notion that he again Continue to press forward that commerce matters more than sort of ideological conflict, right? That's why you a an Israel for example now have a pretty solid relationship that's with stood a lot of the the the stressors that have been created by October 7th and the and the ensuing war.
The question of whether Saudi actually does that is an interesting one because if you're looking for a new region in which commerce really does take the four Then obviously UAE Saudi they're they're very close. I mean that essentially UAE is a There's no I don't think there's no distinction. There's no distinction. There's no better place. I think in the world right now If you're trying to find it and net new place to put capital to work than the UAE and then Saudi.
Yeah, no, I mean I agree with that and I think that that you know obviously Integrating the region across religious boundaries would be a very very good thing And I think President Trump also has an interest in that so it'll be interesting to see how things develop from here I could it's it'll be again I remain skeptical of sort of the idea that that just commerce alone is going to usher in a new era.
I do think that that the United States typically when it's when it's brokering these deals does put its thumb on the scale in particular ways And those ways are not just putting money into KSA or taking money out of KSA, which again I'm I'm great with that. I think it's brilliant when President Trump is doing I know a number of businesses obviously They're working in Riyadh and doing wonderful work in Riyadh and and I'm I think what MBS has done transformatively to KSA is incredible if what you're looking for is a broader sort of regional calm that's going to last the course of time.
What you don't need is an upsurgent Muslim brotherhood or a resurgent Iran or the rebuilding of terrorist groups that threaten both Saudi Arabia as well as as Israel and other Sunni allies in in the region and so you know I think that there are a couple of ways to see what President Trump is doing One of them is I hope that there's a step two, right, which is okay now Saudi Arabia We have a great relationship with you it would be really great if you did join in Abraham Accords.
And now you have this very strong regional block that economically is more interdependent Which is of course what he pursued during his first administration or is he moving in the direction and this is also plausible Or he's basically saying listen everybody sort of on their own We're going to cut independent deals with each one of these nations in bilateral fashion with the United States.
And I think it's sort of remains to be seen which strategy President Trump is taking sort of bilateral approach to relations with each one of these countries individually or whether he's attempting to forge more of an interdependent regional economic block. Two questions for you Ben rapid fire Abraham Accords was brought up will the Saudi sign it will be a sign it and Trump sort of alluded hey, they're going to do it in their own time. What's holding it up in your mind and if they if and when they do sign it what impact we'd have on the region? The number two euro thoughts on this Qatar plain kerfluffle and the media sort of obsessing over it. Are they over indexing on it? Or not?
So as far as the Abraham Accords, yeah, again, I think that this is it is a shift in tone for President Trump. Abraham Accords was considered sort of his signal foreign policy accomplishment during term one and is my belief if he'd been reelected in 2020 by February 2021? I think Saudi would have been in the Abraham Accords. Obviously, one of the obstacles continues to be the war in Gaza what actually ends up emerging there. But one ironically one of the things that actually has undermined the kind of incentive for Saudi to join the Abraham Accords is Israel's complete devastation of all of the proxies of Iran.
So one of the things that was driving Saudi and Israel together was the fact that there was this really giant threat in Iran. And so now it appears it could be at least plausibly read that one of the reasons why President Trump is selling $150 billion worth of military hardware 2ksa is provided defensive barrier against Iran while assuming that maybe Iran does end up going nuclear.
So, you know, what happens with Iran does have serious ramifications for the possibility of an Abraham Accord including Saudi Arabia. It that seems like it's more distant than it was a couple of years ago. And it may take more time than I think that special envoy Steve Whitcough and the Trump administration would like it to be.
As far as the as far as the plane kerfluffle on my show I said that it looks skeasy. You know, and I will I will maintain that position. It doesn't have to be that it's illegal in order for it not to look particularly good. Because of course the other half of the deal is that once the plane is retrofitted and used by the president for a certain period of years, it then goes to the Trump presidential library, and that was one of the conditions of the gifting.
Qatar is quite famous for putting a lot of money in a lot of various pockets ranging from the attorney, I mean the current attorney general of the United States Pambandi was a foreign registered agent for Qatar for a while, being paid by Qatar to do that sort of lobbying work. Qatar is pretty famous for putting its money in a variety of pockets.
Just just just to put a number on that Qatar in sovereign wealth fund the QIA, the investment authorities about a half trillion dollars of capital, about 50 billion of which is invested in US funds. And many of the folks in and around the circles that are associated with the White House obviously have QIA as an LP or have had funds that they're affiliated with that have QIAs and I'll and my point about this is that put aside whatever moral quums You know anybody has about this sort of stuff which again you can argue either way.
The key to me is if you like president Trump's agenda the biggest obstacle to president Trump's agenda They're basically two obstacles one is the economy goes south right that's an obstacle to any president's agenda That's why it's really important what he's doing in the Middle East. It's why it's important what he's been doing backing off at the terra for in a lot of ways Is why do regulation passing the tax cut is important all that's important and then the second thing that can really hurt any administration Is corruption and even allegations of corruption can be incredibly damaging.
So for example There's a crypto bill that was on the floor of the Senate or is about to enter onto the floor of the Senate just last week And it ended up being killed by Democrats plus a couple of Republicans and Democrats at least publicly maintained the reason they killed the crypto bill was specifically because of allegations surrounding the Trump family and Trump coin Trump meme coin world liberty financial and all this sort of stuff.
And so the question is in as a Trump supporter who raised money for president Trump and campaign with president Trump and campaign for president Trump As a person what I want is his agenda to be successful If an obstacle to that agenda is the optics of a thing like taking a $400 million jet from Qatar which does amount to the single biggest monetary gift ever given to the United States even if you consider it to just be a gift to the United States generally not to the Trump Library personally or anything like that.
Is that is that the kind of thing that harms him in the public mind and if that ties into a broader narrative that his political opponents are trying to drive that he is corrupt or the people around him Is that a win for him right just on a practical efficacious level is that a win for him is that a win for his agenda because The media coverage this week you could have all been about him doing deals in these various places and bringing money back home to the United States unnecessary distraction.
That's kind of that's kind of my view of it at the very least appearance of impropriety Yeah, I agree amongst half the country who doesn't like him and he's now tipping into You know almost as unpopular as his first term They're just going to weaponize that in the midterms and it's going to scuttle the important agenda doge. You know and this is one of the things that I'm absolutely preyed on You know, this is this is the thing that also ties into the economic problem right the right now everybody is is basically like uh Who cares about this kind of I think a lot of people who cares about this kind of stuff as long as the number goes up into the right And all this sort of stuff doesn't matter very much.
If the number starts going down Then you start having all these kind of corruption allegations rise to the surface in a new way right Because that's what happens with with presidents very often is what you see is there a kind of a bunch of little dents That are in the vehicle and then there's a car crash and suddenly you know All the dents are very evident to the naked eye and that's what I like from no void.
What if he loses the midterms and then we start impeachment three four and five and investigation three four five Now we're back to law fair and insanity which nobody wants to be in let's talk about another win It was a pretty great week objectively for Trump on Sunday treasury secretary Bessent announced a trade deal with China in Geneva the details were basically here we go another pause tariffs will go down from 145 percent to 30 percent maybe that's managed both China's cutting their tariffs for the US from 125 to 10 percent.
