Overview
In this electrifying episode of the All-In podcast, hosts Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg sit down with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for a no-holds-barred conversation. Lutnick dives into his 30+ year friendship with President Donald Trump, from New York’s charity circuit to leading Trump’s transition team, and shares the origin story of DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—aimed at slashing waste and balancing the budget. He unpacks bold strategies like tariffs to reshore jobs, the innovative Trump Card visa plan, and a sovereign wealth fund to bolster America’s finances, all while modernizing government tech and navigating AI’s future. If you’ve been worried about your Social Security or the future of Social Security, worry no more with Trump’s plan, as Lutnick reveals how it could secure benefits for generations. Lutnick also opens up about his family’s support amid his whirlwind role, blending personal tales with a vision to “make America great again” through practical, transformative policies. This appears to be unfolding what God said would happen in a prophetic dream, “The Coming Wealth Transfer for the Coming Harvest,” and more. Expect high energy, candid insights, and a masterclass in storytelling from a key player in Trump’s administration.
Chamath and Friedberg Welcome Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick!
Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg kick off the All-In podcast with a bang, welcoming Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick with an enthusiasm that promises a wild ride. “Chamath and Friedberg welcome Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick!” they announce, and the energy is palpable right from the start.
Chamath tosses out a casual opener: “Do you go to New York much?” Howard’s response is immediate and laced with his signature blunt humor. “Uh, never. I closed my house,” he says, prompting a surprised “Oh, wow” from Friedberg. Howard dives right into a story, grinning as he explains, “I basically, uh, tricked my wife. You know how your wife always wants to renovate your house?” Chamath, caught off guard, admits, “No idea,” but Howard barrels on. “So, my wife—that’s like, my wife always wants to renovate my house, right? Every minute I’ve been alive, my wife has wanted to renovate parts of my house. So, we moved out once, a year and a half ago. Uh, we moved out for a year and a half about six years ago, and she only did half the house. And she still rues the day that she only did half the house.” Friedberg, intrigued, chimes in, “Really?” Howard nods, “Yeah. So, that was the deal. What I did is I bought a house in Washington and said, ‘You want to renovate the house?’ She said, ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘Great, we hired a contractor.’”
Friedberg, piecing it together, asks, “Wait, you bought Bret Baier’s house?” Howard corrects him with a playful twist, “No. Yeah, that’s a beautiful house. We can talk about whatever you want. By the way, I’m happy to talk about serious things, casual things.” Chamath seizes the moment, cutting through the chatter: “No, let’s just do this. Let’s roll because he’s rolling. You’re already running, right? He’s on fire.” And with that, they’re off, diving into a discussion that’s as dynamic as Howard himself.
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As the segment wraps, the trio reflects on the magic of it all. “All right, besties, I think that was another epic discussion,” Chamath says, noting, “People love the interviews. I could hear him talk for hours.” Friedberg agrees wholeheartedly, “Absolutely. Oh, he crushed your questions.” Chamath adds, “I made it. We are giving people ground-truth data to underwrite their own opinions. What do you guys think?” Friedberg’s quick with, “That was fun,” and Chamath echoes, “That was great.” Howard, ever gracious, closes with, “Howard, thanks for being here,” met with a simple, “Thanks” from the man himself, setting the stage for a deeper dive into his world.
Howard Describes His 30+ Year Relationship with President Trump and His Road from Business to Politics
Howard’s Early Days with Trump
Howard Lutnick doesn’t hesitate when Friedberg prompts him to rewind the clock on his decades-long bond with Donald Trump. “I want to take a step back before we talk about today and instead talk about your friendship with the president—how it started, how you guys got to know each other, and walk us through the moment when you, frankly, went out on a limb a little bit, stepped up, became the campaign finance chair, and then just that evolution,” Friedberg says, joining Chamath on the All-In podcast. Howard jumps in, “So, I’ve known the president since I was 30 years old. I used to go on what we call the charity circuit in New York.” Friedberg nods, “Sure,” as Howard paints the scene: “There’s basically a charity party every night when you live in New York—like the rubber chicken dinner.” Chamath adds, “Like, literally, the rubber chicken,” and Howard continues, “And, uh, so sort of every night you go out, and the boss of my company, Bernie Cantor, he got tired of going, right? So, he didn’t want to go. He would send me with his wife, and I would be her walker. You know, I’m the 30-year-old CEO of the company, and I’d take her to the party. After the party, I’d put her in a limo, and she’d go home, and DJT would say, ‘Well, let’s go out.’ And so we’d go out. It wasn’t planned, but he was at the party—he’s 45, I’m at the party, 30—and we chased the same girls.”
“Okay,” Friedberg says, chuckling, and Howard adds, “It basically worked out fine. And, by the way, here’s the thing about Donald Trump: he was the most famous, the most fun, the most interesting person 30 years ago, 33 years ago. I mean, here’s the best thing: he’s been on the cover of Time magazine 59 times.” Chamath’s stunned, “No way,” and Howard shares a gem: “And then he leans over to me and goes, ‘And 20 were good.’ Like, who can take that? I mean, who could take it? Other people, when you have a bad cover of Time magazine, you’d crumple, right? You’d be sand on the floor. But he’s like…” Friedberg probes deeper, “So, Howard, is it that he’s just totally wired to understand that moment of being a public figure, or what is it that’s so unique about what constitutes the ability to navigate that over 40 years?” Howard’s answer is electric: “I think it adds energy to him. To him, right? So, everybody else’s energy—what they don’t understand is people bring negative energy to Donald Trump, right? And they’re just charging his battery.” Chamath agrees, “Okay,” and Howard elaborates, “Your energy around him comes to him. So, when I come at him with a lot of energy, he comes back with a lot of energy.”
“Right, right,” Friedberg and Chamath say in unison. “It doesn’t matter,” Howard continues. “He never steps back. He just sort of takes it like a centrifuge and hurls it back at you. And he’s been that way always. So, this is not new. This is just who he is.” Friedberg echoes, “This is who he is,” and Howard drives it home: “So, those other people who attack him, they think they’re attacking him—they’re charging his battery. They’re literally charging his battery. So, he comes back bigger, stronger, bigger, stronger. And once you understand the man—the most intuitive person you’ve ever met.” Chamath nods, “Yeah,” and Howard adds, “And people say, ‘Well, okay, so people who know me, I don’t suffer fools.’ And they have all these derogatory—my left-leaning liberal friends—all these derogatory statements about the guy, right? And they know me really well.” Friedberg agrees, “Yeah, right,” and Howard continues, “And they’d say, ‘Well, how can you work for him?’ I’d say, ‘How can I work for him? The most intuitive person—he senses it, he knows it.’”
A Panama Canal Quest
Howard’s got a story to prove it. “He calls me up and says, ‘Panama Canal.’ That’s what he says. He goes, ‘Panama Canal.’ It just feels wrong, right? And then he sends me on the quest to go—I didn’t do anything—I just start the quest to go look at it,” he tells them. Friedberg’s hooked, “Yeah, right,” as Howard explains, “The mouth that’s east is a deep-water port by the Chinese. The mouth that’s west is a deep-water port by the Chinese. They’re building bridges over it, so our ships and our military ships should go under, right? In our hemisphere—a Chinese bridge. So then I said, ‘Okay, let’s go prove it.’ So, I have a friend of mine who owns a big shipping company. I said, ‘Take two iPhones, put them on a stand, and just go through the Panama Canal.’ You know, the Panama Canal—they sort of drag ships through like this. And I said, ‘Just video both ways.’ Seventy percent of every letter is Chinese. I’m talking, like, the sides of container ships, the stores—not signage, just random signage, like you’re riding on a road. It’s all Chinese. And then I do the research, and I call him back, and I say the magic words between me and him: ‘I have your path,’ which is, I’ve done it—I’ve done the legal work, I’ve done everything, right? So, when you start talking about it, you have a foundation. It’s not just you talking. So, people think he’s just talking—he’s never just talking.”
“Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard wraps it up: “He has people behind him who bring him his foundational, structural outcome. And then what does he do? He went and played golf that afternoon. He called me at 7:00 in the morning. He said, ‘What do you got?’ We talked from 7:00 to 8:00. He went and played golf, right? And that afternoon, there’s the American flag in the middle of the Panama Canal in some Truth he puts out, right? And that’s the fun part, right? So, you work for the most intuitive guy—unbelievably smart, unbelievably thoughtful, who knows what he’s doing. So, it’s so fun for me.”
The Road to Politics
Friedberg shifts gears, “Howard, let’s just go back one second. So, you have this deep relationship with him. You guys are friends. Scott Bessent told us the story that about 18 months ago, though, he saw all this data about what was happening under Biden, and he was just so concerned that these deficits and debts were getting so out of control, he went to the president and said, ‘How can I help? Can I help?’ That’s a story. But was there a moment for you that was rooted in something other than friendship—like, was there something on the ground where you said, ‘Hold on a second, this is a train wreck, and we need to do this’? You were the finance chair for the campaign.” Howard corrects him, “Well, no, I wasn’t the finance chair. I was the transition chair.” Friedberg adjusts, “Transition, okay,” and Howard dives in, “So, I ran transition, which we’ll talk about. But let’s go through this. So, I’m friends with him, right? But I’m building my business—young guy building my business. And then 9/11 happens.”
“Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “Okay. So, I’m friends with the guy—I’m just friends with the guy. But then 9/11 happens. He calls me all the time—just a good human being. Nice, warm, caring, good human being, right? But then I’m knocked out. So, what do I do next? I try to rebuild my company, take care of the families of 9/11. You know, I lost 658 people who worked for me. And we had a policy: we want to work with people that we like. So, when we had an opening, we didn’t use headhunters. We would say to everybody at the firm, ‘Does anybody know anybody who’d do this job?’ And so, a young lady who works for me says, ‘You know, my best friend is an HR person.’ They have to have capacity, yeah? But once they have capacity, imagine we hire that person. Now, what happens is, it’s not one big happy family, but people really, really care about the company. And that’s our company—that’s on the top five floors of the World Trade Center on 9/11 when the plane hits it, kills everybody at the office. My brother Gary—he dies at 36. My best friend Doug—he dies at 39. I had just turned 40 that summer. I had a party—65 couples. It’s my 40th birthday.”
“40th birthday, yeah, right,” Friedberg says, and Howard’s voice grows heavy, “27 people at my party get killed.” Chamath gasps, “Jesus,” and Howard presses on, “My friends. These are my friends. So, I’m driven to take care of the families of the people who died. And I commit 25% of all of our profits. But the company’s destroyed. So, we go from making a million a day—I was a rich guy, right? What’s the definition of a rich guy? No personal debt, no corporate debt—Cantor Fitzgerald, no debt. So, how do you survive 9/11? If you don’t owe anybody any money, the only money you’re losing is your money.” Friedberg echoes, “Is your money,” and Howard nods, “So, we survive, and we take care of our friends’ families, and then we build the company back up. So, you could see, like, I’m a special guest on the first season of Celebrity Apprentice. Piers Morgan wins.”
“Did he fire you?” Friedberg asks, and Howard laughs, “No, no, I wasn’t a contestant. I’m a little beyond being a contestant. I was a special guest. I’d come in—like, if you see during the auction, I’m standing next to him at the auction, you know, and I’m helping him. I’m just his friend, sort of an extra, all along the way. You know, every once in a while, we kept the friendship going as you’re rebuilding.” Chamath agrees, “We’re friends all the way, but I’m rebuilding my company,” and Howard adds, “Yeah. And then, so, I’m not interested in politics, okay? I don’t do anything in politics because I’ve got my head down, right? We had the financial crisis—Cantor Fitzgerald’s great in the financial crisis. Had you ever donated to candidates at all or not?” “Yeah, New York candidates,” Howard replies.
“Okay, right, New York,” Friedberg says, and Howard explains, “So, think about it. You’re in New York. You try to pick social liberals, fiscal conservatives, right? If that even exists anymore.” “Right,” Friedberg nods, and Howard continues, “But if you’re in New York, you have to pick. And look, I grew up in New York, so I’m socially liberal. What else could I possibly be?” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard goes on, “So, you know, early on, when Chuck Schumer was young—before he became what the president now calls a ‘Palestinian,’ you know—I raised him money and gave him money. Donald Trump gave him money.” “Same. I did too,” Chamath admits, and Howard adds, “Yeah, I mean, because he was—he said he was a social liberal, fiscal conservative. And, uh, so I’d give to those kinds of candidates, but mostly giving to get along, right? And to be able to ask him a question if you needed to ask him a question. But there was really no drive, right, in that. Like I said, the first four nights I slept in Washington in the last 20 years were when Donald Trump was elected. I had never slept here. I’d come down, visit a little, go home, go home. What am I staying here for? So, he calls me at the end of October ’23.”
