Apr 4, 2025 · 1h 54m · allin
DOGE updates + Liberation Day Tariff Reactions with Ben Shapiro and Antonio Gracias
Ben Shapiro · 28m spoken Jason Calacanis · 20m spoken Chamath Palihapitiya · 20m spoken Antonio Gracias · 15m spoken David Friedberg · 14m spoken Ronald Reagan · 1m spoken Rand Paul · 31s spoken Scott Bessent · 19s spoken
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In this episode of the All-In Podcast, hosts Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedberg are joined by Ben Shapiro and Antonio Gracias to discuss DOGE's audit of the Social Security Administration, immigration policy, and the strategic and macroeconomic implications of proposed trade tariffs.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 53.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.5 Guest teaching 5.8 Guest disagreement 2.6 The hosts pushing back 3.0
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 44:02 Shapiro Rejects 4D Chess Tariff Defense
Shapiro forcefully rejects Friedberg's rationalization that Trump's tariffs are a poker bluff, insisting Trump directly means what he repeatedly states.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 32:52 Jason Challenges Voter Fraud ClaimsJason pushes back directly against Antonio Gracias's claims of voter fraud, citing Heritage Foundation data showing only 2,400 cases over 40 years.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 40:02 Shapiro Dismantles Tariff Calculation LogicShapiro systematically educates the hosts on why dividing trade deficit by imports has zero mathematical relation to actual tariff rates.
The host holds their own ▶ 50:12 Chamath Demonstrates Bond Yield ExpertiseChamath asserts authority on macro markets by explaining how the 10-year Treasury yield drop saves hundreds of billions in government financing.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pre-Show Banter and White House Recording Jokes | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | The show opens with light banter regarding White House recording protocols and casual introductions of guests Ben Shapiro and Antonio Gracias. There is no serious policy debate or confrontation in this opening segment. | |
| Analyzing Non-Citizen Social Security Number Issuance Data | 3 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Antonio Gracias details how his DOGE team mapped Social Security Administration data to uncover a sharp spike in Enumeration Beyond Entry (EBE) numbers. The hosts mostly listen as Gracias explains the historical baseline versus recent surges. | |
| Verification Gaps & Border Patrol Conditions | 4 | 7 | 2 | 3 | Gracias explains systemic gaps in ID verification at the border and details findings regarding non-citizens registered on state voter rolls. Ben Shapiro asks a focused question regarding whether the administration can invalidate these Social Security numbers. | |
| Addressing Criticisms and 'Apples to Oranges' Data Comparisons | 5 | 7 | 3 | 4 | Chamath prompts Gracias to address public pushback from high-profile critics like Jim Chanos. Gracias breaks down why comparing total enumerations to EBE data represents an apples-to-oranges fallacy. | |
| Antonio Gracias's Democratic Background & Bipartisan Immigration Framework | 4 | 7 | 2 | 3 | Gracias shares his 20-year history as a major Democratic donor to emphasize his data-driven neutrality. Shapiro adds policy analysis, arguing that tracking individual economic impact is more effective than treating immigrants as a single class. | |
| Mass Deportation vs. Targeted Action & Human Trafficking Realities | 4 | 7 | 2 | 4 | Jason pushes back on mass deportation rhetoric, calling 20 million deportations 'just marketing.' Shapiro agrees it is political rhetoric while Gracias highlights the human trafficking realities driving border surges. | |
| Institutional Intent vs. Public Perception on Immigration Policy | 5 | 6 | 3 | 6 | Friedberg asks directly if top Democratic officials intentionally engineered border policies to expand their voter base. Gracias confirms top-level policy decisions set open defaults, though average voters were unaware. | |
| Next DOGE Initiatives & Election Integrity Concerns | 6 | 5 | 3 | 8 | Jason aggressively challenges the premise of widespread voter fraud, citing Heritage Foundation data showing minimal illegal voting cases. Chamath counters Jason, arguing that data analysis quality depends directly on who interrogates the raw numbers. | |
| Electoral Impact Theories & Antonio Gracias's Closing Remarks | 5 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Shapiro contextualizes long-term demographic strategy theories in American politics, referencing Roy Teixeira's earlier work. Gracias offers closing remarks on following data to protect American democracy. | |
| Ben Shapiro's Critique of Trump's Tariff Rollout | 4 | 8 | 5 | 3 | Shapiro delivers a detailed breakdown of the Trump administration's tariff rollout, criticizing contradictory justifications and mathematical errors in the tariff calculations. The hosts listen attentively as Shapiro dismantles the policy's logic. | |