And they're gonna end this diminimous rule also known as the like garbage fashion rule t-moo sheen all that kind of stuff When they drop shift you stuff that's under I think the numbers 800 or so The market love the news don't don't make America dress well again don't do it I think this is like an important part of this is like this You know ridiculous garbage fashion.
I hate it the market was up massively But you know the down the Nasdaq are basically a flat to slightly negative our partners over a polymarket You know have a nice market on the chances of a us recession that peaked at 66 percent during the Liberation day Chaos fallout and hey here we go now.
It's 38 percent. So we're kind of Maybe cleaning up the chaos. He shook the globe The economic globe freedberg and now maybe as I think a lot of people are predicted He found an exit ramp. Maybe that was the plan all along. Maybe it's 40 chess. Maybe he's reacting to the market Maybe all that doesn't matter, but here we are Dave freeberg when we look back on This whole trade trump tariff Turm oil or what are we going to look back on this a year from now and think was it just a distraction? Or is it actually going to create a trillion dollars in tariff revenue and we're going to get rid of 150 People playing taxes who make under a hundred fifty thousand dollars. What's going to happen with this? And we look back on it a year or two from now Well, I don't know where the tariff deals are going to end up so we don't know yet.
Yeah, it's asking for a guess right now Yeah, and so I don't know I don't know Like I said, I think one of the biggest things that needs to happen that is being discussed in these trade deals is regulatory parity such that U.S. companies can participate Evenly in foreign markets. I kind of highlighted a few examples of why it's challenging for U.S. companies to set up and do business in the local jurisdictions for a lot of our trade Partners across multiple industries. I think that's being heavily negotiated so that doesn't make the headlines. That's not kind of the top of the news everyone talks about the tariff number the tariff number the tariff number But at the end of the day the access to foreign markets for U.S. companies You can even think about I mean a good example for us Is a lot of the fines that happen to U.S. tech companies in the EU and there are just billions and billions of dollars of fines being paid out of our companies.
That's another form of taxation The fact that China won't allow U.S. tech companies to operate but we allow Chinese tech companies to operate here So the regulatory parity is kind of the biggest thing that I think needs to kind of be identified in these deals before we have a real sense jk because This again could be a real economic growth driver for American businesses and that could have a real effect on our gdp So that's the biggest thing I'm looking for versus just the tariff number Is parity and access to global markets for U.S. companies I don't think we know and those are the details of the deals that are going to take several months normally These are multi-year trade negotiations with you know big trade teams that go back and forth over several years to figure these deals out.
So to create maximum leverage and accelerate outcomes it seems like A lot of this trade hype got everyone to the negotiating table now the hard work's being done to figure out the details of these deals. And hopefully we end up in a better place for American businesses because of it Tremoth I know where you stand on this he creates that big pothole crater everybody gets excited It creates a lot of attention and then maybe the real negotiation starts. So a year from now when we look back on this what would success look like For the Trump administration in Tremoth Poghapatia's mind and assessment I think this goes back to what I said at the beginning I think tariffs have the potential To be the on ramp to our version of belt and road and I think that that is an incredible jujitsu move Of what was an exceptionally well executed and methodical program By the Chinese government To cement hard and soft power all around the world while the United States wasn't looking and obsessed with cheap garbage that they could buy a target.
Hmm, okay So this should be a wake up called to us. We don't need all this cheap nonsense We can live with fewer things Those things could be of higher quality. They may be of higher price, but more importantly We need to make sure that we're cementing bilateral deals with as many countries in the world and building the next phase Of Pax America of American hegemony we need to do it So the fact that we Are negotiating with China. I think is very good. I think that they are a necessary partner of ours But we can't take our eye off the ball the tariffs was a way of ripping the bandaid of all this globalist free trade nonsense And now we need to reset this in a methodical calm way.
Now some markets we're not going to get right and in some industries we have some very complicated thinking to do. As an example, which we'll get to later the pharma eo is very complicated and very nuanced, okay. But this is the hard and necessary work. So my perspective is this is the beginning of Belt and Road 2.0. I think we started with a real bang in the Middle East. And I just encourage the administration to go and finish the job and get as many bilateral deals done as possible and reset how important the United States is as a partner? We always knew it. But we allowed that hard influence and hard power to get frittered away with all kinds of nonsensical idealistic thinking that was just wasteful.
Now we just need this also globalists who wanted to make money right? It's like easier to make cheap stuff over there and then sell it here. And it's harder to make money. I think that was once, I think that was short-term and non-strategic thinking by many of those companies. I think that we've created dynamics that we can change. We can change the incentives for how consumers consume in the United States. And I think it's worth thinking about how to do that.
All right, well here is the polymarket on tariffs generating greater than 250 billion in 2025 that we set or polymarket set basically no chance that that's gonna happen. So we will see here. I think everybody coming to the table and reciprocity bad. I don't even know how you're gonna settle this Jason because what does it mean will tariffs generate? I think it's a really interesting bet. But the real question is on the measurement there is not gonna be some number that OMB or somebody else puts out that says it generated X. Well, I think let Nick was saying he was tracking that but we'll see.
I mean because if it's reciprocity and we see us making more money or getting charged less fines to the examples we had earlier then you could include those in it, but yeah, it's hard it's a hard bet to settle. But I think people believe it's not gonna generate a massive amount of revenue. The relationship with China and this sort of changing concept of consumerism you think that's a possibility for America to Americans just want cheap stuff on Amazon and unlimited number of Amazon boxes in their recycle bin.
I mean, I'm not sure the tell consumers have ever thought about this sort of stuff. You know, I remember when I was younger there was a lot of talk about made America cars. You know by made American and that just kind of failed because it turns out that the American cars just weren't as good as the stuff that you could get elsewhere. And it turns out that Americans are both producers and consumers and yeah, it's easy to say don't buy cheap crap from China. But it turns out a lot of stuff that actually is not all that cheap also was manufactured in China.
Hopefully now it'll be manufactured in Vietnam or or manufactured in India or in other third-party countries. The idea that we're gonna be you know reshoring all that stuff to the United States. We're not gonna be making t-shirts in the United States. That's not a thing. Um, but you know, I do think that right now my read is that we it's too early to tell meaning that this this just reminds me the old Yiddish joke where the couple isn't getting along so they go to the rabbi and they say what do we do rabbi?
So I want you to bring a chicken into your house. They bring the chicken in their house and still isn't working and go back to the rabbi. So I want you to bring a calendar house so bring a calendar to their house and they say it's still isn't working rabbi. It's just terrible. They go back to the rabbi says I want you to bring two goats in your house. They do that they come exit the husband says this is awful. I can't handle this is take everything out of your house to take all the things out of their house and like oh my god this is this is just fantastic because that that's basically what Trump did here.
Ready put the chicken and cow and the two goats in the house. I still think he left the chicken right and so it's kind of it's gonna be you know a question is to how much impact the chicken has. Meaning the 10% tariff rate that we still have on the rest of the world is you know more than quintuple what it was at the very beginning of this process.