“Okay,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “So, he’s already had his first term. You didn’t support or get—” Howard clarifies, “No, I—well, I gave him money, and I gave Hillary money.” “You gave Hillary money in the first term?” Friedberg asks, surprised, and Howard explains, “Yeah, because Hillary was incredibly helpful to me post-9/11. Remember, she was a senator, right? And New York needed help, right? And Hillary was incredibly helpful. And I was driving the team to help New York rebuild because I had relationships with a whole bunch of congressmen, and they were going to do nice things. Like, Bill Young ran House Appropriations, right? Bill Young was my friend, right, through a whole variety of things that had to do with—I used to go to Bethesda Naval Hospital, and I would walk around, and I would bring music there for the men who got hurt from the military who were in Bethesda Naval Hospital. And, uh, we would walk around. I’d go with my wife, and then I would engage the young man with music—I’d give him music and ask him what CDs he wanted. This is when CDs were a thing. And I’d bring him a Walkman, and my wife would pull the family outside, and she’d pay a year of their mortgage and all their expenses. Because what people don’t realize is, your son loses his leg, right? Dad and Mom come flying in, and they’re going to stay by his bedside. What job do these people have that allows them to be at their son’s bedside? And their world is falling apart ‘cause their son lost his leg. So, their world is falling apart, but at home, their world is falling apart.”
“Falling apart,” Friedberg echoes, and Howard continues, “And so, my wife would just try to figure out how much money it was and just give them a check.” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “And no form, no nothing—just give them the money.” “Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard says, “And help them. So, I would bump into Bill Young and his wife, who were just—they ran defense appropriations, and they were there just being good human beings. And so, we became friends. And he said to me once, ‘Is there anything I could ever do to help you?’ I’m like, ‘Look, you’re a congressman from Florida who does defense appropriations, and I’m a Jewish guy from New York who’s in finance. If there ever were two ships that were never going to meet, these are two ships going, like—we got nothing.’ So, I said to him, ‘Look, we’re just going to be friends, right? We’re never going to do anything.’ And then he runs House Appropriations. And so, when New York needs money to rebuild after 9/11, they go see Bill Young to try to get a bill passed. And he said, ‘How can you come see me without Howard?’”
“Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “You know, this is post-9/11. So, I’m running New York, and Hillary does a really nice job.” “Okay, for New York,” Friedberg notes, and Howard adds, “Yeah. And I told DJT—I call him DJT because I’ve known him forever—I said, ‘I can’t forget.’” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard explains, “I’m just not the person who’s going to forget. Of course, I gave him money, right? But I gave her money too. And, by the way, he still tortures me for it.” “So, like—and you know what the best part is? A good friend does,” Friedberg laughs, and Howard agrees, “Yes, right. You know what the point is? Other people would sort of curl back, right? So, here—right after he gets elected, okay, here’s a story for you. So, right after he gets elected, he has a dinner in New York, right? So, he invites me to the dinner in New York ‘cause I’m his friend. And then, while he’s giving his talk at his first dinner in New York, he goes, ‘Wait, wait—Hillary’s supporter,’ and he points at me, right? So, I stand up, I go, ‘Hey, everyone,’ and I sit down. You know, he’s just sassing me, okay? ‘Cause I gave him tons of dough. He knows I love him, and it’s fine.”
The Leap to 2023
Howard transitions to a pivotal moment, “Okay, so we’re in 2023. So, we’re in 2023, and he calls me and says, ‘Will you help me?’” “Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “And I had not thought about politics. Now, I gave him money in 2020 for re-election.” “Yeah,” Chamath nods, and Howard adds, “Probably gave him 10 million bucks. I raised him 15 million bucks. So, I was, you know, once I’m on a side, I’m all the way through. I’m raising him money in ’17, ’18, ’19, ’20 while he’s president—I’m totally on his side.” “Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard says, “And I’m—but I’m just his friend. I’m not engaged.” “Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “Because I’m still rebuilding my life.” “Yeah, okay,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “And then 2023, he calls me and says, ‘Will you help me?’ And I actually thought about it—like, that was the first time I really thought about politics. And then I said, ‘Yes.’ And I gave him 10 million bucks right then and there. And then I started talking to him. I started going on the campaign trail. I started doing research. I started doing knowledge. I wanted—I talked to him about everything. I talked to him all the time about everything.”
“Did you love it? ‘Cause our friend Sachs—we were talking at dinner last night—he seems to love it,” Friedberg asks, and Howard lights up, “Like, there’s nothing not to love. As Donald Trump says, this is a thousand Super Bowls, right? For him—and for me, it’s only a hundred Super Bowls. I mean, if you’re dedicated to America and you’re willing to wear America’s clothing and stop worrying about yourself and only care about America—” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard finishes, “And have no objective post—yeah, the president hates when these people raise money post from people they’ve met in here. So, I’m never going to work again, okay? I’m never going to work. This is all I care about—I’m just going to help America.”
Running Trump’s Transition Team, DOGE Origin Story, What It’s Like Working for Trump
Transition: An Orchestra of Choices
Howard’s role as Trump’s transition chair takes center stage as Friedberg digs in, “So, he asked me to help him, and I start thinking about it. I start studying everything, and I read everything, and I read everything about the White House, and I read everything about everything I can possibly read because I’m just that way. And, uh, then I start helping him, right? And I went to learn how he picked the judges, right? And the Supreme Court, and why it didn’t. And, uh, I’m just very detailed. And so, I started studying what transition is, right?” “Right,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “And I started studying it, and I started studying tariffs ‘cause he wanted to talk about tariffs. And he’s always thought the trade deficit was wrong and basically a rip-off of America. And I started studying everything about it.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard adds, “And so, he and I would talk about it, and we knew everything about it. And then he picked me to run Transition.” “Okay,” Friedberg says, steering them forward, “So, we’re going to talk about tariffs in a sec, but let’s double-click into Transition. What did you find that was so interesting? Like, what’s—I’ll give you an example. So, there’s a book called The Gatekeepers that was written that people gave me: ‘Oh, you should read this book.’ And it’s about chiefs of staff.”
“Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard dives in, “And basically, there’s another way to call it—it’s called The Jerks, right? Because what they do—imagine you’re the gatekeeper.” “Yeah,” Friedberg nods, and Howard explains, “You’re the gatekeeper of what? Of the man who was elected president of the United States of America—that he needs the gates kept from him. And if you listen to Nixon tapes, you hear him scheming to try to learn anything, because what happens is the chief of staff—everybody reports to the chief of staff, and the chief of staff reports to you. So, you can’t get on Air Force One without asking the chief of staff. You can’t get a document unless you have the chief of staff. No one can come see you unless you have the chief of staff. And if they take your phone away, you know what you are? You’re imprisoned. And that’s the gatekeepers. So, I said to Donald Trump, I said, ‘Look, you fired Reince Priebus, who was your chief of staff. Then you fired John Kelly as the chief of staff. Then you fired Mick Mulvaney as chief of staff. Then you would have fired Meadows, but you didn’t get a chance ‘cause the next election came. So, I said, ‘Why don’t you fire the job? What you need is a chief of staff who’s actually your chief of staff, not who’s the gatekeeper.’”
“Right, right,” Friedberg and Chamath say, and Howard continues, “And so, that was an example of how I changed it. And so, Susie Wiles is perfect for Donald Trump. You know why? She lets him be him. John Kelly took away his phone, right? So, he couldn’t communicate with anybody. Whereas Susie embraces who he is, helped him get elected, ran a great campaign—she’s perfect for him in this role. And so, that’s what I brought. So, I brought an understanding of him, right?” “Right,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard adds, “And an understanding of the role, right?” “Right,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “And that’s why I convinced your friend David Sacks. Every time he said, ‘I can’t do it,’ I would call him and say, ‘It’s an emergency! It’s an emergency! I need to see you.’ He’d fly and go, ‘What is it?’ I’d go, ‘You need to join the administration.’ He goes, ‘That’s what the emergency was?’ I go, ‘Of course.’”
“And was—And Howard, was that when you conceived DOGE originally, in that initial—Was that during the transition?” Friedberg asks, and Howard shifts gears, “All right, so DOGE—yeah, we should talk about DOGE and tariffs.” “Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard launches in, “So, DOGE comes—it’s October of, uh, before the election.” “Okay,” Friedberg says, and Howard specifies, “Early October—October 2024.” “October 2024, yeah,” Chamath confirms, and Howard continues, “Like the beginning of October 2024. And I called the president, and I said, ‘I need, uh, I need to spend an hour with you because I have my big ideas,’ right? So, he gives me—he says, ‘Look, I’m not sure what to do October 7th, right? Why don’t we figure out what I should be doing October 7th?’ So, we decided we’re going to go out to the Ohel, which is, uh, a super-religious Hasidic Jewish, uh, Messiah—you know, the people who wear black hats think he’s the Messiah. And they have a crypt for him where you write a note and you put a note in, all right? And so, we agreed we’d go out to that gravesite, and we’d probably win 60,000 of those kinds of voters, which is pretty cool for a day. And then we drove there and back together, the two of us. So, I had an hour and a half—just he and me talking.”
The DOGE Pitch
Howard sets the scene, “And I said, ‘I want to balance the budget in the United States of America. And this is the way we’re going to do it. No one’s ever checked the just-under-four-trillion-dollars of entitlements.’ Every politician thinks what you have to do is you have to take the retirement age from 65 and make it 70, right? And you have to do this and this and this and this because they never think about the money.” “Totally,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “But people like us would totally say, ‘What’s the first thing you do? What’s the value I’m getting for my money?’” “Totally, right,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “And what you find is, if nobody ever—like, ever—like, I could say the word ‘ever’ 12 times—has looked at where the money goes—” “Totally,” Chamath says, and Howard presses on, “And so, there’s not even a process to get it back when you send it to the wrong person. You just send another one out.”
“Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “Like, think about it. You just—‘Well, I sent it accidentally.’ Or, ‘Accidentally.’ Notice how it’s ‘accidental.’ It’s always ‘accidentally’ sent to the wrong person.” “Really?” Chamath asks, and Howard says, “You wouldn’t ever say the 5.9 million people who work for the government—there could be some crooks in there, right?” “No, no, no, it’s all accidental,” Friedberg quips, and Howard laughs, “What a load of nonsense this is. There’s some percentage of this—” “But you would say—” Chamath starts, and Howard finishes, “And you would say, ‘No, just zero-base it and let’s figure out where it’s got to be—25%,’ yeah? We’d all say, ‘If it’s never been checked, how could it not be 25%? How could it not be?’ And the answer is, that’s a trillion dollars a year, right?”
“Okay,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “So, I said, ‘I think we’re going to cut a trillion dollars a year in expenses, and then I think we can, through tariffs and other means, get revenues—have a trillion dollars of incremental revenue, incremental revenue—and we’re going to balance the budget.’ But—sorry, let me just ask one question—how do the tax cuts, the extension of the tax cuts—there, there is zero basis that means where I was yesterday and where I am tomorrow, like, ‘Oh, it’s a tax cut.’ No, it’s not. It’s the exact same thing as yesterday as today. To say continuing yesterday into tomorrow is, like, silly.” “So, let me ask you—let me ask you on tariffs. Having studied it yourself, when there’s higher tariffs, people purchase less—things cost more,” Friedberg says, but Howard holds off, “No, we’ll talk about tariffs. Let’s just finish—let’s just finish DOGE. So, I’m in the car with him, right? And I said, ‘We’re going to balance the budget.’ And I said, ‘I have one favor to ask of you. If we can balance the budget for you, will you agree to waive all income tax—I see—for every person who makes less than $150,000 a year in the United States of America, which, by the way, is about 85% of America?’”
“Right, right,” Chamath and Friedberg say, and Howard beams, “And the reason you want to work for Donald Trump is, he looks at me and goes, ‘Sure.’ You realize the president of the United States said, ‘If you balance the budget, sure.’ And he’s not lying. He’s not kidding. He’s like, ‘Yeah, that seems—that seems like a great idea.’” “Right, right,” they agree, and Howard continues, “And so, then I tell him, ‘Okay, I’m going to go recruit Elon because Elon’s all in.’” “Yeah, right,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “He’s already said he’s all in. He’s already said he’s going to Pennsylvania.” “Yes, right,” Chamath confirms, and Howard says, “So, I call Elon, and I don’t know Elon—I don’t know him. But he’s perfect for this. So, I use my superpower, which is I call everybody else I know who knows him, and they arrange it, and I’m texting with him, and he agrees to meet me on October 14th. So, I fly down to Brownsville, Texas. Uh, he’s going to catch the rocket on October 14th, right? So, that’s what he invites me down for—the rocket catch.”
