DOGE unveils a roadmap, Unlocking GDP Growth, WW3 escalation, Fat cell memory

**David Sacks** (0:00)
Chamath, do you hear that Friedberg got busted looking at porn on his computer?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:04)
No, I did not. You got busted looking at porn?

**David Sacks** (0:07)
You want to know what it was?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:08)
Yeah.

**David Sacks** (0:09)
It was Elon of a Vakes Wall Street Journal op-ed.

**David Friedberg** (0:11)
It was. I lost it.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:14)
Oh, man. I lost it. It was too good.

**David Sacks** (0:16)
I think he was pleasuring himself to that op-ed.

**David Friedberg** (0:19)
He was playing his skin flute.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:22)
What happened? You have to go for a quick game of pocket pool. How did you write it?

**David Friedberg** (0:28)
It was too exciting.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:29)
You were beating the bishop.

**David Sacks** (0:30)
Alison came in and she was like wondering what was going on.

**David Friedberg** (0:33)
She grabbed my computer, she looked at it, and it was an essay.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:53)
All right, before we get to DOGE, we got a little housekeeping, a little housey housekeeping. You know, we're getting into the holiday spirit here. It's episode 205, we're in year four, and we're having a Christmas party. It's going to be great. The All-In holiday spectacular is happening in San Francisco on Saturday, December 7th. I think the VIP sold out. There's still some tickets left. Go to allin.com/events.
And if you can't make it to San Francisco, I think you can buy a ticket for $50 on the Zoom. I think we're going to have it on Zoom.

**David Friedberg** (1:29)
Is that right?

**Jason Calacanis** (1:30)
Do I have my facts straight there, Friedberg?

**David Friedberg** (1:33)
Yeah. There's going to be a live stream. Thanks to Zoom for setting this up for us. It's kind of interesting. They're doing this thing where you could kind of get access to live events. So they're helping us get this set up. If you want to watch the stream live on Zoom.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:50)
Anything's possible. It could be spicy. True that. All right, listen. Bestie Yuan and Bestie Vivek wrote an op-ed, a barn burner in the Wall Street Journal about DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, and they laid it out. They want to cut overbearing and unnecessary regulation, obviously. They want to cut unnecessary administrative roles, save taxpayers money. They want to run it by founders, not politicians, helping the Trump transition team find a way to hire, quote, a lean team of small government crusaders.
The team is going to work closely with the White House Office of Management and Budget. Here's the plan. First, take aim at $500 billion in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress, then fix the government's procurement process by conducting massive audits during temporary payment suspensions. This is an interesting playbook that Elon has done before. So basically, suspend all the payments, and hey, let everybody audit those payments. Drive change through, executive action based on existing legislation rather than passing new laws, and two SCOTUS rulings are going to play a major role here. West Virginia versus EPA. That's when SCOTUS ruled that federal agencies can't impose regulations dealing with major economic or policy questions unless Congress authorizes them to do so. And Luper Bright versus Raimondo. That's from 2024 And that overturned the Chevron doctrine. We talked about that on a previous episode. So according to DOGE, when combined, quote, these cases suggest that a plethora of current federal regulations exceed the authority Congress has granted under the law. DOGE will use software and legal experts to create a list of regulations that Trump can immediately pause. They're going to make some sort of a leaderboard, Elon said, and Vivek said he would do. He suspended his existing podcast. I didn't know he had a podcast, but he's doing a DOGE cast, a DOGE podcast. And so, Friedberg, this has been a major issue for you. You've been talking about on this podcast that the unsustainable existential issue for our country is all of the debt we have. What are the chances that this is going to occur? Because obviously, we all know the machine is going to fight to preserve the machine. Chances that we are sitting here in four years and we've seen meaningful cuts in spending and a meaningful reduction in size of the government.

**David Friedberg** (4:25)
Look, DOGE has probably 18 months to do what they can do before the midterms, and there's going to be an inevitable amount of recoil and backlash that's going to arise from the actions that they're going to try and take, and President Trump's going to try and take under the recommendations provided by DOGE. So they need to move fast and aggressively, and that's only going to cause the recoil to be harder and faster. There's going to be a ton of litigation. Obviously, everything's going to go to court. It's going to be incredibly politicized. What is frustrating and challenging to me is that there is nothing that they said that doesn't seem obvious and right. I don't know how you can politicize the points that they're making. Put aside their party, put aside who they are individually, put aside how we got here. At the end of the day, this federal government needs to be run more efficiently, more effectively. It is unfair and it is a tax on every one of us to have money thrown away, to have wasted capital, to have bureaucracy that gets in the way of people being able to do their jobs. It is a tax on all of us and our kids and our future. It needs to be fixed. If it doesn't get fixed, as I've said countless times before, we are in an arithmetic debt-depth spiral.