I mean the average tariff rate and not to use a you know a number of David doesn't like but the average tariff rate right now is higher than it's been anytime since the 1930s. Is that gonna have some carryover effect? I mean Walmart is already suggesting they're gonna have to start increasing their prices. So I don't think they were out of the woods and I do think that the biggest threat with regards to this sort of stuff is less the tariffs than the feeling of uncertainty for investors as to what comes next.
And that's where the pharmaceutical EO starts to come in or the negotiations over the tax bill what actually makes it in what doesn't make it in well when it comes to you know the stuff that makes investors sanguine and one of the reasons why investors are sanguine about Saudi Arabia is because Saudi Arabia is a kingdom And that kingdom is very wealthy and that very wealthy kingdom doesn't have to worry about the next election They don't have to worry about the next policy that they just have to throw out there for public consumption President Trump because of the rapid shifts in policy the feeling if the feeling comes away is we're now back on a solid path This was all a tactic and and we're hunky-dory great.
You're gonna see the markets go up You're gonna see more investment and all the rest if the feeling and basically more Scott Bessent and fire Peter Navarro into the ocean via catapult with you might Vice to the Trump administration And you do that actionable suggestion, man, I really really what predictability you know we were sitting here a couple weeks ago and I was as I was mentioning I would I know a lot of e-commerce folks and they were saying layoffs coming we don't have predictability and the really hard part is How do you invest in a business? You know you're running daily wire. It's a nine-figure business You want to hire people you know you need to have advertisers many of the advertisers you probably have are somehow related to consumption in America.
What's the first thing they're gonna pause they're gonna pause advertising right why am I advertising this? You know mattress and why am I Matt you know advertising eight-sleeve the best mattress in the world I happen to be an investor from little bias But why am I gonna market eight-sleeve if I can't get it to the country or if the price is too high You know, it's like it causes all these downstream Issues I guess during all of this now Talking about like shaking the globe and the in the economy here Republicans are working hard on the big beautiful bill. It's it's big and it's beautiful Ben I don't know if you want to get into your Trump doing Trump's But it's a big beautiful so big so beautiful many people are saying and many haters Nancy Pelosi nasty woman She bet on Walmart bad bet GOP's plan is to push this bill via reconciliation so they can avoid the Senate fellow buster with 51 votes instead of 60.
The Trump bill would extend the 2017 tax cuts and jobs act through 2034 That's kind of the big piece here is these tax cuts And there's a bunch of campaign stuff like no taxes on tips or overtime Things that Trump promised to you know in some cases swing states like Nevada those are trying to get in there And an increase on universities in down in tax and the tax foundation This is a nonprofit that analyzes tax policy estimates the tax cuts would reduce revenues by 4.1 trillion over 10 years So 400 billion a year and the bill also aims to cut 1.5 trillion and spend over the next decade.
Some Republicans think this is weak and are pushing for 2 trillion in cuts or more Notable cuts include a stricter snap rules tighter Medicaid taps and removing taxpayer benefits from illegal Gosh freeburg you actually hey, I understand from our group chat did a deep dive here And you I think are responsible in many ways for bringing the issue of our national debt to the forefront especially Particularly with this administration in doge which we give you a lot of credit for you being a single issue voter for this.
Are you worried about The budget now we're we're 100 plus days into Trump do you think he's got any chance of cutting the deficit? I'll talk about the House tax bill which I think is To use your term jcal absolute discratiate I Oh Wow, it is absolute discratiate if you're an American You should feel shame that your elected officials are proposing that this is the bill that gets passed That we vaporize this much money that we put ourselves this much further in debt that we do not treat the situation as the fiscal emergency That it is the bill ultimately yields No real change in the annual deficit the annual deficit could climb to 2.5 trillion dollars being added to the federal debt load every single year Going forward in fact if you look at the treasury yields the 30 years now kissing 5% So the United States has called 37 trillion dollars of debt At 5% we're paying close to two trillion dollars a year just in interest On our debt.
As this debt gets refinanced free but it's a favor for the audience if you could explain why it's going up Why it's so high and what that means why the debt or the interest rates the interest rates Yeah, well the interest rates are going up because the probability that the US will default on its debt payments Which is what you're buying when you buy US treasuries you're getting the US government To pay you some number of dollars with interest over time And the market is now demanding that that interest rate be as high. as 5% Because of this fiscal situation that the United States finds itself in We are now burning an additional 2.5 trillion dollars a year adding to our debt load We are in a fiscal crisis and we're not willing to admit it And I've said this from day one that doge can only do so much and clearly that's the case where they're now talking about sub 300 billion dollars a year and potential annual savings from doge action at the end of the day Congress needs to take action And this bill from Congress doesn't take much action.
I will tell you that if you look across the board all of these programs are still being proposed to be run at a cost That is well in excess of their pre-COVID levels And so I would set who guiding principles if I was to be the benevolent dictator of the United States of America My guiding principle number one would be that any program that we intend to continue to persist Have its budget level cut to pre-COVID to 2019 levels Second would be and if we did that by the way we would be in a much better fiscal situation The second would be that we had no new programs in the moment There's a whole bunch of new sh** thrown into this bill as well as increasing the cost and a few cuts here and there.
I'll just highlight a couple that I think are worth noting You know, there's a cut in the snap program which is the supplemental nutrition and assistance program That's food stamps And I talked about this with Brooke Rollins in the interview I did a few weeks ago You can watch it on YouTube and we talked a little bit about how this snap program has absolutely exploded in size From 60 billion a year in 2019 to 120 billion a year today So in this budget proposal, they're actually cutting it back By about 30 billion so to 90 billion so it's still 50% higher than it was pre-COVID And there's a lot of kind of stories we could go through on what happened during COVID that caused this thing to blow up the way it did But political wrangling pulled money out of the government into people's pockets and that is persisting today.
I'm a big believer in cutting taxes Obviously, I'm probably more libertarian than anyone else on the show or that we've ever had on the show But at the end of the day, you can't just say hey, let's cut taxes and spend more than we're making It doesn't make sense a lot of the stuff's going to be exploitable the tips and overtime exclusions Are a way to pander to people to get votes and now keeping your promises on those votes I think at the end of the day the tips and overtime rule could invite a lot of gamesmanship and loopholes That will be created and people will wake up and be like uh-oh For example, if I'm an independent contractor I will enter into a contract with someone that says here is the service I'm providing you for 50 bucks And then there's an optional tip you can give me at the end and then I will pay taxes on that tip And I can give you a hundred other examples that this will create in an ordinate number of crazy insane loopholes.
The interest on the debt at $1.9 trillion a year Equates to 7% of GDP that means 7 cents of every dollar that moves in every transaction in this country Is being used to pay down interest on money we overspent in the past it has become an absolute crisis I think that there's a few folks that should be shout out on this which is senator Paul And senator Ron Johnson who both highlighted how ridiculously under impressive The spending cuts are in this bill I think we've got a lot of work to do. I'm deeply disappointed I'm scared and I hope that um that this all gets kind of fixed up and Do you think that we should line item out all the new spending irrespective of what all new spending line itemed out That's that's rule one and rule two is all existing programs got to go back to pre-COVID levels You do those two things we're in a great place.