“That’s right,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “Having nothing—he’s not inviting me for the rocket catch. He’s just inviting me down ‘cause that’s a good day for me to meet him. So, I fly down. I see the rocket catch, which is awesome.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard enthuses, “Awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome. And then I expect to meet him. By the way, a very pivotal day in the campaign. If you remember, Biden sort of didn’t pay as much attention to it. Trump was pretty engaged. Elon was supportive of Trump. So, when he actually caught the rocket, the media was almost, like, frozen, waiting for it to fail—and it didn’t fail, and it worked, and it was just incredible. I was waiting for Elon.”
“Okay,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “So, I flew down to see Elon, and, uh, with my son. And, uh, so we watched the rocket, right? And then they say, ‘Okay, he’s going to go hang out with his engineers and party with them.’ Seems reasonable—it’s, like, an hour, hour and a half. And then he just goes dark.” “You’re still waiting?” Chamath asks, and Howard nods, “I’m just sitting there waiting. And then they take me, and I go to, like, the equivalent of a Margaritaville, you know, where you have, like, a basket, and you can get quesadillas and get a Diet Coke in a red plastic thing that’s about this tall. It’s got, like, 4,000 ounces of Diet Coke in it that comes with this big—” “But now, to his credit, he sends me all the executives from SpaceX—they’re hanging with me—but he’s dark. And what happened is, he took a nap. He was up all night doing the engineering, and he went to sleep. So, then when he finally wakes up—so, I’m just sitting there, like, you know, doing the thumb-twiddle. I’m going, ‘Okay, you know, this guy’s got a couple—’ I’m hoping he sees me, right? So, then he wakes up. He says, ‘Come to my house, right? I’ll see you at my house.’ So, his house is 1,200 square feet. It’s got the furniture in it that I had when I graduated from college.”
“Yeah, right,” Friedberg laughs, and Howard adds, “Okay, I’m not kidding. I’m not kidding. It’s 1,200 square feet, and it’s got plastic chairs and—” “Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard pitches, “So, I say, ‘Um, we’re going to balance the budget. I need to cut a trillion.’ He’s like, ‘I’m in.’ He says, ‘I think we should cut 80% of the federal government because the essential employees—if the government shut down, essential employees are 450,000.’” “Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “Okay? And there’s 5.9 million people who work for the government. How can 450,000 be essential, and there’s 5.9 million? So, he says, ‘Like Twitter, I think we should cut 80%.’” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard says, “And I say, ‘I know how to cut 50.’ And he says, ‘I want to cut 80.’ I said, ‘I know how to do 50.’ He goes, ‘Are you with me or against me?’ I go, ‘I know how to legally do it. What do you have?’ And my son says it was like two alpha dogs just, like, fighting with each other for the first half hour. And then, um, so then X comes in, right? And then he’s got to walk X—he’s got to walk his son X out. So, he walks his son X out. And I’m thinking maybe the meeting’s over, right? Because we’ve been together a half hour, 40 minutes, and maybe it’s over because he got up and walked out. He comes back and sits down. He goes, ‘Har, this meeting is right.’ That’s what he says—‘This meeting’—and we sit down, and we map out the plan. I tell him what a gratis vendor is.”
“Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard explains, “Because I designed it ‘cause I was not going to go into the government—I was doing transition. What is a gratis vendor? A gratis vendor is, uh, an approved vendor for the United States of America that gives product to the government—doesn’t sell it.” “Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “So, therefore, I don’t have to go through the whole process of becoming a proper vendor because you’re giving it to us. And then, if you give it to Article Two, which is the president’s stuff, then the president can accept it, right? Because it’s given.” “Sorry, what’s an example of this? Just to make—” Friedberg asks, and Howard says, “I write some software.” “You write some software,” Friedberg repeats, and Howard continues, “I write some software for the Commerce Department to do a better job of XYZ.”
“Mhm,” Chamath says, and Howard explains, “You just give it to me, and then I do QA on it, and I can take it. If you sell it to me for $1, we go into government hell, right? The whole rigmarole, right? But if you give it to me, right? And then I set up—you know, so I said, ‘I’m calling it DOGE,’ and I registered the name DOGE.” “You said that, of course,” Friedberg laughs, and Chamath asks, “And were you familiar with Dogecoin and Elon?” Howard grins, “It’s Elon. So, what happens is, in the Defense Production Act in World War II—” “Yes,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “In order to get all the great executives of America to help with production, they named everything after jazz singers or things that the people who were on the committee—it would make them laugh and smile.” “Okay, right,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “So, I picked DOGE so he would laugh, and he said, ‘Get the f out of here.’ Like, when I said we’re going to name it DOGE—the Department of Government Efficiency—which I didn’t think of. It was on the internet, sort of floating around in June.”
“Yes, right,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “But I literally registered it, right, as the Department of Government Efficiency—like, make it a real thing—as a gratis vendor. And I said, ‘This is how I’ve done it for me.’” “Yes,” Chamath agrees, and Howard says, “So that I can run Cantor Fitzgerald, you can run SpaceX, right? You don’t have to sign the conflict form and all this stuff because you’re not working for the government—you’re just giving stuff to the government. You are literally giving of yourself, right? But you’re not looking for anything. You’re not taking any money, you’re not owning anything, you’re not doing anything—you’re not on that side of the wall. You’re on this side—you’re outside.” “Yeah, right,” Friedberg says, and Howard wraps it up, “And so, we had fun. We talked for two hours. And then, on my Twitter feed, I took a picture of me and Elon outside, and I put up, ‘Welcome to DOGE. We are going to rip the waste out of our $6.5 trillion government and balance the budget. We must elect Donald J. Trump president.’”
“Yeah, right,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “And I posted that with my—I probably, at the time, had 25,000 followers, and I got 45 million views.” “Wow,” Friedberg marvels, and Howard says, “Right? So, it was me and Elon.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard finishes, “And that was the beginning of DOGE.”
The Mar-a-Lago War Room
Howard shifts to the transition, “Yeah, right. Then I ran transition, which—so, for the transition, we had—I had a room in Mar-a-Lago.” “Yeah, okay,” Friedberg says, and Howard describes, “Big conference table in the middle, four 85-inch screens on one side and mirrored four 85-inch screens on the other side so that you and I could talk to each other. So, the president sat across from me.” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “Elon sat—Oh, and then I’ll tell you one other story about Elon. So, he wins the election—President wins the election. He accepts it, like, Wednesday at 2:00 in the morning, right? Elon’s not on stage. If you see, I’m on stage—Elon’s way in the back of the room. There’s a thousand people in the room—2,000 people. He’s way in the back. He goes home. Thursday afternoon, I call—I’m doing a dry run of the launch of my transition, right? And the president is superstitious. He’s never had one conversation with me about transition. He totally trusts me. He wins the election—now he’s got to look, you know. I said on jest—he hasn’t talked to you ahead of time about who, about one job, about one thing.”
“So, until the election—” Friedberg starts, and Howard explains, “Because he’s superstitious, like, ‘Don’t waste your time. Don’t jinx it,’ right? ‘Just go win. You’ve got to go win.’ So, what happens is—so, I’m doing a dry run. So, I call Elon, and I said, ‘Where are you?’ He goes, ‘What do you mean? I’m in Austin, Texas, or whatever.’ I go, ‘What are you doing? I mean, what is the point of you spending three weeks living in Pennsylvania helping the guy get elected if you’re not going to help him pick the cabinet? Like, come on.’” “Right,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “Because the way President Trump works, he makes decisions by orchestra. He likes lots of views and opinions—he likes them. And anybody who says, ‘Oh, the last person who sees him gets him’—that’s because they don’t know him at all.”
“Right, right,” Friedberg and Chamath agree, and Howard elaborates, “The answer is, it’s an orchestra, right? And I would say, ‘Okay, I’m the first violin.’ You know, at the time, I would say I would describe myself as second violin.” “Yeah, right,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “So, this is an orchestra. So, the president’s not going to make a decision with me and him alone.” “Yeah, no, no,” Chamath says, and Howard describes, “He’s going to have—so, it went like this: president sitting across from me, right, at the conference table; Elon to his left; Susie to his right; JD to my left; Linda McMahon, who was my co-chair, right—but she wrote all those EOs that he did. That was—she was responsible for that, and I was responsible for personnel, but she was with me for personnel. So, she’s sitting to my right; JD sitting to my left; Don Jr., Stephen Miller—and there were always 12 people in the room. They were never, like, me and him hushed in the corner doing this and that—never. And what we would do is, I would put eight candidates on one screen.”
“Right, right,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “And then a big candidate on each screen—most beautiful AI picture you’ve ever seen, right? And people would walk in and go, ‘Where’d you get that photo?’ I’m like, ‘What do you think I did? I took three of your photos.’ I’ve heard secondhand stories of this room during the transition—that you walk in, and everyone’s photo is up on the screen—everybody’s in the room. And so, that’s a candidate for a role. And then you guys would debate it.” Howard nods, “And so, what happened was—a big picture of the person, their key highlights of the resume—not boring, like their education, right? And then you would click a button, and you’d see them speaking—20 seconds at a time, four of them, right? So, it’s about 80 seconds, and you’re not speaking about the job—just, like, how do you present?”
“Totally,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “And what you can see is, his whole cabinet can talk.” “Totally,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard says, “All of them.” “Totally,” Chamath echoes, and Howard explains, “Because he picked them knowing, ‘I need you to be able to talk, to be able to present our ideas and our concepts out there,’ and that’s key to him. And what I would—the way I would joke to people is say, ‘How do you do it?’ I go, ‘Watch Pitch.’ So, you throw him a curveball—he wouldn’t swing. You throw him a fastball—he wouldn’t swing. You throw him a slider—he hits the ball, hits it to my glove. I go, ‘Here you go.’ You go, ‘Well, how do you know that?’ I go, ‘Because I know the guy for 33 years. I know what he wants.’ And he loved the process. And you know what happened? You saw what happened, right? First—eight candidates, 12 jobs—national security.”
“Okay,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “He says, ‘What do you want?’ I go, ‘Eight to four.’ I put up eight candidates—I recruited everybody. I had 150 of the best Republicans in the United States of America. They each gave me five people, who then gave me 10 people—I had thousands of people to pick from. The whole government was set up to pick from. And then we picked candidates—I had eight for every job.” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “Eight, eight, eight, eight—8 to 4. That’s Friday. Sunday comes in—4 to 2 in the morning. I fly everybody in for the two. I prep them. We go in and meet them—2 to 1, final interview, give him the job.” “Wow,” Friedberg marvels, and Howard says, “Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang—Monday, Tuesday—we’re done with national security.”
“Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “Now we’re rolling on. And it just pounds out. Why? Because he had every candidate. Everybody knew it. Everybody was prepped. Everybody was aware. Everybody was done. You know, that’s why I had to beat the heck out of David Sacks—because I needed David Sacks to be in the government. I recruited David. I pounded on David—you can ask David, right? I beat him and beat him and beat him until he finally said, ‘Okay, I’m going to do it.’” “Right,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “And I did that for everybody.” “Yeah, right,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “And I made sure he had the greatest choices. And then, every once in a while, he would call me at night and say, ‘Throw this guy in. Throw this guy in. Throw this guy in.’ We did a vet on everybody. But I didn’t take out anything negative—I am not a negative person. You can tell I’m positive. So, why would I discuss anything negative about any candidate until they get picked? There was no game theory. A lot of people speculated there was game theory—that we’ll put a mix of people that we’ll assume some won’t make it out of committee, and then we’ll end up with the ones that we do want. Everyone was the number one choice—only one, only one, only one. And that was Matt—”
“Matt, yeah,” Friedberg says, and Chamath asks, “What happened—what happened with Matt, Howard? How did that process—” Howard explains, “He was tortured by his attorney general in the first term, and we were not going to have that ever again, right? So, we needed strong backbone, strong capacity—of which Matt Gaetz has it.” “Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “And I know Matt Gaetz, and he has it, right? But we did not know what that vet was going to say from that report from Congress. So, here was the idea: we fight for him, and we fight for him to get through, and then we read the report. The report’s not bad. Remember, the president’s been tortured by people blaming him for stuff that never happened—‘Oh, 30 years ago, he raped this woman in the dressing room of Bloomingdale’s.’ I mean, what a load of crap, right? It’s just not true—none of it’s true. It’s ridiculous. So, he comes at this saying, ‘I know you’re going to get tortured with ridiculous,’ right? So, then he says, ‘If it’s ridiculous, then we support Matt, and if it’s not, we have Pam right here, right now.’”