| Tariff Strategy: Negotiation Leverage vs. Economic History | 5 | 8 | 6 | 5 | Friedberg attempts to rationalize the tariff rollout as a 4D chess negotiating tactic, but Shapiro firmly rejects this framing. Shapiro further debunks historical economic comparisons to the 1880-1910 tariff era by noting massive confounding variables. | |
| Tariff Strategy, Stock Market Volatility, and Treasury Yields | 8 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Chamath takes the floor to analyze Treasury yield movements, explaining how the 10-year yield dropping toward 4% saves the US government hundreds of billions in debt refinancing. He emphasizes that the administration prioritizes MAGA working-class goals over equity market stability. | |
| Federal Reserve Rate Policy and Private Credit Liquidity | 8 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Chamath breaks down market dynamics between the front end and back end of the yield curve, calling on Fed Chair Jerome Powell to cut rates to inject liquidity into small businesses facing potential recessionary pressures. | |
| Real-World Business Impact of Trade Tariffs | 7 | 7 | 3 | 3 | Chamath shares a concrete example of a 100-year-old American family manufacturing business negatively impacted by broad tariffs. Shapiro joins in with commentary on Rand Paul's constitutional arguments against executive emergency tariffs. | |
| Structural Risks of Protectionism, Agricultural Bailouts, and Intellectual Property Theft | 8 | 6 | 2 | 3 | Friedberg plays an archival clip of Ronald Reagan warning against protectionism and details three structural risks: loss of domestic competitiveness, agricultural bailouts, and potential Chinese disregard for global IP rights. | |
| Scott Bessent's Vision for Global Economic Reordering | 7 | 7 | 4 | 3 | Chamath plays a clip of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calling for a global economic reordering. Shapiro points out that previous reorderings like Bretton Woods required absolute US dominance and warns against anti-tech Luddite impulses. | |
| Tariff Humor, Heard Island Meme, and AI as the New Anchor Asset | 5 | 5 | 2 | 2 | The group laughs over internet memes featuring Heard Island penguins being hit with tariffs before turning to AI as the potential anchor asset for future US economic hegemony. | |
| Stablecoin Legislation, Treasury Demand, and American Economic Linchpins | 7 | 3 | 1 | 2 | Jason and Chamath discuss stablecoin legislation, pointing out how backing US dollar stablecoins with Treasuries creates a massive, durable domestic bid for US government debt. | |
| Debate on U.S. Entrepreneurship, Chinese Industrial Growth, and Political Populism | 6 | 8 | 6 | 5 | Jason celebrates American entrepreneurial culture while Friedberg defends China's rapid industrial productivity gains. Shapiro forcefully counters Friedberg, outlining the inherent structural vulnerabilities of state-directed economic fascism. | |
| Political Dynamics, Recession, and the Threat of Populism | 5 | 8 | 4 | 2 | Shapiro warns that an economic recession under Trump could spark a joint left-and-right populist revolt targeting free-market tech leaders and regulatory critics like Lina Khan. | |
| Shapiro's Advice on Blue-Collar Messaging and Tariff Clarity | 5 | 8 | 3 | 2 | Shapiro advises the administration to pivot away from grievance messaging toward celebrating blue-collar success and American innovation, cautioning that voters have little tolerance for unexplained economic pain. | |
| Addressing Human Capital Crisis and Global Ambition | 7 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Friedberg discusses America's decline in national ambition compared to China's massive infrastructure buildout, while Chamath highlights critical human capital shortages in US utility and defense manufacturing sectors. | |
| Ben Shapiro's Hypothetical Presidential Platform | 4 | 7 | 2 | 1 | Jason asks Shapiro about his personal political platform if he were to run for president. Shapiro delivers a concise monologue centered on individual responsibility, deregulation, and dismantling institutional barriers. | |
| Humorous 'Reciprocal Tariffs' Segment | 8 | 3 | 2 | 2 | Jason presents a satirical list of reciprocal tariffs targeting podcaster pet peeves before Chamath reviews his successful Credit Default Swap (CDS) asymmetry trade setup from earlier in the year. |
Statements from this episode (53)
Gracias: Elon Musk directed him to audit Social Security before the VA
“Yeah, no, what happened was I had actually volunteered to go to the VA because that's kind of, as you guys know, close to my heart. And Elon said to me, look, great, you can do that next, but will you go to SSA first and see what's going on there? Cause it's t…”
Gracias: Social Security will go bankrupt between 2032 and 2037
“Man, this system's going bankrupt. It's going to be bankrupt in 23 to seven. The country overall, as you guys know, talked about many times, is on its way toward bankruptcy.”
Gracias: DOGE found 2.4M questionable non-citizen Social Security entries
“This is about 5.4 million people total. There were about 1.2 million people that the status is marked as unknown, and about 1.2 million people that were marked as general parole.”
Gracias: Average court date wait time for immigration Notices to Appear is six years
“And while you're waiting for your court date, which could be six, six years out is the average, by the way.”