Yeah, I'm just to put some numbers and some charts behind it here is the debt back to Clinton era. Clinton obviously balanced the budget. So you get this nice flatness there. Clinton added 392 billion in the years. It's barely noticeable on the chart 40 50 billion a year. Bush 5.4 trillion four years about 1.3 trillion a year. Obama a trillion a year and then we get to Trump 1.0 2 trillion a year. Suddenly we decided we would double it. Biden same thing they added almost exactly the same amount. To the right way the year and yeah the right way to do the same. Yeah, it's not total dollar amount. It's percent. of GDP that you're adding and you know right now at two and a half trillion dollars a year of deficit we're talking about a deficit to GDP of like 8% yes 8% a year. This is like Argentina. This is like insane at the fact that we don't treat this like a fiscal emergency.
好的,我来把这段内容翻译成中文并使其更易读:
是这样的,我只是想用一些数据和图表来说明一下这里面的情况。这里显示了自克林顿时代以来的债务情况。克林顿显然是平衡了预算,所以你会看到一个比较平稳的趋势。克林顿在任期间的债务增长了3920亿美元,每年大约增幅是40到500亿美元,这在图表上几乎不明显。而布什在四年里增加了5.4万亿美元,平均每年大约是1.3万亿美元。奥巴马时期每年差不多增加1万亿美元,然后到了特朗普,每年增加1.02万亿美元。忽然之间,我们决定把它翻倍。拜登也是同样的情况,他们增加的数额几乎完全一样。
关键的问题是增加的不是总的美元金额,而是占 GDP 的百分比。目前,我们每年有2.5万亿美元的赤字,这意味着赤字占 GDP 的比率大约是8%。对,就是每年8%。这就像阿根廷的情况一样。令人难以置信的是,我们竟然没有把这当作财政紧急事件来对待。
Everyone goes up and they tout Oh, we're gonna make 60 billion in cuts and Medicaid. That's out of 820 billion dollars of annual spend. You know, oh, we're making 30 billion in cuts and snap that's still 50% higher spend in total than we were in 2019 a few years ago when we didn't have that much of a problem. This has become like Such a reset of expectations and I worry again that we went into this I think in a very optimistic way thinking that this administration was gonna treat things differently. We had doge we had alignment on the importance of the budget. That's in his highlight at it and then it's kind of back to gamesmanship in DC.
All these representatives from Congress show up and trying to get money for their constituents in a way that is not sustainable. We're not going to be able to keep this up and we're not really having the hard and tough conversations we need to be having. And every year everyone wants to get elected by keeping programs and keeping money flowing that their constituents elected them to do and they want to add new programs so they can go on CNBC I say look at this cool new program. I stood up. It's great. It's gonna create the future of America. And meanwhile there's no future of America because we're burning two and a half trillion dollars a year.
So would you call this the best it wants the three three three plan you'd call this the three three eight plan? I don't know if there's a three. But yeah, it's definitely the eight. This is eight almost nine. Yeah, I think I think all of this is right. I mean the reality is the US debt to GDP ratio is extraordinary already. It's only going up from here and we have to acknowledge here that the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate are incredibly narrow that for every Ron Johnson who's saying the right things you have a Josh holly who's saying the wrong things in Missouri and writing full-scale op-eds in the New York Times talking about Not a buck should be cut from Medicaid under any circumstances.
And this you know does run a headlong up against a reality Which is that the one one of some signal changes from the old Republican party was not just a change away In terms of foreign policy toward a more realism and less in less you know interventionism but it really was a change away from the Paul Ryan Tea Party Republican party as well. And whatever you think about Paul Ryan on a lot of other issues Paul Ryan was on your side of this David when it came to actually trying to fix Fiscal problems with the United States and I'm old enough to remember the Tea Party when we were out protesting literally in the streets about government Overspending as a response to Obamacare and that's gone completely by the wayside.
And so when you're looking at Republicans today arguing over whether to zero out waste fraud and abuse the problem is not in the end waste fraud and abuse the problem is the programs themselves as they are currently structured. And unless you're willing to make serious systemic changes Like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security you're not going to solve any of these problems and here's the sad reality is nobody is willing to do that. So just as we were saying earlier maybe Americans are addicted to cheap goods from abroad Americans are certainly 100% addicted to government sustenance. They are they're absolutely addicted to this all in that taxes in this country I paid by the top quintile all of them because below the top quintile you're getting as much back from the government or more than you are paying into the system.
And we are also gaming out to the future paying away our kids fiscal future because of all of this. So you know when people ask me what's going to happen I mean the answer is we're going to either wildly inflate our currency or we're going to go into massive austerity measures, you know five to ten years from now. There's not going to be a third choice. I mean and so maybe the politicians keep kicking it down the road Maybe that's what this is. But even the kind of cuts that are being talked about by some of the people in Congress. who I like Are not going to be enough to actually put us back on the right fiscal road.
Even if the Republicans do what they're talking about with regard to work requirements For example on Medicaid they're saying there should be an 80 hour a month work requirement a month a month Well, that's that's crazy. That's crazy right that five hours a four hours a week day For for a month to get your Medicaid requirement if you're an able-bodied person in the United States of working age You know that sort of stuff is not sustainable. But nobody's actually going to take that on and so the question for president Trump is going to be Is he willing to actually go to the barricades and not just make the case that the tax cuts have to be maintained because they absolutely do.
But also that Republicans need to get on board with some of these cuts because you're going to have a lot of pushback From the purplish Republicans from from the Josh Halleys in Missouri and from the Michael Lawyers in New York And all of the people who are afraid they're going to lose their seats if there are any cuts. That's right and existential cuts I mean it is like an existential crisis that no one's willing to stand up and highlight just how critical this emergency is Two and a half trillion dollars of deficit spending on a 28 trillion dollar GDP Tell me when in history that's actually worked out at the end of the day except when you're in a some war.
You're gonna end up taking over some country and getting all their resources And as you mentioned this actually this has you know Knock on effects with regards to things like de-dollarization Why are you investing in the American dollar if you believe that's what you're going to This is the debt this is the debt debt spiral that we find ourselves in because what happens is people stop owning Treasuries when they start to question whether or not 30 years from now the US government is going to meet its debt obligations.
Even the smallest marginal question of that drives interest rates up 1% 2% suddenly your 30 your treasury yields at 6% 7% And then your interest rates climb and then your deficit spending climbs and that's how it becomes a spiral. So now the debt goes up even more than it did the year before and then the next year it goes up even more per year than it did the year before That's why it's called a debt death spiral.
And I will say that let me sorry Let me say one thing one of the things I've heard in a lot of members of cabinet that I've met with Over the last couple of months is we've got all these new sources of revenue I had an interview with Doug Bergen. He talked about unlocking America's assets. We've got this balance sheet with lots of assets We're gonna do land leases and all sorts of other things We took we met with Latinx. He's gonna sell the trump gold card the immigration card.
We met with best and he's got these ideas on how we're gonna drive Everyone's got great theory on how we're gonna grow GDP and actually grow government revenue But until those dollars start to flow in we have to get our fiscal house in order We have to cut spending when those dollars start to flow in then you can start to spend. But you can't spend ahead because otherwise the cost of the debt and the economics uncertainty is gonna limit our ability to execute on the back end That revenue generation.