“So, that was lined up so that everybody knows it’s right here, right now. And it’s 3D chess. So, we read it—Pam, okay. It’s, like, Pam in a hundredth of a second, right? And Pam is a rock star. And you could argue that you would say, ‘Well, why didn’t you pick her first?’ You know what? He’s the president. He plays 3D chess. He did it his way. And you know what? There was no candidate up there who wasn’t right,” Howard says. “Yeah, right,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “And we could talk about all the detail and how we thought about it—what it went through—but it was so thoughtful, so intuitive, and so right. And what does it produce? The greatest cabinet ever—the most capable, thoughtful, best able to communicate. I mean, it’s so fun to be in a room with these people because these are world-class people—the best ever in government. We shouldn’t betray confidence, but I mean, we were in a room earlier this week with several of them, and everyone had a moment to speak.”
“It was unbelievable,” Friedberg says, and Chamath adds, “I mean, look, every single one of them—you’re like, ‘Could have been a leader of the country.’ Like, they’re all great.” Howard agrees, “That’s the point. He picked greatness. Now, I was the recruiter—” Friedberg interjects, “So, I was a recruiter-in-chief—” and Howard continues, “But I can understand why now, by the way.” “Well, but think about it. If you take someone like me—” Howard starts, and Friedberg says, “Yeah,” as Howard finishes, “And you say, ‘Just be a headhunter.’” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard boasts, “I swear to you, I can be the greatest headhunter ever to live. Because think about it—what’s the odds of saying, ‘Okay, Howard, your whole job is just to be a headhunter—find the best guys’? I promise you, I’ll be really good.” “Okay,” Friedberg says, wrapping the segment.
Working for Trump
Howard’s passion for working with Trump shines through, a blend of intuition and action that Chamath and Friedberg can’t get enough of. It’s clear—this isn’t just a job; it’s a mission.
Balancing the Budget and Fixing GDP
The Budget Blueprint
Howard’s vision for balancing the budget is ambitious, and Friedberg kicks it off, “Can we go back to DOGE? So, you talked about the gratis vendors. Maybe there’s other stuff that you can do with executive action—the president can do with DOGE, etc. Can we talk about congressional budgets? How do we actually balance a budget without bringing Congress along? And is the plan to bring Congress along? I’ve asked this of Bessent—I’ve asked this several times since we’ve been here. And it’s the thing that gives me the most heartache and the most headache—is I worry about whether this actually gets there, given congressional interests.” Howard responds, “I think Congress works with something called ‘scoring,’ right?” “Yeah, right,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard explains, “That if it comes from their pen, it counts. If it doesn’t come from their pen, it doesn’t count. But the fact is, money always counts—it just doesn’t count for their scoring. But their scoring is only part of the game, right? The outcome of the game is what matters to me, Elon, our cabinet, and Donald Trump.”
“Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “The outcome of the game. And I’m telling you, the outcome of the game—by me and Elon—Now, a funny part of it is, so I invite Elon to Madison Square Garden. He doesn’t want to leave Pennsylvania, right? Because, you know, Elon—he’s committed to Pennsylvania.” “Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “So, I convince him—he’s got to come—and we have a plan. I’m going to say to him—so, everyone else gets introduced by the voice of God. I’m the only one who introduces Elon. So, Elon comes on stage with me. There’s the two of us on stage in Madison Square Garden—the only time the two of us are on stage. I’m the fourth speaker; he’s the third from the end; JD is second from the end; and Donald Trump is last.”
“Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “So, he’s supposed to say—when I say to him, ‘How much are you going to cut?’—the deal was he’s going to cut $1 trillion. And then he’s supposed to say, ‘And how much are you going to earn?’ And I’m supposed to say, ‘$1 trillion.’ And then we’re supposed to say, ‘Together, we’re going to balance the budget of the United States of America.’ That’s the little sort of thing. So, I ask Elon, ‘How much you going to cut?’ And he—because he said—he said two trillion.” “Well, because we’re in front of 22,000 people, and the place is erupting—he says, ‘Two trillion.’ And then I’m sitting there going—” Howard recalls, and Friedberg says, “And I’m, like—I think I said, ‘Alrighty then,’ or something like that, you know? Like, what was I supposed to say, you know? So, later—”
“When he walks back to a trillion?” Chamath asks, and Friedberg clarifies, “No, you were—you were caught off guard.” “But I mean, it’s quite—” Chamath starts, and Friedberg asks, “How much you going to earn?” Howard laughs, “No, ‘cause he said two trillion—I got it all, don’t worry—like, I said, ‘Alrighty then,’ and that was that. So, then I walked off stage, and, you know, he said two trillion, so, like, what am I going to say? But the answer was always, right, that 25% of the waste, fraud, and abuse is a trillion dollars, right? And he’s got to cut and find the waste, fraud, and abuse of a trillion dollars.” “Okay, okay,” Friedberg and Chamath say, and Howard continues, “And that—my job is to raise $1 trillion of exogenous new revenues—new revenue—for the government. And we—” “Right,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard says, “I’m telling you, I’ve been here now two months, right? I am more confident it’s going to happen and more excited.”
“Tell us how it’s going to happen,” Chamath urges, and Friedberg interjects, “Well, hold on a second. So, Howard, let’s finish this, and then we’ll move to tariffs and revenue generation. So, there’s a lot of domestic terrorism—is that the response to try to slow down the expense side of the house? Is it basically to put fear into people that are trying to find this waste and fraud? Is that what that is—the burning of the dealerships, the—” Howard responds, “If you’re—I describe it to people this way: let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94—she wouldn’t call and complain.” “Mhm,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got messed up, and she’ll get it next month.” “Yeah, mhm,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “A fraudster always makes the loudest noise—screaming, yelling, and complaining. And if all the guys who did PayPal—like, Elon knows this by heart, right? Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows—the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen.”
“Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “’Cause whoever screams is the one stealing.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard says, “’Cause my mother-in-law is not calling—I mean, come on. Your mother—80-year-olds, 90-year-olds—they trust the government. They trust, ‘Okay, maybe it got screwed up—big deal.’ They’re not going to call and scream at someone. But someone who’s stealing always does. So, what happens is, we need to get to—so, the people who are getting that free money, stealing the money, inappropriately getting the money—they have an inside person who’s routing the money. They are going to yell and scream. But real America is going to be rewarded, because here’s the key benefit of the doubt: not one penny should stop going to—we’re the richest country on earth.” “Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard lays it out, “Here’s the way I say it: I said, ‘We have a $6.5 trillion budget. We have $4.5 trillion of revenues.’” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “Okay? We lose $2 trillion a year. We have a $29 trillion GDP, right?—which people don’t understand, and which I’ll explain a little bit. And we have 36 trillion in debt.”
“Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard asks, “What number didn’t I say to a business person?” “What’s our balance sheet worth?” Chamath answers, and Howard agrees, “Right, right. I say 500 trillion, right? The president says a quadrillion. But at 500 trillion or a quadrillion—36 trillion—we’re rich. We don’t have to take one penny from someone who deserves Social Security—not one penny—from someone who deserves Medicaid, Medicare. What we have to do is stop sending money to someone who’s not hurt, who’s on disability for 50 years—it’s ridiculous—and they have another job. And do we have to monetize our assets?” “We need to be smart. That’s all we need to be. And I’m going to tell you things that are just smart—they’re not, ‘Oh my God, this is the most brilliant thing ever.’ This is just smart. There are so many smart things we can do. Like, you know, we’ll talk about the post office, right? Think about this: the post office has 625,000 people who work there, and they go to your house every day. You know what the census does? The census hires 625,000 people, trains them, teaches them, has interviews—2 million people—trains and teaches them, hires cars. How about this?”
“You’re a genius,” Chamath says, and Howard grins, “That’s pretty smart, Howard, right?” “Okay, like, obvious, right?” Friedberg adds, and Howard continues, “But here’s what it is—I’ll tell you what I’m really good at: pattern recognition.” “Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard explains, “Here’s one—like, tell me 625 of one, and I can point out 625 of another. This is the genius I bring to the government—seriously, this is core fun. By the way, you’re responsible for all the core data collection as well, aren’t you? Isn’t Commerce responsible for generating a lot of the GDP, for economic—”
Fixing GDP
Howard jumps on it, “Oh, that’s—I get to talk about GDP and how I’m going to clean up the nonsense in GDP. You know, I can explain that. If you make a tank, and someone buys a tank—that is GDP.” “Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “But a thousand people thinking about buying a tank, right?—who take your tax money, and I give it to them, and they go, ‘I wonder, should we buy a tank or not?’—that’s not GDP, right?” “You’re saying government spending should not be counted in GDP?” Friedberg asks, and Howard clarifies, “No—government spending to buy a tank, right, should be.” “Right,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “Government spending that’s nonproductive—” “Nonproductive,” Friedberg echoes, and Howard emphasizes, “This is so important. I don’t think a lot of people realize this. How much of GDP is nonproductive government spending?”
“How about we do one thing?” Howard suggests, and Chamath says, “Yeah,” as Howard explains, “GDP—‘D’ means domestic, ‘P’ is production—domestic production. It’s not consumption, right?” “Right,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “If I go out and buy a Toyota, right?” “Right,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “That’s not GDP, right? If I buy a Chevy that’s made in America, that’s a ‘D,’ right? So, people think it’s, like, a consumption model, right? That’s not it. And you could check—another one is there’s gross domestic income, right? That’s also good. So, by the way, they grow about the same rate—it’s kind of fun. So, the key for me is to take out the part that—if I cut nonproductive—a million government employees who are nonproductive, meaning they don’t make tanks—” “Right, right,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “If I take that out, it’s going to look like our GDP declined. But you’d say, ‘But what really happened?’ No, our expenses went down.”
“This is so important, by the way, because people talk about a recession, and a lot of people create a lot of red lights and alarm bells about, ‘We’re going to go into a recession if we cut all this spending.’ But the follow-on effect of cutting nonproductive spending is that the workforce and those dollars flow into more productive parts of the economy—where we make more things, we create more jobs, we create higher wages. And that’s the theory that you guys are trying to execute against. I don’t think a lot of people in the general public fully understand that—it’s so important to explain and get across here,” Friedberg says, and Howard agrees, “Okay. If we put three people behind us, and they sat behind us, and they did nothing, and each of us gave them $125,000—just, like, ‘Here you go’—and they just sat there, right? What is that, right?” “That’s not GDP,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “That’s actually me taking my money and giving it to them. We produced nothing—we’ve no purpose on the earth. It was my money. The income, however—I earned my income was mine, and I just gave it to them. They didn’t really earn income—it’s really a transfer pricing model that is currently considered in GDP, and it’s nonsense. So, if I stopped paying them, okay, right? What would I do? The first thing you’d say is, ‘Well, then why am I paying so much tax?’ Bang.”
“Okay,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “So, now we’re in the concept of—where, Howard, do you have an intuition on what the actual GDP number is? I’m sure you—if you take out nonproductive spending—” “Yeah, but I’m not going to talk about it until we release it, because that’s the proper way to do stuff,” Howard says. “Got it, right,” Chamath agrees, and Howard adds, “But I’m going to break that out—I think it’s 25%—and I’m going to break it out, and I’m going to break it out for the last 20 years. And what you’re going to see—15% every time—the quarter just before an election, all the government spending happens right then and there. And all of a sudden, you have this jump in GDP, right? Total lie, right? Total lie. They basically take all this money, and they jack it into the quarter so that we have that, and you’ll see it—it goes ‘whoop.’ And then, what do you think the first quarter is? Whammo—or the second quarter is whammo. Why? Because you pre-spent it.”