Gracias: January 1st was the most common birthdate in border data
“When we looked at the birth certificate data that was presented at the border, the number one birth date was one. And it was four times more likely to be born on one-on-one than any other day of the year.”
Gracias: 23% of analyzed border records lacked fingerprint biometrics
“We found that 23% of the records we looked at did not have fingerprints.”
Gracias: Over 70 border agents committed suicide during recent border surge
“Both Border Patrol and Border Protection told me they had the highest suicide rates of all time during the surge. Okay, over 70, over 70 of these agents committed suicide in this period.”
Gracias: 1.3M non-citizens with flagged Social Security numbers receive Medicaid
“We found in the benefit programs that every benefit program that was being accessed by these people, you know, 1.3 million of them are on Medicaid right now, today.”
Calacanis: Heritage Foundation recorded only 24 non-citizen voting cases since 2003
“There's only been 24 cases since 2003 of Somebody who's a non-citizen trying to vote.”
Gracias: Flagged Social Security numbers yielded terrorist watchlist hits
“We sent this data list to the National Targeting Center. They, and I don't want to get too far into the data, but I can tell you they found hard hits in the Targeting Center of very bad people. Criminals and people on terrorist watch list that are in this grou…”
Gracias: Initial critic deleted counter-chart and admitted DOGE data was right
“The person, the first person that posted the chart actually deleted it and sent me a post saying, Hey, I, you know, I'm deleting it because I get it. You're right.”
Shapiro: US border crossings have dropped to lowest in recorded history
“The numbers of the border have just Plummeted to almost zero. I mean, the lowest numbers in recorded history, and that is an unmitigated success.”
Shapiro: Trump does not realistically expect to deport 20 million people
“I don't think President Trump actually thinks the number is, is twenty million. I don't think anybody realistically thinks the number is twenty million.”
Gracias: US policy funneled $13B to $15B annually to human traffickers
“You've got to realize we gave 13 to fifteen billion dollars a year to human traffickers.”
Gracias: DOGE found thousands of non-citizens on voter rolls in four states
“We looked at the voter rolls. We found these people, thousands of them on the voter rolls, and we found many of those people had voted, right? In one state in particular, well over a thousand voted.”
Gracias: Social Security Administration issued numbers based on minimal ID
“You get a Social Security number before we got here by walking in office. Answering, you know, with a medical record and a school ID that had your name and your date, the date of birth on it.”
Calacanis: 15 US states currently do not require voter ID
“It's 15 states now are the ones that don't have voter ID.”
Calacanis: Heritage Foundation found 2,400 illegal voting cases in 40-50 years
“They found, like, 2400 cases over 40 or 50 years. The number of people voting illegally is minuscule.”
Gracias: 1980s amnesty turned California into a solidly blue state
“Ronald Reagan signed amnesty, and you know, some, four years later, it is now a solidly blue state, and I think some of us on this program, I know you, Jason, are a refugee from California because of that, because of some of those policies, and I want to be, I…”
Ben Shapiro: Trump's tariff plan rollout was as bad as possible
“I think that the way that the tariff plan was rolled out is about as bad a rollout as you could do.”
Ben Shapiro: Tariff goals of reshoring manufacturing and raising revenue are mutually exclusive
“If you're going to reshore, you're not going to raise as much revenue, for example, right? Those two things are mutually exclusive, and they're both being trotted out at the same exact time.”
Shapiro reduced stock exposure following State of the Union
“I called my financial advisor after the State of the Union address and told them to rejigger my stock and bond ratio in my portfolio because I figured that something like this was going to happen.”
Shapiro: Trump will carve out tariff negotiation off-ramps within weeks
“I think the most likely result of these tariffs is that within the next few weeks, the headlines are not good. President Trump starts driving trucks through the center of the tariffs. And then he starts getting wins from various parties outside that allow him …”
Shapiro: Israel removed US tariffs before Trump levied 17% tariff
“Yesterday, in anticipation of this, Israel, which had very, very low tariffs on United States goods anyway, announced they'd removed all tariffs. On American goods, right? There were no tariffs on American goods anymore. And the administration that afternoon l…”
Chamath: Trump administration does not care about stock market performance
“The Trump administration does not care about the stock market.”
Chamath: Trump administration will not capitulate on trade tariffs
“They're gonna go through with this and they're gonna see it through. I don't think you're gonna see this grand capitulation.”
Chamath: Trump tariffs represent a $750B to $1T economic impact
“This is a seven hundred and fifty billion dollar to trillion dollar event.”
Friedberg: There is $12T-$16T of private corporate debt in America
“There's roughly 12 to 16 trillion dollars of private corporate debt in America.”
Shapiro: DOGE is avoiding means-tested welfare, the main national debt driver
“The systemic drivers of our national debt are not actually being touched at this point by Doge. I mean, it's the means-tested welfare programs that are really the systemic long-term drivers of our national debt.”