And I'm very worried about no one kind of paying enough attention to this So I just you know, I feel very passionate having seen this bill that we're just not on the right track. It's really it's really frustrating Let me pull up a tax chart here Nick from the chat and get Tremoffeer comments on this a bar chart here Just who's paying taxes as you can see you know the top 1% Which I think is this panel here and the top 5% paying the majority of the taxes in the country.
Is there any way to increase revenue and is there any way for politicians to say hey, let's cut military That hasn't come up yet as a concept, but maybe cut a little bit of military spending And maybe put in some modest austerity measures now before as Ben's pointing out we get to you know Spain and You know Greece I don't know what was that 10 years ago when they had to Portugal and they had to do Like intense things so you're your home country Chimoffe of Italy like With austerity measures Americans. I don't think we've had to ever face austerity measures and certainly not in our lifetime.
So income taxes can we get more revenue in Where is that our realistic and then cutting military maybe on the margins Chimoff or do you not see this as a major issue It's easy to catastrophize. Okay, I think I think that is easy Because I think there's enough data there The harder thing if you're going to make a directional bet is to try to find the nuance So what is the nuance the nuance is you can point to all of these countries But what is singularly different between all of those countries in the United States of America? Is that a question it's not a no it's a story. It's a story. Okay. The difference is We're the shining city on a hill and every other country is not And as much as we want to believe that there is equality there isn't there's a hierarchy and America is the most important country in the world period full stop into story What does that give us the ability to do it gives us very different parameters with which to solve this problem It gives us I think the parameter of time And it gives us the parameter of Acceptance from a lot of other foreign governments Why because they need America to also succeed.
There's this very funny quote which is when you owe the bank a million dollars It's your problem, but when you owe the bank a billion dollars. It's their problem This is true here and I think that we have to recognize that The right thing to do is obviously what Ben and Dave are saying. I don't disagree with that But if you panic I think you're going to start a cascade that is unnecessary And by moving to a place where you're all of a sudden trying to cut entitlements incredibly aggressively I don't think sets the stage for thriving American population that then allows This problem to actually be solved. So what is my proposal? I do think we have to monetize the balance sheet of America I do think we own probably 100 trillion to 150 trillion of assets All of us as citizens we own that.
And I do explain what those assets are so people listening because they may not know So the largest landowner in the United States is the United States of America The ability to allow you to drill is given by the United States of America The ability to do many things. By the way, Chimac, I'll just give you the numbers from my interview with Bergam The federal government owns 500 million acres of land And they have control over 3.2 billion acres in the outer continental shelf Which is the land under the ocean around North America the resource availability In that land under the water and in the the kind of main land Is in the kind of immeasurable trillions of dollars of value And their business model Bergam stated business model in the interview I did with him Is land leases and royalties so enter into private partnerships and then participate in the value version I've talked to talk about this so I agree with him.
We're talking about a balance sheet again. I said 100 trillion You could probably make the case that it's two or three or four hundred trillion But let's just use 100 trillion My point is that our balance sheet is much larger than our debt obligations Number one, number two, we owe $33 trillion dollars It's as much their problem as our problem And number three, every country that owns that Does so in part because they need America to be successful so that they themselves can be successful So I think if you look at all of these interdependencies the right thing to do is we need to Monetize the balance sheet of America much more aggressively than we've looked at before.
And two what Dave and Ben said we must do which is we need to draw a firm line And say no new spending I completely agree with that idea But I think if you do both of those two things at once You have meaningful inflows That can fund a lot of the tax cuts that people want to propose It'll also allow us to show that we have some level of discipline by not overspending in all of these other random pork barrel projects And I think it allows us to set a path towards this three three three plan just to be clear to everybody what's got Besson's three three three plan is it's three percent dollio dollio's plan It's three percent inflation It's three percent GDP growth And it's a three percent deficit to GDP percentage And if we do that That's the Renaissance in the United States mathematically okay, we can quibble about the politics But it would be a economic and mathematical Renaissance.
So that's what I would do if this is the best plan that Jason Smith and Mike Craypo can get done between the House and the Senate. If this is the best plan, I urge the United States government to figure out how to start aggressively and quickly monetizing our balance sheet. I'll just respond to two things. Let me just ask one question: The land we're talking about here, Friedberg, and the oil, I guess, or the minerals that are under the ocean floor—everything. Well, I mean, what else is there under the ocean floor? I go to the question: Where are our assets? Yeah, so, who's gonna buy the—um, yeah, okay, who is the customer? I think is what we're all wondering.
Of this land in the United States and for what purpose? The private companies that would then use those resources to manufacture critical requirements for the United States and other countries who are buying. For example, the US is now the largest exporter of methane. We have four pipelines that go to this facility that I visited with Doug in the interview I did in Louisiana. They liquefy that natural gas, which is methane. They put it on ships. Those ships go to India, they go to Taiwan, they go to Japan. So, US companies are selling liquid methane that we’re playing out of the ground to those countries that they then use to heat their homes and power electricity production.
We don't necessarily need to go back today and say, hey, let's cut entitlement programs deeply. We should certainly make entitlement programs more efficient. We don't need to. All we have to do is take all the other programs and reset them to COVID or pre-COVID level and, secondly, get rid of all the new programs. What's wrong? Okay, so we all agree on the new program. No, my wife—she says she texted me. She's sitting there and she does things to tilt me. She says this morning in this serious moment, my wife last week I was gonna find last night and I just sent her a very quick text that said I'm really sorry about last night.
She says I've moved on. Just the plane comes from the—Did you send her that text? She moved on while I was talking about— I was your last fight with your wife over. Let's get it all out on the—you know, by the way. To a fight, it's like with them. I'm gonna play with them flying back. Oh my God, I asked how do you—you were talking to a—a—who are anxious, and you are the way you look at the way—No, it's more serious and that it's like when you're in it, like in a coffee house or coffee shop in Europe, and there's this like European couple speaking some language you don't understand.
The more you hang out with us, there will be a moment where you will observe me in that fighting. It will be a multi-hour affair. It is not initiated by me. It's not I want to keep it going. It does end with a passionate love-making from a 12, 12, 36. It's a full of six minutes of a—exibiltion. Honestly, right now, six minutes feels like a long time. But I'm still as I'm— We eat them at leftover managot. It's an incredible tradition in Italy. We fight three hours, but we make love for four minutes and then we eat.
Get the thing back on track on the routes. I want to ask you an important question, Dave, if I may. Are you, as a man of science who believes in global warming and who cares about the environment—is it a great idea? Is what a lot of people are thinking here: great, great idea first to rip everything out of the ocean shelf in Alaska and sell all this incredible land we have that's preserved with nature and trees to far end governments and people who own our debt? Is this a great idea? You have concerns about this very question, austerity, and maybe not buying as many bombs?
Here's the economic argument: Energy demand, heating demand, power demand is growing globally with or without the United States. Okay, does the United States, which produces that energy cleaner than anyone else, want to participate and benefit from that energy demand? Or do we want to leave it to other countries that are going to do it in a dirtier way? And what do I mean by that? So, natural gas is methane. I'll just give you the natural gas story real quick.