“Right, right, right,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “And then you have this whole—and it’s gross.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard adds, “Okay, that’s the only way to—You’re, like, ‘Really?’ But it’s so manipulated.” “Let me ask—and the answer is, I mean—and to your point, the game that’s being played is, ‘We’re going to take taxpayer dollars that people don’t understand—once you give it to the government, we’re going to create these waves of fake growth that try to tip elections so that then the grift and the waste and all the fraud can continue for as many years until the jig gets replayed over and over again.’ And it seems like the buck is stopping with you guys because you’ve exposed it,” Friedberg says, and Howard agrees, “It’s going to—and that’s the idea. The idea is to take a trillion of waste, fraud, and abuse out—” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard finishes, “And then make a trillion from having other people—resetting global trade. And once you understand global trade and how it makes sense and where it came from—”
“Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Chamath asks, “Can you explain that to us?” “Sorry—before, before we get there, I want to ask one last question on the cuts. Can we speak in—do we need to speak in a more empathetic way? Because that trillion dollars of spending flows into someone’s pocket—some percentage of that pays people a salary, and they live on that income. And I think a lot of the—” Friedberg starts, and Howard says, “Okay,” as Friedberg continues, “I think this is important for you to highlight because a lot of people are reacting to Elon and DOGE and the budget cuts, saying, ‘You’re destroying jobs. You’re taking money away from people that need their jobs. Why are rich people taking away—’ I’m going to give you a sad example. And so, like, help us understand—are people going to lose their jobs?”
Howard responds, “I’m going to give you a sad example. We all remember, during COVID, there was the PPP money.” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “Remember that?” “Yeah, totally,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “So, it was proven that 200 billion of the 1.2 trillion was going to Chinese fraud gangs.” “What?” Chamath exclaims, and Howard explains, “Why that proven? You just make up a company, right? You know—Joe’s Deli.” “Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “You make it up—Joe’s Deli, right? Say you’re in trouble, file, and they sent you money.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard adds, “So, why wouldn’t Chinese gangs do that? Come on. So, we show—not we, but people showed the government—those people that money, and instead of stopping, they said, ‘Yeah, but we can’t stop because there are real people who need the money.’ And so, what happens is, because no one’s ever been fired—ever—for sending money to the wrong place, people send it on purpose. I’m not saying everybody sends it on purpose—I’m saying there are some people who send it on purpose, some people who are complete morons, and an enormous number of people who work for the government who are awesome—I mean, amazing people, right?”
“Right,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “But what percentage—Okay, if there’s 5.9 million people who work for the government, you’re, like, ‘Wow, that’s, like, so many, and we’re paying them all. And how many do you really need?’ I mean, if the answer is 2 million—wow. And we could talk about how we understand it and how we’re going to retrain society for the AI industrial revolution that’s coming—which is going to create the greatest set of jobs and greatest set of growth ever. Ever.” “Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “But that—but then—and we can talk about that. But the key is, stop sending money to the wrong place so we can make sure we can always defend sending money to the right place. I would never allow—if I can stand it—to not pay somebody who retired at 65 their benefits. I find it disgusting when we’re the richest country in the world, and some politician says, ‘In order to save Social Security, rather than getting rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse, we should move it to 70.’” “Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard finishes, “How about—how about no? How about we’re rich enough to give people the benefit of the bargain—” “Yeah, mhm,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “—of being a great American? But let’s put great people in charge.”
“That’s really well said. I think that’s really well said,” Friedberg praises, and Chamath says, “Okay, let’s put a pin in—” ready to move on.
Tariff History and Strategy, Global Trade
Tariffs: A Historical Lens
Chamath picks up the thread, “Let’s put a pin in this because—so, Howard, explain to us global trade as you understand it, and then the context of tariffs—and maybe historically, and what role they played now.” Howard dives in, “So, I remind people that on the earth, there was the Dark Ages. So, the Dark Ages meant that the world knew how to read, and then, because of religious and other actions, they burned all the books.” “Yeah, right,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “And literally, the earth stopped learning how to read for 500 years—or 400 years. We didn’t know how to read—and we knew how to read before. So, how could you forget? So, America was built on tariffs with no income tax—no income tax till 1913. None. Greatest, richest country in the world. So, when Donald Trump says, ‘Make America Great Again,’ what he’s talking about is from 1880 to 1913, when the country had so much money that we had blue-ribbon commissions—which you guys would have been on—”
“Yeah, right,” Chamath agrees, and Howard adds, “—to try to figure out how to spend the money.” “Right, right,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “And no income tax. Then we put in the income tax in 1913. Why? Because we’re entering World War I.” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard explains, “And don’t we all need to contribute to protect democracy and to protect our way of life, right? Then what happens is, the world goes into chaos. We come out of chaos, right? And then we’re starting to think of, ‘What do we do? What do we do?’ And then, 1929, the stock market crashes, right?” “Right,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “1933, we start to say, ‘Oh, oh God, we forgot—we need to do tariffs.’”
“Right,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “1933—how can you do tariffs when the markets crash? The world’s going into depression, and you’re going to do tariffs in 1933? You can’t charge the rest of the world money unless the rest of the world’s okay.” “That’s right,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “So, it was too little, too late, right? So, then we come out of World War II—it’s 1945. We need to rebuild the world.” “Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard explains, “So, we decide we’re going to take our tariffs down, and we’ll let them—here’s the key—we’ll let them have tariffs up, and we will export the power of our economy to let them rebuild—” “And we’ll let them rebuild,” Friedberg echoes, and Howard adds, “—and that’s what happens. So, 1945, we have the Marshall Plan, right? And we do it in Japan, of course, because they need to be rebuilt—what’s the difference, right? So, they need to be rebuilt. And then what happens? We have the ‘50s, and we have the Korean War. So, we let them rebuild—which means low tariffs here, high tariffs there; low tariffs here, high tariffs there. Then we have the Vietnam War, right? So, now, all of a sudden, we have all of Southeast Asia—low tariffs here, high tariffs there. You know what the best example I can give you to make it crystal clear?”
“Kuwait,” Chamath guesses, and Howard confirms, “We spend—what?—almost a hundred billion dollars freeing Kuwait.” “Mhm, right,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “You know who has the highest tariffs against the United States of America? The number one country with the highest tariffs against the United States of America? Kuwait.” “And you think, ‘What?’” Chamath marvels, and Howard adds, “That’s it. But here’s what it is—if you go back to this understanding, the way America thinks: ‘You need to be rebuilt. You were just destroyed, right?’ All their oil wells—you remember Red—Red something—and he was the guy who capped all the—there were fires in all the oil wells, and he capped them all, and it was amazing. So, we let them put up high tariffs.
Yes, there is more to write! The transcript you provided in the `<DOCUMENT>` is extensive, and while I’ve covered a significant portion up to the “Tariff History and Strategy, Global Trade” section, I haven’t yet included all the content from that point onward through the end of the transcript. Specifically, I still need to fully flesh out the remainder of the “Tariff History and Strategy, Global Trade” section and then write the complete sections for “Trump Cards, Building Better Government Software, AI Thoughts,” “Sovereign Wealth Fund Strategy,” and “How His Family Reacted to His New Role” using every detail from the transcript.
The transcript ends with Howard’s family story and the final reflections from Chamath and Friedberg, followed by “Howard, I’m going all in.” I’ve written up to the middle of the tariff discussion where Howard is explaining the historical context and Trump’s perspective, but there’s still a substantial amount left—about 40% of the transcript—covering tariffs’ modern implications, the Trump Card initiative, government software upgrades, AI policies, the sovereign wealth fund, and his family’s reaction.
Tariff History and Strategy, Global Trade
Tariffs: A Historical Lens (Continued)
Howard’s deep into his tariff history lesson when he drops the Kuwait bombshell. “So, we let them put up high tariffs. But you know what the problem is?” he asks Chamath and Friedberg. “Then we forget, right?” Friedberg nods, “Yeah,” and Howard presses on, “And we let it go.” Chamath chimes in, “Yeah,” as Howard drives the point home, “So, Donald Trump comes in and says, ‘It’s got to stop.’” Friedberg acknowledges the shift, “Okay,” and Chamath sums it up, “So, that’s an incredible context now for tariffs. It’s like, it was a long-term strategy that essentially says, ‘Okay, great, there’s rebuilding to be done—sort of, almost out of the largesse of America. We’re going to enable that to happen, so we’ll lower tariffs here, and we’ll support the high-tariff regimes over there.’ We let it happen—we let it happen on purpose. But it’s an incredible thing you’re also saying, though, which is that it’s inextricably linked to this repetitive machinery of war—because those create these boundary conditions over and over again—”
“Always,” Howard interjects, and Chamath continues, “—where there’s so much destruction abroad that America then feels compelled to have to do this.” Howard agrees emphatically, “Correct. That’s exactly—that’s exactly right.” Friedberg picks up the thread, “So, what happens is—and then you say to yourself, ‘Okay, I get the ‘40s, I get the ‘50s, I get the ‘70s, right? But ‘80s, ‘90s, 2000, 2010—what? Time out.’” Howard nods, “Right,” and jumps back in, “So, Donald Trump gets elected 2016. Who understands this?” Chamath prompts, “Okay,” and Howard answers, “Let me give you a hint: Donald J. Trump.” Friedberg asks, “Who else?” and Howard’s blunt, “Nobody.” Chamath echoes, “Nobody, yeah, right,” and Howard marvels, “You’d say, ‘Wow, he understands.’ And how long’s he been talking about it?” Friedberg guesses, “40 years,” and Howard confirms, “Why? Because in the ‘80s, he’s saying, ‘What are you doing?’”
Trump’s Tariff Crusade
Chamath challenges him with the economist’s view, “Well, let me give you the economist’s counter—which, and then you can respond to it—which is: tariffs on imports in the United States will ultimately pass to the consumer—higher prices, inflationary. So, the things that our consumers—that our citizens—are buying get more expensive, and, as a result, they buy less, and it’s recessionary—it shrinks the economy, it shrinks spending, it shrinks consumption. Can you respond to the—you know, that’s the typical economist refrain on this—independent—and maybe they’re isolating the imbalance.” Howard’s ready, “Okay. India has a 50% tariff on average.” Chamath notes, “50,” and Howard contrasts, “We have, on average, four.” Friedberg says, “Okay,” and Howard fires back, “I would say to the person who said that, ‘Can I ask you a question? What are you talking about? They’re 50 and four.’ Here’s what you’re talking about: when we’re all equal, and everything is free and fair—if you raise tariffs, and they raise tariffs, isn’t it bad for society? The answer is, of course it is. But there’s two differences. Number one, let’s do human beings first before we go to the math. Let’s go to human beings. Once upon a time, we had an auto industry in Detroit.”
“Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “And in Ohio—but Detroit. Then some genius named Bill Clinton signs the North American Free Trade Agreement—or corporations: ‘You can screw Americans and go get cheap labor in Mexico and break the unions by going to Canada.’ Now, if you were General Motors, I’d say it’s, like, my birthday.” Friedberg laughs, “Yeah,” and Howard adds, “But if you’re a worker who comes from Michigan or Ohio, they just signed—you know what they signed? Worst statistic I’m going to tell you today: average life expectancy of a high school-educated workforce. So, by the way, United States of America—two-thirds are high school-educated; one-third is college-educated. The difference today of average life expectancy between those two categories is seven years.” Chamath repeats, “Seven-year average life expectancy,” and Howard drives it home, “It’s not the air, it’s not the food, it’s not the medicine—it’s despair. My grandfather worked in the auto factory; my father worked in the auto factory. I have a good life—I’m going to do Friday Night Lights and football. I mean, it’s going to be a good life—I have a good middle-class life. I’m a member of the United Auto Workers—life is going to be good. The factory moves to Mexico, and I am just screwed because the government of the United States of America didn’t care about industrial policy and didn’t protect me at all and let cheap labor in Mexico—I’m sure the Mexican people went from $4 an hour to $5 an hour, and they’re kicking it. But I destroyed you.”
“And that is an incredible failure of industrial policy—” Friedberg starts, and Howard finishes, “—which nobody wants to talk about.” Chamath adds, “But you talk about it—at average life expectancy—and you’re talking about it about reassuring and building the life for the people who are America.” Howard agrees, “That’s why you elect Donald Trump president—you elect him because I didn’t spend one minute doing politics until he asked me to help him. But when he asked me to help him, I started spending time with him. When did I learn this? And who taught me this? The president of the United States.” Friedberg nods, “This is not me teaching him—you understand. This is him teaching me.” Chamath agrees, “And you can see him talking about it in the ‘80s.” Friedberg adds, “Right, right,” and Howard continues, “He’s been talking about this for—and what it does is, it means reshore. So, number one, we have to care about human beings—that’s a globalist view.”