Shapiro: US defense spending as share of GDP has decreased post-Iraq War
“Military as a percentage of the GDP, or as a percentage of the budget, has been, you know, relatively stable, and in some cases decreasing since, since the end of the Iraq War.”
Friedberg: Trump administration paid $28B in farmer bailouts during 2018-2019 trade war
“As a result, the Trump administration had to issue two support payment checks to farmers that totaled twenty eight billion dollars in 2018 and 2019.”
Friedberg: Maintaining tariffs will force higher US government spending to support exporters
“I think that the second consequence is going to be that there is going to need to be financial support, which means increased government spending if we intend to keep the tariffs in place, and the global market stops buying American exports.”
Friedberg: China's 3nm semiconductor technology will reach full production in 2026
“China, one thing that's not talked about, which I'll add in, seems to have developed three nanometer semiconductor manufacturing technology, which is going to go into production in Q three of 20, 25, and will end up being in full production in 20, 26.”
Scott Bessent foresees global economic reordering within next few years
“I could see in the next few years that we are going to have to have some kind of a grand global economic reordering. There's something on the equivalent of a new Bretton Woods, or if you want to go back, like a treat, something back to the steel agreements or …”
Shapiro: Most US manufacturing job loss stems from technology, not offshoring
“The vast majority of job loss in the manufacturing sector is not due to offshoring. It's due to technological advancements.”
Calacanis: Global supply chain diversification out of China is wiped out by tariffs
“These were specifically designed, Ben, to be a diversification strategy. Japan was paying their companies to build factories outside of China, and Apple was doing India, Vietnam to build AirPods and laptops, and even the iPhone being made outside of China. Tha…”
Chamath: Artificial intelligence must anchor any new Bretton Woods financial agreement
“If we try to reconvene a new Bretton Woods, we have to have an anchor asset. So it's a really great question. What is that anchor asset? It has to be AI.”
Friedberg: China is expanding electrical grid capacity to eight terawatts
“We're going from one terawatt to two. China's going from three to eight over the same time period, just to be clear.”
Friedberg: The US graduates only 200 people per year with mining degrees
“He said, we only graduate 200 people a year in the United States with degrees in mining.”
Shapiro: Loss of US dollar reserve status will trigger higher taxes
“The exit of the dollar as the world's global reserve currency is going to have some pretty nasty spillover effects, and it's going to require the government to start sucking in more dollars from the American population in order to pay off all of these debts th…”
Chamath: U.S. stablecoins create structural demand for U.S. Treasuries
“The thing that US dollar stablecoins does is it starts to replicate one of those advantages, which again, if you think about having a release valve for the US economy, and if we needed to, all of a sudden scream to 200% debt to GDP. The real question is, where…”
Calacanis says the Trump family launched a stablecoin in April 2025
“I think the Trump family now just launched, ah, their own stablecoin this week, so you're gonna see 10 stablecoins.”
Friedberg: China's industrial growth will drive a great era of prosperity
“And that's what drives the growth and the improvement in productivity and this extraordinary abundance in energy, in mining, and now in manufacturing. And it's, I think, gonna lead to a great era of prosperity for China. It's pretty clear with or without the c…”
Shapiro: A U.S. recession will trigger populist revolts against free-market capitalism
“And if the, and if it goes sideways, then what you're going to get is a populist revolt on the left and a populist revolt on the right that is going to take down everybody who is even remotely connected with this idea of free market capitalism.”
Shapiro: An economic downturn will make both parties favor Lina Khan
“And that's how you get a populist uprising on the right. And what you end up with is a horseshoe theory politics where both parties are in favor of Lena Kahn. Right. Both parties are in favor of Lena Kahn.”
Ben Shapiro: The US middle class has shifted into the upper middle class
“The fib, the politicians always make bank on is the idea that, for example, the middle class in America is completely dissolved. That is not statistically true. The middle class has turned into the upper middle class.”
Ben Shapiro: Trump's tariff policy rolls the dice without an articulated strategy
“It's why I'm being critical of the tariffs. It's not because I want Trump to lose, it's because I want Trump to win, right? I think he's doing too many important things, like the stuff that Antonio's doing. There are too many important things happening to take…”
Friedberg: China built 30,000 miles of high-speed rail in 20 years
“In the last 20 years, they've built 30,000 miles of high-speed rail.”
Friedberg: China will add double US electric capacity in 15 years
“In the next 15 years, they're gonna add More electricity production capacity than the United States times two has today.”
Chamath: 56% of US utility workers have under a decade experience
“So most of the people, 56% of all utility workers now have less than a decade of experience.”
Friedberg: Created a Polymarket bet on Q3 US GDP falling below -5%
“I created a poly market on GDP. Annualized GDP growth in Q three of this year being below five, negative five percent.”