We pull it out of the ground—we figured out a technique for putting pressure into the ground that pressure forces the methane to come up through the rocks. And then we capture that methane, and then we liquefy it—so reduce it down by like 800 times size. So now it's liquid. It's negative 160 degrees Celsius, and we can transport it. Methane, when it burns to create electricity, is 60% less carbon into the atmosphere than burning oil or coal.
So the first argument is methane is a cleaner way of producing electricity than oil or coal, which would be alternatives. However, when methane leaks, it's 80 times more heat capture than CO2. So you've got to make sure that your methane production, your methane extraction systems are tight, aren't leaking methane, and that makes it cleaner. And we've been that regulation in America, and other countries don't. And other countries don't do it's good a job Etc. Etc. And then that power is going to be generated and someone's going to make that energy somewhere. So if it is a cleaner power source and we can make it cleaner and we can do it better, then it's certainly the case the United States should be, as we are today, an LNG or liquefied natural gas or liquid methane exporter.
So that's like also can I can I build on this. Can I also it's like can Americans grow up? I mean these are industries that have to exist, have the courage to have some hierarchy and some priorities please. Like we are talking about a potential debt spiral on the one hand we're talking about cutting entitlements on the other, and people want to run around and basically say don't do anything. Well, don't do anything is not an option.
So yeah monetize the assets. Okay, you may not like the way that Trump says it when he says drilled baby drill, but the actual outcome is the same. We need to monetize, we need to generate revenue in the United States as quickly as possible. We need to do the things that maintain technical supremacy. We need to do the things that maintain political supremacy. If we don't, we will be a second and third tier country. Why does anybody in America want that? If you're an American citizen that wants that, go to another country.
Ben, as we're saying here, do you think maybe we do solar or maybe clean gas here, drill baby drill? Or probably some people in the audience are thinking, well, why don't you rich guys pay one percent more taxes and cut the military 5% and then a little bit of austerity measures on the margin sound like a better strategy? How would you respond to that argument that many people in the audience are probably thinking right now?
So I mean if the numbers added up that might be plausible but the numbers just don't add up. I mean the idea that if you just incrementally increase the top tax bracket that's going to pay off the massive Nationals that we have racked up or the national deficit that we're racking up every year, the numbers don't add up in any way like that. And when you take a look at energy production the same thing is true. So there's not going to be making up for LNG anytime soon. That's for sure true globally.
And you know when it comes to America's role in the world, which is the biggest thing here, when it taught when we talk about cutting the military budget, that always sounds sexy, but the reality is that undergirding things like for example the big deals the president Trump is cutting in Saudi and UAE is the giant American airbase that we have in Qatar and the ability of the United States to provide the defense mechanisms for those countries. I mean let's be very clear about what's going on in the Middle East. If the United States did not exist, there's a solid shot that the Saudi monarchy, the Qatar Emirates and the UAE would not exist in their current form and you would have something like a Muslim brotherhood running many of those nations.
And so the reality is that always backing American soft power is the threat of American hard power. And this is for sure true when you look at things like what's going on in Taiwan. I mean one of the ways that we, you guys know much more about this than I do, one of one of the ways we've been talking about getting out of the possible debt spiral is massive increases in productivity due to AI. Well, if China out competes us in AI or if China were to take Taiwan like right now, that would basically crush the hope of that.
And the reason that China is not doing that right now is because number one we actually are building up the American naval assets President Trump is working on that, but number two because we are rapidly scaling with regard to our own energy production. I mean you have to be an energy intensive nation in order to produce AI. And so the United States has to play this game. If we're not playing this game, we're losing. I mean China is out producing us that energy about leaps and bounds right now.
So my simple request for Americans is don't be mathematically illiterate and let's all grow up together come on. Yeah, yeah, and I'll just say like no just to go back a couple comments to Chimoff's point. Number one monetize our assets, totally agree. There's opportunities, we got to do it in a clean way, we follow the law, we follow the EPA's there to make sure that these methods and systems that we use are not in danger, species or the planet or whatever other kind of acts were important. But I'm not sure that the ramp up is gonna make up for the deficit. that's really important as I it's great to say that at a high level There's a north star there we can monetize our assets.
But as you build out the annual plan over the next 10 to 15 years first of all Political cycles are gonna affect this If the Democrats come back into power in this next election cycle they'll put a blockade on this stuff It's not gonna be persistent so again, we have to fix the spending problem And this idea that we have to cut in tidalments to fix the spending problem I don't even think that that's step one. I think step one is don't add new programs step two go back to covid level spending And then step three is you can address the entitlements and all the other kind of spending and step four as you execute as quickly as you can On monetizing America's assets.
But I'm not sure that the ramp up is gonna be fast enough to make up for the deficit of the next one One quick comment here also that I think is important and that that is that the American people We're gonna have to get used to the idea that we can't just spend every dollar that comes in. So if you take a look at the the Spanish Empire in the 16th century Spanish Empire in the 16th century is a dominant power in Europe And then they discover all the gold in the new world and so suddenly They are easily the richest power on earth because of the amount of money that's coming in and they immediately start spending all of it and they immediately start Expending all of that capital in order to build up and build up and do different projects and pretty soon They're bankrupt and they're defaulting on their debt routinely.
I mean it there's there's not a correlation between your asset base and inability to go bankrupt I mean we all know very rich people who go bankrupt because they Outspend their asset base and then in the United States We can expand our asset base for sure and we should do that of course But if we don't wean ourselves from the addiction to spending particularly on social programs because that's what's gonna bankrupt us. Then all we will do if we increase our asset base and say hey look how much more money We now get to spend because there just so you know Chimoff did hit the brakes before he hit that situation He hit the brake pump the brakes and I touched a couple billion but I learned a couple lessons.
He almost flipped the car. I Not not really, but I think I just want to pick up on what Ben and Dave said This is a great opportunity for us to grow up as a society collectively to have some priorities The problem that we have right now is we allow all kinds of fringe belly aching and we don't have a good sense making mechanism to prioritize that belly aching And so everything seems like a class five hurricane And everything is not a class five hurricane and how we respond should be Proportion we need to React proportionally to the actual challenge at hand and I think what Maybe it's just said differently is this is a class five category issue.
How we spend and our revenues are completely completely broken So we need a new way of addressing it and the people that Would have issues with how that salt need to have the maturity to actually point to what the alternative is Because there is no way to quickly raise several trillion dollars without selling land and without giving land leases and without taking royalties for drilling. And so they should say explicitly I would rather the country Go into a debt spiral and go bankrupt. Okay, then just say that Yeah, I mean and to the point of taxes if you even if you raise taxes 20% on the rich it's gonna like impact three talking about the year It's not impossible.
It's the pimple on the dogs ass people We have to stop the spending train. Hey, let's talk about um You want to go farmer? Do we want to go science coordinator? I don't want to have you Mr. Science quenna there free My science governor today is just a rant against the governors who are signing laws banning cellular meat And I'll just hit on it real quick. Oh, this is a this is a your this is your take-to on this because you've done this once this rant Correct governor de Santis did this in Florida since then Alabama Mississippi, Indiana. What's your issue with the cellular meat sir? Cover it Like a little pepperoni This week this week Montana's governor Greg G on forte signed a law house bill 401 banning cellular meat That bill goes into effect on October 1st you guys can.
laugh all you want if it was in a market that you were an investor in In innovation or technology for example if they said we ban AI in our state How would you guys react what sort of opinion or commentary would you guys have over? Move around move around the state let the state go to zero and then come pick up the average We have 49 other and I think that's really important and now by the way There's a house bill being proposed to do the same thing throughout the United States Meanwhile China and Europe are building cellular meat systems that are rocketing ahead They're actually economic drivers because they make the cost of food cheaper.