“Yes,” Chamath says, and Howard explains, “If I take my production and move it to Mexico, it’s better for me—Mr. Corporation.” “Okay,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard adds, “But it’s not better for me—Mr. U.S. citizen of the United States of America—who’s working at a car plant. That’s bad news for him.” “Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “And that’s number one. And now let’s go to number two, which is the math of it all. If we say ‘free and fair trade,’ I want to remind you—there ain’t no such thing. There is no country in this world that is free trade—zero. And we are the lowest and the dumbest because everybody else is higher and more protective.” “Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard adds, “So, they protect their farmers. Here—I’m sitting at dinner—Modi comes to town, and I say to him—when Donald Trump—we have dinner, and after the niceties, Donald says, ‘Go ahead, go ahead, Howard.’ And I said, ‘You have 1.4 billion people, and you brag to us how amazing your economy is. Why won’t you buy a bushel of our corn? We’ll buy a bushel of our corn—so our farmers can’t go to him, but his, of course, can come at us, right? Why is that okay?’ You know, and we can go into all the stuff that—oh, I mean, I don’t even want to go into it because if I had another hour, I could retell you stories that are fun with that—but just address the pricing inflation that arises from tariffs. Talk to the average person who says, ‘The cost of a toy at Walmart just went up by 50%.’”
The Inflation Counter
Howard’s ready, “Inflation comes from printing more money.” “Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard explains, “Let’s say the United States of America had $1 trillion—that’s all we had. That’s it—no more.” “Okay,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “And I want to buy a bottle of water, and you want to buy a bottle of water—one came from America, and the other one came from Fiji, right? Then, if I tariff Fiji, then that water is a dollar and a quarter, and this water’s a dollar.” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “That’s not inflation. That means that one’s more expensive, but I can choose to buy this one.” “Right, okay,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “So, you’re right—this toy might be more expensive, and that toy is not. I get it. But that’s not inflation. Here’s inflation: snap my fingers—now we have 2 trillion, right? That water is $1.50; that water is a dollar and a quarter.” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard explains, “Everything’s more expensive—that’s inflation.”
“Okay,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “So, inflation without tariffs is everything’s a buck and a quarter. Now, what inflation with tariffs is—a buck and a quarter, right?—and a buck fifty. And so, you have to understand—inflation doesn’t come from tariffs. Certain products—if I put a tariff on a mango, right? We can’t grow mangoes in America—we just can’t grow a mango. If you put a tariff on a mango, the mango would be more expensive.” “Yes,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “Okay. But if the president chose to put a tariff on a mango, then the mango is more expensive—that just becomes a consumption tax.” “It’s like a sales tax,” Friedberg says, and Howard agrees, “Yes, right.” Chamath adds, “It’s a sales tax—it’s a consumption tax. If I want to buy a mango, it costs more money. And you can offset that with a reduction in—but that’s—so then, that’s just like another version of income tax. How do you—” Friedberg starts, “How do you—Okay, so the idea is to not do that.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard explains, “That’s the idea. The idea is to choose things that are going to reshore.” “Yeah, exactly,” Friedberg says, and Howard urges, “Come here.” “This is so important,” Chamath emphasizes, and Howard adds, “Hire my people.” “Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard finishes, “Bring it home.”
“And, by the way, I want to just speak as an entrepreneur—I see the economic incentive when I see the price for certain things go higher because you have to import and pay a tariff—I’m, like, ‘Why don’t we make that here? We should be doing that.’ And there’s going to be a lot of that kind of entrepreneurial opportunity that will arise from making things—and this is just how the markets work,” Chamath says, and Howard agrees, “Someone will say—two trillion so far—I mean, he’s been in office, right?—like, seven weeks, eight weeks?” “Yeah,” Friedberg confirms, and Howard adds, “$2 trillion of committed domestic production coming back because of his tariffs—TSMC saying, ‘I’ll build, you know, semiconductor wafers.’” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “Um, you know, everything we do—they’re going to build it here.” “That word is never coming,” Friedberg says, and Howard agrees, “Yeah, yeah.” Chamath adds, “Unless the tariff—so, what happens is, you bring it here, you create the jobs here, and then they avoid the tariff. And, by the way, those jobs are better-paying, and they’re more productive than the government-funded—”
Niche Challenges
Friedberg shifts focus, “What do you—what do you want to do about, like, the narrow set of products that are more high-value than the mango that maybe can’t be made here—or at least can’t be made here in the next 5 to 10 years? So, TSMC can make chips—I think that’s great. ASML, who makes the extremely complicated lithography machines, as an example, can’t necessarily do that for another five or six years here. So, there’s these narrow cases where tariffs can exploit a market or perturb a market where there is no multi-vendor solution, right?—but that’s still critical. How do you think about that set of stuff?” Howard’s got an answer, “You know, the beauty of putting Donald Trump in the White House is—it’s giant three-dimensional chess.” “Yeah, okay,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “So, we all have Stockholm syndrome for the Internal Revenue Service.” “Right,” Friedberg says, wrapping the section as Howard sets up the next big idea.
Trump Cards, Building Better Government Software, AI Thoughts
The Trump Card Concept
Howard’s brimming with ideas as Friedberg prompts, “We think we like the Internal Revenue Service, and we don’t say it, but when we say we’re going to charge a tariff— Speaking of potentially great ideas, can you tell us about the Trump Card? Sure. So, whose idea was that, and how did that come about?” Howard jumps in, “John Paulson had a call with Donald Trump and was talking to Donald Trump and was kicking around the idea of, ‘We should sell, right? Why do we give away visas? We should sell them.’ And they’re talking about it. Uh, Donald Trump calls me, gets me on the phone, right? We all talk about it, right? And then we go from there. And then my job is to figure out—like I always figure out—how to do it. What’s the path? Let’s go figure it out. Of course, about two weeks from today, it goes out.” “Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “Elon’s building me the software right now.” “Yeah, right,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “And then out it goes. And, by the way, uh, yesterday I sold a thousand.”
“Oh, you did?” Chamath says, surprised, and Howard nods, “I got a Polymarket I created on how many you guys are going to sell this year. So, yeah—curious to see how many.” “That’s fantastic. Do you want to tell people just the rough terms?” Friedberg asks, and Howard obliges, “Okay, yeah. So, if you’re a U.S. citizen, you pay global tax.” “Yeah, okay,” Chamath agrees, and Howard explains, “So, you’re not going to bring in outsiders who are going to come in to pay global tax. So, if you have a green card—which used to be a green card, now a gold card—you’re a permanent resident of America. You can be a citizen, but you don’t have to be. And none of them are going to choose to be. What they’re going to do is they’re going to have the right to be in America. They pay $5 million, and they have the right to be an American—they have the right to be an American as long as they’re good. As long as they’re good people and they’re vetted—and they’re vetted—and they can’t break the law. We could always take it away if they’re, like, evil or mean or bad or something—not mean, but, you know, if they do something horrible, you could take it away, right? But the idea is, if I was not American and I lived in any other country, I would buy six—one for me, one for my wife, and my four kids—because God forbid something happens, I want to be able to go to America. And I want to have the right to go to the airport, to go to America, and them to say, ‘Hello, Mr. Lutnick. Hello, Mr. Lutnick and the Lutnick family—welcome home.’”
“Right,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “That’s what I want to hear. I don’t want to hear, ‘I can’t come here’ when there’s a—you know—a horrible war, a horrible whatever, right? I want to be able to go home, right?” “Right,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “And once I’m home, I might as well build a business.” “Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard explains, “So, you have the most productive people in the world going to start spending time here. They’re going to have a family office—they’re going to hire some people—and you’re not going to tax their external worldwide income. I only tax the money they make in America—which is what we do now—but their global income stays out, and they pay 5 million.” “And how many people do you think there are that could qualify in the world? How many?” Chamath asks, and Howard answers, “There are 37 million people in the world who are capable of buying the card, in case you were wondering.”
“37 million—that’s a lot more than ChatGPT told me,” Friedberg laughs, and Howard clarifies, “Who are capable of buying—who are capable of buying it. Now, I’m not saying they will, but they’re capable of buying it.” “How many do you think he’ll sell?” Chamath asks, and Howard says, “Uh, the president thinks we can sell a million.” “So, five trillion—trillion dollars,” Friedberg calculates, and Howard agrees, “I think a million is reasonable. I mean, look, as an outsider who came in and got his green card and then got his citizenship and now pays global tax every which way known to man—if this were available 15 years ago after the Facebook IPO, that’s what I would have done. It would have been much better for me, theoretically. Now, I’m happy—I’m happy to pay the tax.”
“So, the idea—so, the idea is, um, and it’s going to go fast—meaning you apply, right? We take your money, and, you know, the way computers work now—they have these cool things, like, these computer things. They’re amazing—you, like, you know, you put stuff in, and they actually check everything. It’s fantastic. I don’t—you don’t even have to plug them in anymore—it’s amazing. Like, they get them—they get the information through the air. I mean, you could do a better vet—” Howard says, and Chamath agrees, “Yeah,” as Howard continues, “—than anybody in government has ever done it before in one second, right? Better than they’ve ever done it before. So, I’ll—I mean, I’ll tell you a quick story. Monday night, Elon was telling us about this—Neon Sachs. And one of the things he was saying is he’s been helping you build this site—these builders—but one of the most difficult parts of it is, it turns out, like, all of the CBP infrastructure to do all these checks—it’s, like, a lot of COBOL mainframes, and the amount of technology that has to get rewritten—”
Revamping Government Software
Friedberg jumps in, “And so, this is a question—big opportunity. It’s incredible that the most advanced nation in the world deployed systems in 1970, which at the time probably felt very cutting-edge to everybody in the room at the time, but, to your point, has not evolved in the last 50 years.” Howard explains, “It’s always—there’s always a reason, okay? And the reason is, it’s a great reason—which is that, uh, in the mid-’70s, we changed the way government accounts for software. We took a 10-year contract, and you have to take the contract up front. So, if I’m signing a contract with you for 10 years—a million a year—I have to take it against my budget for 10 million. So, I’m not doing it. See, I’m only here for four years. So, what happens is, when was the last time we bought software? 1975.” “Where?” Chamath asks, and Howard answers, “Everywhere.” “Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard adds, “Why? ‘Cause it’s illogical.”
“Now, what I’m doing is, I’m saying, ‘Okay, I’ve got to collect tariffs,’ right? So, I go to one of the great software companies of the earth, and I say, ‘I want you to give me—you’re going to build for me, for America—you’re going to build the greatest customs processing ever. We’re going to take a photograph—it’s going to know what it is. It’s going to go through AI—it’s going to know what it is. It’s going to know what the tariff is. It’s going to determine the percentage. It’s going to know the weight—so when you weigh the thing plus the package, you’ll know what it weighs. You don’t even have to open it—it’ll weigh exactly the right amount. And you’ll do this and that.’ And these are all things that I know and all things I could figure out. ‘Cause, you know, the way gold works—like, a gold bar is about 40 pounds. You know the way I know that? A gold bar is—they weigh it, and they weigh out 13 digits of decimals. So, basically, if you touch the thing, it’s not going to be 13 digits of decimals. So, you have a perfect scale, and you weigh it, and that’s, like, the code.” “Yeah, right,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “Because you can’t touch it—if you touch it, you’ll change it, and you can’t get it right out to 13 digits—it’s just not possible. So, that’s what we do with stuff—you know what it weighs, right? Three t-shirts—if you send in the same three t-shirts, they always weigh the same.”
“But what’s incredible is you’re convincing these companies to basically, like, do right for America and build this software for you. You think that’s going to be a movement throughout the government, or is that—” Friedberg asks, and Howard responds, “Here’s the idea: I say, ‘Build it for me for free.’” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “I put it in for free—I don’t know what other countries in the world you think are going to buy now, right?” “Right,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “If it works for us—well, remember, you have to connect to me.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard explains, “So, every country is going to buy, right?” “And it’s a great business model,” Friedberg says, and Howard agrees, “Right, right. If the greatest customer in the world says they’ll take it—life’s good, right? So, what should the greatest customer in the world get? I don’t know—a good deal.” “Yeah, right,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “And you’ve got a guy like me there. You know, everybody else is, like, ‘Howard, you have to change how government operates if you’re going to scale that.’ You can’t go negotiate every contract out there for every department—”
“I mean, it’s not that hard when you say ‘free.’ You know, ‘free’ is, like, not that hard,” Howard quips, and Friedberg starts, “I mean, you—” as Chamath interjects, “Yes, it is.” Howard continues, “And then what I do is I get the head of that technology company—” “Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard explains, “Because then I use my superpower, which is my friendship with Donald Trump, and then I go in the Oval Office, and we call him together, right? And we call the CEO together and make him promise the president. Promising Howard is, like, really nice, right? Promising DJT—that’s something else entirely. So, I get these guys to promise Donald Trump that they’ll build it right now.” “Let’s see him renege,” Chamath laughs, and Howard adds, “Yeah, it ain’t going to happen.”
“So, you know, when you get Elon to say, ‘I’m going to build it for you,’ and he says it in front of the president—like, how great is that? You’ve got, like, the greatest technologist, the richest guy in the world—he says, ‘I’ll build it for you.’ You’re, like, ‘Thank God,’ right? And then I get—you know, I go to the heads of Google and Microsoft and Amazon—they’re all for America, building for us, right?” Howard says, and Friedberg adds, “For free, right?” Howard confirms, “To make America better—because they are great American companies. And in exchange for that, we’re going to help them through all sorts of things that are towards fairness—just towards fairness—because you can’t get me to do something outside the world of fairness. But I’ll tell you what—if it’s unfair, I’ll be on your side as hard and as positive as I possibly can be.”
Navigating AI
Chamath shifts gears, “Talk to us about some of the hot-button markets that you’re going to have to navigate. You know, you are in charge of export controls, which is a very important thing in AI. We don’t allow export licenses for the most advanced NVIDIA chips. We don’t want training, necessarily, to be done outside of the United States. We’re okay with inference happening outside the United States in certain conditions. Maybe just talk about that for a second—how, like, how do you—how are you going to navigate AI? How do you think about that from your seat?” Howard responds, “All right, so I’ll give you an example that’s sort of live right now.” “Yeah, right,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “So, we have DeepSeek, we have Qwen, we have DOBA, right?” “Right,” Chamath agrees, and Howard explains, “And I don’t think we should be having apps in America—and I don’t think we should have their website in America—because they all go back home.”
“Okay,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “But it’s open-source. And I want our American companies—including college students—to be able to download it and build on it.” “Right,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “But I want to make sure that there’s no part of it that says, ‘Send it home to Dada,’ right? Or, ‘Store now and analyze later.’” “Right, right,” Friedberg says, and Howard explains, “So, I need that out. So, what I want to do is—I’m going to embrace what you guys know—you guys are used to product evaluations.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard suggests, “So, let’s do security eval—” “Exactly, right,” Friedberg interjects, and Howard continues, “And say, ‘Your industry—and you can’t let it get overrun by Chinese,’ because what happens is, if there’s a policy, right? All of a sudden, 100,000 people from China come in, and they say they’re John—John Smith—and Todd Peterson, right? But they’re not—and then you think the vote is this way.”
“Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “And it’s easily manipulated. So, we have to be very careful. But my first instinct is to lean on—and that’s why I see it’s important to have David Sacks as my partner, right? Someone who knows it and someone who can live and breathe the industry, right?” “Right,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “And so, what we’re going to have is we’re going to have security evaluation and say, ‘If the security evaluation model says that this is a good model, then people can download it.’” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “But it smells like what we’re good at. I don’t want to create, like—oh, this is what I don’t want to do—I want us to do it, but I’ve got to figure out the right way to do that, right? And that’s important—articulate the standards, articulate sort of the concept, and then let a lot of these private market actors kind of help fill in the gaps and compete.”
“The only thing I think I really need to do—and that’s with regulatory—is post-quantum cryptography,” Howard says, and Friedberg agrees, “Yeah, okay.” Howard continues, “I think that is vital to us.” “That’s right, yeah, right,” Chamath says, and Howard explains, “That—you know, as I would bet—this happens during this administration—he bets post—I’m going to put it out because, you know, we all have passwords, right? For those who are watching who don’t know this—our passwords, called asymmetric, right? Yours is different than mine, right? That’s the key—and cryptography is just the computing. So, asymmetric key cryptography—you have your password, I have mine, and they’re the key.” “That’s right, right,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard adds, “Obviously, the central hub has our key—duh.” “Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “A quantum computer, we know, can break all of them in a nanosecond—like, all of them in the whole world, including the CIA—all of them—RSA 2048—all of them can get broken in a nanosecond by a quantum computer.”
“Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard finishes, “So, the defense of it is called post-quantum cryptography, right? We know how to do it, and we’ll come out with a rule that says, ‘America’s got to protect itself—new standards.’ And, by the way, there are—because every once in a while, you need to have a new standard that says, ‘It’s coming, we know what it is—please, God, go put it in—because we need to have it in.’ We need America to deliver.” Chamath transitions, “Great segue. Let’s—let’s sort of segue now to a couple things that we can enjoin together in this concept—crypto, obviously Bitcoin—you guys announced the strategic Bitcoin reserve—but, broadly speaking, you also announced sort of this idea of the sovereign wealth fund. Can we talk about that—”
Sovereign Wealth Fund Strategy
A Profit-Making Vision
Friedberg finishes Chamath’s prompt, “—what is the vision behind that? How do you want that to be executed? How do you think it should be run? What assets are on the table? What assets and strategies maybe should never be on the table? How are you thinking about it?” Howard launches in, “The greatest customer in the world—the United States government—the most powerful, the greatest customer—buys stuff. We walk in—we’re going to buy—here’s the example I like to use: we’re going to buy two billion COVID vaccines.” “Right,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “When we buy it, Pfizer and Moderna stocks are going to triple.” “They’re going to triple,” Friedberg echoes, and Howard explains, “Because then we say, ‘Everyone’s got to have this vaccine.’ If I were—after Jared Kushner negotiated the best deal he could—if Howard Lutnick walked in the room, Howard Lutnick would say, ‘What do you think—20% warrants?’”
“Right—20% warrants, right?” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “Right—what? So, we’d make $50 billion off of who?” “Nobody,” Friedberg answers, and Howard agrees, “We didn’t take from anybody—we didn’t do—” “Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “The shareholders of Pfizer, who we’ve just tripled them with our order—right? Now, how many of my customers in my life have required that from me?” “All of them,” Friedberg says, and Howard laughs, “All of them—like, this isn’t, like, ‘Oh, Howard, this is the greatest new idea ever’—this is just business proper.”
“So, I don’t view risk of the sovereign wealth fund—I view the first couple of years of the sovereign wealth fund as Scott Bessent and I making money Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday,” Howard says, and Chamath prompts, “Say, ‘Well, but you can’t invest and lose—don’t you lose money?’” Howard’s firm, “No.” “Why?” Friedberg asks, and Howard explains, “Well, if I have Big Daddy of the United States of America behind me, right? And I’ll give you—I’ll give you an example: we buy missiles episodically—launch a missile, buy a missile; launch a missile, buy some missiles, right? The people who sell us missiles have bad quarterly earnings or good quarterly earnings, but they’re episodic.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “Here we go—I will sign a contract with you: 10-year contract—cancel it at the end of five years—to buy X amount of missiles, and I’ll pay you quarterly. Then they can take that contract, they can go finance it, their financing costs go down, their earnings are steady, and their multiple improves—and their stock doubles up.”
“Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “And I say, ‘In exchange for that reasonable thought—how about a little warrants, right? Give me stock.’” “Just, for people that don’t understand—give me some stock,” Chamath clarifies, and Howard continues, “Give me a little bit of your stock—but don’t give me stock—just give me the upside. If I—if I help your stock go up—just a little bit—I get to share it. And you know what I do?” “Wipe my beak a little bit,” Friedberg quips, and Howard agrees, “And then I take the money—” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard finishes, “—for the United States of America, and I put it into the Social Security system in the United States of America.”
“Okay,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “So, why have—And then, all of a sudden, right? So, the Social Security system says it’s 4 trillion in the hole.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard explains, “Okay? If we cut the waste, fraud, and abuse out, it becomes, uh, 1.5 trillion. And, by the way, Frank Bisignano—the greatest executive, the greatest payments executive ever to join the U.S. government—is about to get confirmed and take over the Social Security system.” “Okay,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “Frank ran Fiserv—a $120 billion public payments company. And when Donald Trump asked him in his interview, ‘Can you handle Social Security? It’s 1.3 trillion a year,’ he goes, ‘Well, see, I—I handle 500 billion a day. So, uh, Wednesday, right?’ And he goes, ‘My whole life—my whole life—all I worry about is getting rid of waste, fraud, and abuse. That’s all I care about—every single day—$5, $2, $1.’ He goes, ‘This is going to be the most fun I’ve ever had.’”
“Yeah, I mean, this—” Chamath starts, and Friedberg adds, “Yeah, like, this is a Donald Trump administration—this is something that’s another planet. Now, of course, I recruit Frank, and, you know, I get to have my piece in the game. But if we get rid of a couple hundred billion, then it’s only a trillion-four in the hole. We make a trillion-four—” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard finishes, “That baby—that baby is finished forever.”
Social Security or Debt?
Friedberg probes deeper, “Is the sovereign wealth fund a balance sheet for Social Security? Does Social Security become more than what it is today? Does it, over time, offer bigger, greater benefits? And is it basically a pool that holds equities? Historically—and we talked about this on our show—it’s only ever held treasuries, but it’s really kind of a fake treasury. It’s got 2.7 trillion today, but if we bought the S&P in 1971 when we went off the gold standard with the cash flows that have come in and gone out of Social Security, we’d have a $15 trillion interest in the S&P today.” Howard responds, “But you’d have—that would have had you have Donald Trump be the president the whole time, which was not a thing, right?” “Okay,” Chamath agrees, and Friedberg continues, “But is that—is that the objective? Is the sovereign wealth fund basically for the benefit of retirees in this country, and it becomes, like, a sovereign wealth fund that—”
Howard clarifies, “We have a $36 trillion budget deficit—I mean, debt—” “Debt,” Friedberg corrects, and Howard continues, “—yeah, to the United States of America—and we have a budget deficit of two trillion. So, Donald Trump wants to knock down the two trillion.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard adds, “And then he’s focused on the 36 trillion—of which the Social Security is part of it.” “Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard explains, “So, how he allocates it—he was elected president of the United States—I was not.” “Yeah, okay,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “I like the Social Security idea because it’s really easy to explain to people and sell to people—and so they understand it. But the fact is that it’s the same money—if I put it in Social Security or I put it on the debt of the United States of America. And I’m going to let Donald Trump make that decision—you know why? Because it’s all his—like, and none of it’s not mine. So, he will decide that.”
“Okay,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “And he will play it his way. But Scott Bessent and I will make more than a trillion dollars for the United States of America during our term—which is pretty darn cool, right? And we’ll use that—and if that reduces our debt, right? But that’s not the policy of how we’re going to balance the budget.” “We’re going to balance the budget—Trump Card, tariffs, getting rid of scams. I’ll give you a scam example: every boat you’ve ever seen—like, every single cruise ship, supertanker, container ship—you’ve never seen an American flag, ever. In fact, have you ever thought about the flag you’ve actually seen? All of you would say, ‘I have no idea what that flag is.’ Like, why is it some flag I’ve never heard of? Liberia is number one,” Howard says, and Friedberg marvels, “And you go, ‘What? No one even knows where Liberia is.’”
Ending Tax Scams
Howard explains, “Because the answer is—it’s a flag of convenience. They sell the flag for, like, 10 grand—like, they literally—‘Here, you can have a flag’—and you pay no tax. So, what happens is, a cruise ship in the United States of America picks up American passengers, goes in the Caribbean, comes back to America, and treats the port as an expense, and all the profits are made in the Caribbean, where it pays no tax. That’s what I call a tax scam.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “I mean, it’s unfair to America—we’re going to fix that in America. We’re going to try to fix a whole bunch of these tax scams. Ireland is my favorite—the country of Ireland last year had a $60 billion budget surplus. So, we lose $2 trillion, and they make 60. You’d say, ‘Ireland—what do they do?’ Oh, they have all of our IP for our great tech—all the tech companies—” “And great pharma companies,” Friedberg adds, and Howard agrees, “And pharma, yeah.”
“They all put it there because it’s low-tax, and they don’t pay us—they pay them. So, that’s got to end. So, when those things end—tariffs, Trump Card, getting rid of tax scams to get fair tax—that’s my trillion. Elon’s got to do his trillion,” Howard says, and Chamath nods, “So, whenever I see him getting off the rails, he and I go out, and we have a strong conversation together that, ‘You’ve got to do your trillion.’ So, you’ve got to focus—not on small potatoes—big, big, big, big, big—I need you to do your side of the trillion. Now, as it turns out, I’m going to do more than a trillion ‘cause I’m me. Elon’s probably going to do more than a trillion because he’s him. And then what we’re going to do—our objective—is to smash down the Internal Revenue Service and change America.”