They're creating new industries There's a lot of supply chain that goes into these industries Whether consumers like or want to buy the product or not should be left to the consumer It should be a free market the market should decide as long as they're regulated check for health check for safety as they all are today The FDA the USDA and others are all involved in regulating these systems They shouldn't be banned because in every single state what is it the reason we're banning them is to protect our ranchers our cattle ranchers And so in all these cases they're saying that that's making no protectionism no, but that's I look I take this very different view I mean These are okay.
Let's ban Uber to protect the cap drivers But what we just did 90 What's I guess the cap is easy? Yeah, I don't like the benevolent dictatorship model of running a country each of these 50 states have the ability to make decisions Some are good some are bad some are neutral if they want to make fundamentally bad decisions for themselves Let them if they want to make fundamentally good decisions for them let them at the end of the day Those populations in those places are making those decisions.
I don't see it as a big deal Yeah, and I think the reason is that most of the consumers 95% of them don't give a shit about the product Whereas Uber and others were different many people did care about the product But fundamentally it unlocks economic opportunities that they don't see today And I think that's what's really frustrating about this is a small cohort that's created regulatory capture mechanisms By getting these laws passed in these states these are this rancher industry can I say something cattle as somebody who's tried this that meets success? Okay, yeah, the meat was delicious That's fine. Just be honest with you No, this is my point.
I've never had it. I don't give it about the meat. It's not let me make my point If this product was exceptionally delicious It would be widely consumed all over America and this would never come to pass because there were taxi drivers in Montana But the reality was Uber was better in Montana And there were taxi drivers in Florida, but Uber was better in Florida And my point is that when the product is so good It allows adoption and it quels The naysayers at the fringes.
Okay, let me point to you when the product is a little bit more man But what if someone banned Uber before it had a chance to get there? That's a good point I mean, I think your point is there was no offer to be developing technology. It's early stay on And they're stopping it because what would happen is there were places that banned Uber and what happened? They all flipped that's because because Unforward and broke the law No, no, we reinterpreted regulation even tried I was there of what's right for the people of America what I'm saying is not in the place that it was banned But there were enough places around it.
Yes, where the product value could be demonstrated and government But tomorrow that doesn't mean you pass a law banning it. You should still let the country do it It's right for capture Ah who cares if this was some one of your companies, Chimalt and they were banning some Farma company or social media or some bullshit that you'd started or gotten vested in you'd be all up in arm saying They're blocking us. They're keeping us from developing. We're early stay in I wouldn't try. No, I don't I don't cry. I'm not an investor and anything that's going to benefit from this. I think it's tough Well, I don't think so because it happens all the time I would say get over it grow up figure out the markets where you can make it and Make the product excellent so that then all these people in these states at You know, I have a very different point of view on regulatory capture capitalism and free markets Chimalt That's a fact.
No, no, no, no I mean, would you need a pork that's made in a fermentation tank? It's just make this is Jewish you got to bring up poor I'm actually curious about this. I'm sorry. Oh, this is the only reason I'm interested in this topic at all This is like it's not to get into extrude Jewish law But this is like an actual open question is that if you grew pork in a tank and it didn't come from an actual pain What did then become kosher and is it considered a vegetable as opposed to a meat because I talked to my brother about it Right, it's like like this stuff to me is really interesting and hey if it gets me to be able to eat bacon I'm all for it like that's it.
I've heard amazing things the reviews are excellent on bacon Yeah, okay, let's go to farm here shout out to Long Hill Bacchina steaks will send you Oh, I just made an order from Long Hill I just bought five hundred dollars worth of stuff. I got a discount though They I don't know if you got the email, but if you put the Memorial Day promo code you get 10% off. Oh I have to get paid for the order with long Hill Wagyu While I mix and mix it up. I mix up the kind no, I do the pecania, but I do some Denver steaks sometimes I mix them Nice, yeah, I like the New York strip.
我听说关于培根的评价非常好,是啊,好,我们去农场那里,感谢Long Hill Bacchina,他们会寄给你牛排。我刚从Long Hill下了一笔订单,买了价值五百美元的东西。不过我有拿到折扣。我不知道你有没有收到邮件,但如果你使用纪念日促销代码,可以享受9折优惠。哦,我得付Long Hill Wagyu的订单,我会混合购买不同的种类。我有时候会买pecania,有时候买一些Denver牛排来混合。不错,我喜欢纽约客牛排。
We'll send just a Ben you eat steak right of course of course of course I'll try this place called Long Hill Wagyu. It kicks us right by me and Austin it is incredible And you know Freiburg doesn't eat meat and you know It's just the nature of it. Okay, let's wrap on farm. Okay, Trump signed an executive order to slash drunk prices on Monday I mean, this is like a great week for Trump.
I like everything Trump did this week The goal is to cut prices 30 to 80% by giving the US MFN if you don't know This stands for most favored nation status. That's a generic term in business It means we get to pay the same price of whichever country gets the lowest price for a specific drug This executive order would cut out the famous middleman He's talking about pbms you've heard more Cuban friend of the pod talk about that a whole bunch Here's rfk juniors quote Congress is controlled in so many ways by the pharmaceutical industry. This was an issue The people talked about but nobody wanted to do anything because it was radio active It's radioactive obviously Chimoff because Listen, so many politicians are getting donations and lobbyists What's your take on this obviously?
Amore is in this business and is in pharmaceutical so she has some great insights I'm sure as you do yeah, let me Start by talking about the specifics of the EO the really interesting thing about this EO was that there was a very detailed Report that was published in the national bureau of economic research a few years ago that study this exact thing so The president used the term MFN, but the concept here is called international reference pricing.
Anyways, there was an extremely detailed study that said okay What happens to drug prices when you use this irf pricing mechanism? okay, and What they showed in that study was a very interesting takeaway which is If you set the irf with only one country Typically what happens is for the United States The change is about minus 2% If you do it with a basket the actual profitability of the pharma companies would go up slightly If you had a required comparison meaning it had to be a like for like opportunity Profits fall about 20% and if you use the US bargaining framework then profits could fall about 27.5% so this is the impact Of that but there are a lot more nuances of it.
So the question would be what does this all mean then to the downstream impact of pharma the thing to keep in mind is that We are in a very complicated situation on the rnd side of the house And what this chart shows is clinical trial enrollments in China versus the United States Now this has been happening well before the EO But what this effectively shows is a really important comment which I'll come back to China a few years ago very smartly Completely reformed the way that it does trials And the procedures and as a result what they saw when they had this regulatory reform Was an explosion in the number of clinical trials And there are as many clinical trials now in China as there are in the United States and oftentimes They're bigger which is to say That the amount of innovation And the surface area there is already exceeding what's happening in the west
So that's where we are now why does this all matter if you go to the next chart To tie it all together As you saw at the beginning International reference pricing has an impact to profits Prophets can have an impact on rnd As we stand today R&D we are neck and neck with the Chinese What is more important to understand is that actually the last 10 years has been very complicated for western pharmaceutical businesses when you look at the average rate of return As an industry These things used to be extremely profitable businesses But as of the last decade It's been very very hard in fact I think like the Delight study that I saw was that the can you believe this the average ROI for broad-based farmers 1.5% as of 2022 per year So if you invest a billion dollars or making back 10 million a year you'll make 10 million bucks Which is not enough to fight this rnd battle
So if you then further affect the profitability scale of pharma The impact is probably that we push rnd to different places So I bring all of this up basically to say I think that what trump did in one vein was brilliant why He took A plank of the democratic party like if you guys think about like what Bernie Sanders ran on yeah It was this and he took it and he jiu jitsued it and now he owns it He'll be able to take credit for it And the democrats are robbed of a very critical Political plank that they had which they'll have to fill in with something else And if you saw by the way Rokana and other folks said oh we agree with this and we'd like to do this via You know some bill so even they had to kind of flip and say yeah This is kind of a good idea
So politically it's good the execution of this is going to be complicated because of what I showed We were already at this Delicate balancing act of how to make sure that there could be a lot of domestic rnd that's was still economically viable The last thing I'll say is We still need to do one important thing Which is I think that this eo is an important start But it doesn't yet address the much bigger problem which is that there is a lot of money That goes to many other things other than drugs so when you look at a dollar of health care spend Which is you know almost 20% of GDP I think the number is that you know there's 30% that is administrative complexity 20% that is pricing failures which is effectively to say PBMs failure of care coordination is 5% over treatment is 10% fraud and abuse is almost 10%
So there's a lot of other organizations in this value chain that kind of eat out of that dollar Before it gets to the sense that goes to pharma And so it's important to make sure we don't overlook those the biggest ones being the pBMs Ben your thoughts on this e9% goes to pharma Yeah, but what are your thoughts a ban on this broadly speaking? I mean, I have a general rule if Bernie Sanders likes a policy. I don't like the policy And so the and so when it comes to when it comes to this particular eo I mean the the real problem here for using mfn status as president trump is calling it Is that if we are going to use the kind of tariff tools the president trump has talked about to even the playing field It seems to me this is where you actually should put pressure on places like Canada or Mexico
Or the EU is for them to actually pay their fair share. For the drugs that they are getting from the United States because we're patenting all the drugs over here. And then we're selling it at discount prices to all of these nationalized health care systems. And so if you do that with Medicaid what you will probably get is number one a lot of these pharmaceuticals just won't be used by Medicaid. Pharma won't sell it to them instead you'll have to go into the private sector, which means it's going to be more expensive in the private sector than it would have been otherwise. If you're covered by private insurance, your pharma bill is actually going to be higher than it otherwise would be. What we should be doing is getting other countries to pay their fair share, drive up the price on those other places, and then you can actually do something that looks more like an mfn status because you're not artificially.
You're basically squeezing the balloon here and you're inflating the balloon here, the inflation side being the private health care insurers in the United States and private consumers in the United States. And so if you're talking about, you know, just artificially lowering prices by basically clocking pharma, I mean the reality is if you want to kill R&D, this is a great way to kill R&D. People in the United States I don't think have a clue as to how much money gets spent on R&D that crops out because what you see is the big winners. Right, it's like going to a casino and only watching the guy who's got the hot hand with the dice, right? I'm the version with the dice about the hot hand, right? Me. But you don't see the other hundred guys, the casinos absolutely cleaning out.
And the reality is the vast majority of biotech companies and pharmaceutical startup companies, and people who are trying to do this sort of stuff spend literally billions of dollars and then crap out at phase three of the way after a trial. Then just to build on this because you're making an excellent point, did you guys know what the cost of the average trial was in the early 90s? It was about 250 million dollars. The average cost of that same trial in 2025 is 2.3 billion dollars, 10x. And effectively what happened in that 30-year period was a thousand regulations became a hundred and fifty thousand regulations. And so to your point, one thing that we could do is if this EO, you know, is going to continue and really be implemented in a forceful way, the other side of it is we have to find a way of decreasing the regulatory burden so that then the cost of the trial isn't all the administrative, but it's the core science.
And isn't the issue here Friedberg that there is a free market for drugs outside of the United States where they seem to negotiate really well? And then inside the United States, we don't seem to negotiate our prices for drugs as aggressively as Canada, Mexico, and European countries do. As is the case with the cost of education and the cost of housing, the cost of drugs is largely inflated because of the federal government's role in being the primary buyer or capital provider to that market. So similar to how the US government provides all the capital through the federal home loan program and all of the capital through the federal student loan program, the cost of tuition has no market check, and the cost of housing doesn't have a great market check because there's an unlimited, endless supply of capital coming from the federal government.
Similarly, through our purchases of prescription drugs, the federal government as a buyer doesn't have any incentive to keep prices low. There's no individual, there's no shareholder, there's no one that has um check that says you know what we're actually not going to buy that drug because it costs too much or hey we need an alternative. If every individual had to pay for their drugs or private insurance was the only way to get your drugs, was through private insurance, we would have a much more dynamic marketplace. So the way that we negotiate drug prices is pretty messed up. There's also this construct in the market, these PBMs are pharmacy benefit managers. If they got cut out of the market it would save a lot.
I'll just give you guys some numbers on these PBMs. There's three major PBMs: CVS Caremark, Express Scripts, and Optum Rx. These three companies make on average approximately three bucks in operating profit per prescription claim processed. They make money in markups; the FTC's been investigating them and have several open cases between 2017-2022. The estimate that these companies generated seven point three billion dollars in excess profit by marking up prices on specialty generic drugs.
The list goes on on kind of the egregious behavior and the role that they play as middlemen in the industry. Their job and I'll kind of describe it is to be the managers of prescription drug benefits on behalf of the health insurers, large employers, Medicare Part D plans, and other payers. So as an intermediary, they provide this role where they coordinate between the health insurer, the pharmacy which dispenses the drugs, and the drug manufacturing allowed to be owned by the payer, which is crazy.
这个清单中列举了他们作为行业中间人时极端行为的种种例子。他们的工作,我简单描述一下,就是代表健康保险公司、大型雇主、Medicare Part D计划和其他支付方来管理处方药福利。作为中间人,他们在健康保险公司、提供药品的药房以及被支付方所拥有的药品制造商之间进行协调,这种安排简直让人难以置信。
And now they're allowed to be owned by the payer and there's a lot of obfuscation of the true cost of the drugs. There's a lot of markups, a lot of spread taking. And so if you took the PBMs out of the market that would solve one of the problems. But at the end of the day, I've said this many many times before anytime the federal government is involved as a payer in any market-based system it creates a distortion and the market is no longer free or efficient.
All right for Ben Shapiro of the Ben Shapiro Show in Daily Wire, Smoth Polyhapatia, and David Friedberg. I am Executive Producer for Life. We'll see you all next time. Love you boys. You all bye bye. Bye. And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just got crazy.
Oh, that's my dog. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge or two because they're all just like this like sexual tension. But we just need to release. You, I'm doing.