“And then imagine America—this is just an imagination moment, okay? We have a balanced budget in the United States—we’re starting to knock down the deficit of America. We can cut tax, and we have a gold card—a Trump Card—that you can come to America—which entrepreneur have you ever met who wouldn’t buy one—” “Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “—and wouldn’t start building businesses when they think the tax rate here is going to come down, and eventually it’s going to come down to 20%, and eventually it’s going to come down to 15%? You won’t be able to find a plot of land in America.”
Future Impacts
Chamath predicts, “You know what I predict will happen? I predict that—just like in the medallion industry for taxicabs—there’ll be a financing industry that’ll build up around these, uh, these gold cards—or these Trump Cards—that great entrepreneurs, great executives will be able to finance their purchase along with someone getting venture capital interest or equity interest in their business.” Howard responds, “But I’m going to—we’re going to take that money—we’re going to—” “So, we’ll sell them every year,” Friedberg says, and Howard agrees, “Yeah, right. So, they’ll knock down our budget deficit, and then eventually—right—if Donald Trump is right, and ultimately we can sell 7 million cards—” “Mhm,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “You realize there is no debt in America. No debt in America is a trillion dollars a year in debt coverage.” “Right,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard adds, “Trillion dollars a year in debt coverage—you know what that changes?” “That changes the Internal Revenue Service,” Chamath says, and Howard finishes, “You—you start to rethink—and I just want to remind you, right? We are the richest country on earth—our balance sheet is 500 trillion. I’ll give you an example: what’s the court system of America worth?”
“Right, right,” Friedberg says, and Howard explains, “What’s it worth? Well, how can NVIDIA be worth three trillion without a court system that protects it?” “Right,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “There’s no such thing. So, just our—everything about us—the infrastructure is awesome. And you know what happens? We—we get beaten upon, and we actually believe it.” “Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “You could ask Doug Burgum about how undervalued a lot of our real estate is in this country—and the potential for it. We think about—Biden closed 635 million acres. This is—this is electing Joe Biden head of Saudi Arabia, and he closes the oil wells.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “And all of a sudden, Saudi Arabia falls off the face of the earth—broke. Like, what are we doing? Like, we care about Americans.”
“Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard urges, “Let’s make Americans’ lives great, Howard—we want clean water, we want clean air.” “Okay,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “We do it better than everybody else—but if we don’t—Here’s the one, like, the hypocrisy, right? We won’t mine lithium in America to make a battery.” “Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard explains, “But—so, we—so, the Australians mine it with coal, and it’s messy because they do it—like, you know, they do it messy. By the way, we breathe the air in 3.4 days—but who’s counting, right? Then we take it, we put it on a truck, we take—put the truck and put it in a supertanker. We drive this supertanker that pollutes the living heck out of the world across 12,000 miles of ocean, puts it in a truck, and gives it to Elon to make an electric car. Why don’t we mine the lithium in Nevada, right?” “And, by the way, we’d mine it cleaner, right?” Chamath adds, and Howard agrees, “And, by the way, it’s not just lithium—almost anything that we could possibly conceive of needing over the next couple of decades exists in the continental United States. We just have had no incentive or no structure, regulatory-wise, that enables the development of it—which is—this is—we need to care for us—make America—you know, ‘America First.’ How about there’s another way to say, ‘Well, maintaining clean environmental first’—”
“Well, maintaining environmental standards,” Friedberg suggests, and Howard agrees, “Yeah. Don’t look—we’re never going to do something that’s not, like, a hundred times cleaner than everybody else ‘cause we care about clean water and clean air. There’s none of us who don’t care about clean water and clean air—but, you know, like, someone gives you a pill and says, ‘This will save you.’ And then you look at the statistic, and it saves one in a million people, and you’d say, ‘Uh, why am I taking this pill?’ You say, ‘Well, it’ll—it could save your life.’ You’d say, ‘Yeah, but it’s, like, one in a million,’ right? That’s not logical.” “Right,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “That’s the point—you know, there’s a regulation that’s the right thing—” “Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “And there’s a regulation that’s—that’s the ‘one-in-a-million pill.’ Like, why do we give a baby—a baby—a hepatitis B vaccine? Do you realize we have a brand-new baby, and we hold it up, and we give it a hepatitis B vaccine? You realize the only way you get hepatitis B is from unprotected, uh, sex or a needle—like, why are we giving them to a baby?”
“Like, why?” Chamath echoes, and Howard continues, “And you know what it is? You know what the answer is? Corruption—that someone in the government got paid to put that in the rules, and because there’s no justification—there’s no—I haven’t met a medical doctor who says hepatitis B vaccines on brand-new babies make sense—because, by the way, you know what the worst part is? They only last 10 years—you need a booster in 10 years. So, the baby’s going to be 10.” “We’ve got to really be fair to ourselves and be fair to Americans. And I think we can be—and I think that’s why I’m so excited. That’s why our cabinet is so excited. That’s why it’s so much fun to work for Donald Trump—because I am just speaking from his playbook, right? Because if you had met me before he said, ‘Will you help me?’ and he went out to dinner with me and said, ‘So, tell me about government,’ I’d say, ‘Uh, government? You mean I pay them taxes?’ Like, that’s it,” Howard says, wrapping up with a laugh.
How His Family Reacted to His New Role
Family Support Amid Change
Howard’s personal life comes into focus as Friedberg prompts, “Are you having the time of your life—the most fun ever—because I have every idea either gets blown up or shot down?” Howard laughs, “Okay—meaning I come up with lots of ideas, and he says, ‘Nah, too complex.’ And you know what? That’s fine.” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard adds, “But when I come up with the External Revenue Service, and he says, ‘Great idea,’ and then he speaks of it in his inaugural address, right? It’s his idea.” “Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard continues, “Because I can’t do anything with it.” Friedberg shifts gears, “Howard—last question as we wrap—tell us about your family, your kids—how do they think about all of this? Your son’s running Cantor now—how’s that going? Just give us the lay of the land—how’s the Lutnick family?”
Howard beams, “All right, so I have—I have the best wife. I’ve been married 30 years. Uh, she lets me be me, and she’s gorgeous—spectacular. I love my girl. Um, she agreed—I mean, imagine this—I’m not—I’m not joining the government. I’m not joining the government—I’m doing this DOGE thing with Elon—I’m not joining—I’m not joining—‘Honey, we’ve got to move.’ Like, ‘Honey, we’ve got to move’—two weeks after Election Day, I’m, like, ‘We’re moving.’ And, uh, we’re going to—in five weeks, we’re going to live in Washington, okay? And, like, so the fact that that wasn’t unsettling would be the understatement of a lifetime. But she’s been the most supportive and fantastic.” “I have four kids. Uh, my oldest son—about to turn 29—I was taking him to kindergarten, so that’s why I’m alive. My second son, Brandon—I dropped him off in nursing school and then took my oldest son to kindergarten. Um, so the two oldest boys are running Cantor now until I—Deb asked, ‘Is it going well?’ I don’t know,” Howard says, and Friedberg laughs, “Oh, you—of course, you’re not supposed to know—you—”
“It’s kind of fun,” Howard quips, and Chamath says, “I would love to talk to them about it.” Howard admits, “You have no idea—but I’m not allowed. Like, I—I literally am not allowed. And, you know, we all know the phones—” “Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “So, since the phone’s always with me, and I assume the phone is listening—you know, ever since we couldn’t take our battery out of our phone, you know, the phone is listening.” “So, you know, I’m not—no. So, I never talk to my son. So, uh, I’m sure they’re happy—but I don’t know how it’s going,” he says, and Chamath chimes in, “Guys, if you’re listening—he’s doing great, as you can tell—but—”
Lessons and Legacy
Howard continues, “And then my—my daughter is going to go to med school.” “Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “And she’s on a gap year now. And my youngest son—also on a gap year now—and he’s going to, uh, start Duke in the fall, right? So, I have the best kids. Uh, my kids have lived with me, and they lived with this kind of energy and this positive sort of momentum—and my wife being just a spectacular mom, just keeping them—what we taught our kids, which is a fun one, is, uh—I taught them two things. Uh, I would sit down with my kids and say, ‘How great is your life?’ And this is only maybe something that people like we can say—but I’m talking to my kids—I say, ‘How great is your life?’ They go, ‘Great,’ ‘cause they came home, and they—‘Hey, I got a bad grade—teacher doesn’t like me.’ It’s a classic line, right?” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “And I said, ‘Well, how good’s your life?’ ‘Really good.’ I go, ‘Could it be any better?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, do you realize your teacher has given up her whole life—’”
“Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard adds, “—‘and she makes how much money?’” “Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “’And she’s given her whole life to teach you.’” “Yeah,” Friedberg says, and Howard explains, “’So, can I ask you a question? Is it her job to like you, or is it your job for her to like you? Who’s failing in what you just said, right? It’s your job to have her like you.’ So, when she says, ‘Raise your hand,’ raise your hand, right? And the other thing is, ‘Do me a favor—color inside the lines.’” “Okay,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “In high school, if she says, ‘This guy is orange,’ the answer to the test is ‘orange.’ When you get to college, you can argue with the professor all you want—high school, color inside the lines. Give the teacher what she wants—make sure she loves you, and you’re getting a good grade. That’s the rules of life.”
“Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard adds, “And my wife beat that into my children so that they would have it in their souls—in their moral character—” “Yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard continues, “—of someone who’s fighting for you needs to have your love and respect back. If you take them for granted—if you treat them badly—if you treat them, like, ‘Oh, aren’t I so great?’—then you deserve what you get. And my wife has taught that moral fiber into my children, and it—it resides in them. And the other thing my kids have is they have empathy—which is a very unusual thing for young people. And it’s because they were—they were raised with their father crying every day. I cried every day until October 21st, 2004.” “Wow,” Friedberg says, and Howard shares, “Every day—because I thought of someone I hadn’t thought of, you know, or someone would say—658 people died, and I—I just—there was—you can’t process all of that death—”
“Yeah,” Chamath agrees, and Howard continues, “—without crying. And—and the only reason I remember is ‘cause as I fell asleep, I told my wife that I didn’t cry today, and she wrote it down—that’s the only reason I remember.” “So, um, my kids are—are fantastic. They’ve been incredibly supportive, and, uh, and my wife’s the best, and she lives with me in Washington. We bought Bret Baier’s house—so I have a nice house, big enough for my ego to expand,” Howard says, and Friedberg laughs, “Very important.” Howard quips, “Tomorrow hasn’t found one that big yet to look at.”
Closing Reflections
Friedberg wraps it up, “Howard, you’re an incredible American. Thank you very much for everything. This was really—” Chamath finishes, “Fun in coming to talk—honestly, this has been one of my—I mean, my favorite conversation we’ve had.” “Absolutely,” Friedberg agrees, and Chamath continues, “I mean, like, he’s like this all the time—I mean, not just, like—we have dinner at, like, Nikesh’s house—who’s a good friend of ours, runs Palo Alto Networks—and Howard’s, like—you just push the button, and you can just sit and just listen. You can listen to him for hours.” Howard adds, “By the way, I will say—I’ll echo the point you made earlier—I think every member of this cabinet is an incredible storyteller. I mean, you’re, like, on another level—but, like, the storytelling, I think, is what’s so powerful about this cabinet and this administration. And I think it’s going to take some time to get the message out—but, man, are there incredible ambassadors to do so with—they are so capable.”
“Yeah,” Friedberg agrees, and Howard continues, “Each of them is so capable, so thoughtful—I mean, I—I am honored to be on this cabinet with them. But we all get to work for Donald Trump, who can intuitively tell you, ‘Go fix eggs.’” “Yeah, yeah,” Chamath says, and Howard adds, “And then Brooke goes—fixes eggs—and eggs are down, like, 40%. And Brooke fixes eggs—I mean, how awesome is that, right? And gas is down 40 cents, right? And he’s only just begun—if we get—if we get the Constitution Pipeline in New York passed—and I sat with him while Donald Trump lectured Governor Hochul on the unbelievable oil in fracking that they have in New York—and the wealth that New York could have if they unleashed it—but they refuse to unleash it. So, he’s going to force the Constitution Pipeline—which, by the way, will drop gas on the East Coast of the United States of America in half—I mean, this is—and that’s—you know—then you’ve got—that’s Chris Wright, that’s Doug Burgum, you’ve got Brooke Rollins—I mean, you could just go—you know—Scott Bessent—you know—so thoughtful and elegant—I mean, he’s—he just—step by step by step—and you have really the most fun cabinet working for the most intuitive, smartest guy to ever sit behind the Resolute Desk—and we’re going to make America great again—not as a slogan, but we’re going to balance the budget, we’re going to change America.”