DOGE updates + Liberation Day Tariff Reactions with Ben Shapiro and Antonio Gracias
Speakers
Ben Shapiro
— Co-founder, The Daily Wire
Chamath Palihapitiya
— CEO, Social Capital
David Friedberg
— CEO, The Production Board
Jason Calacanis
— Angel Investor / Founder, LAUNCH
Summary
All-In hosts Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg are joined by Ben Shapiro and DOGE volunteer Antonio Gracias. The first half is Gracias walking through his Social Security work on enumeration beyond entry - the jump in Social Security numbers issued to non-citizens after 2020, the asylum and parole processing behind it, downstream benefit usage and voter-roll findings. The second half turns to the Liberation Day tariffs: how the rollout was executed, the contradictory justifications, recession and inflation risk, the collapse in the 10-year yield, corporate credit stress, and whether the US or China is better positioned for the next era. It closes with Chamath revisiting his long-CDS call as the best-performing idea of 2025 and Ben Shapiro on the Newsmax post-IPO spike.
- Antonio Gracias details DOGE findings that enumeration-beyond-entry Social Security numbers grew from a 300-400k baseline to 2.1 million a year, driven by asylum claims and parole with little ID verification.
- He says those recipients show up across benefit programs including 1.3 million on Medicaid, and that thousands appear on voter rolls in a handful of states with some having voted; referrals to prosecution are under way.
- Ben Shapiro criticizes the Liberation Day tariff rollout as internally contradictory - revenue versus reshoring - and notes the headline tariff rates were really trade deficits divided by imports.
- Ben Shapiro says he cut equities and moved heavier into Treasuries after the State of the Union because Trump meant what he repeatedly said about tariffs.
- Chamath argues there will be no capitulation, the administration is comfortable with equity volatility, and its singular goal was pushing the 10-year yield toward 4% to refinance about a trillion dollars of debt.
- David Friedberg lays out three consequences: eroded US competitiveness, lost export revenue with agriculture most exposed, and potential Chinese retaliation by disregarding IP rights.
- The group debates whether AI can be the anchor of a new economic order, given US shortfalls in electricity, mining, rare earths, lithography and leading-edge fabs, and argues over whether China is stumbling or entering an era of prosperity.
- Chamath revisits his January long-CDS call, warning that corporate debt covenants tied to revenue and EBITDA make credit spreads the canary in the coal mine, while Ben Shapiro calls the Newsmax spike a GameStop-style retail blowoff that should revert to a $2-4 billion market cap.
Ideas
Cut stocks, bought Treasuries before tariffs.
He took Trump's repeated tariff promises literally, so after the State of the Union he called his financial adviser and changed the stock/bond ratio in his portfolio: lighter equities, heavier Treasuries. His reasoning is that there is almost never a hidden 4D-chess motivation with Trump - when he says a thing over and over, he actually wants it to happen - so a disruptive tariff shock was a known known that equity markets had not discounted, while Treasuries would benefit from the resulting risk-off and growth scare.
Cut stocks, bought Treasuries before tariffs.
He took Trump's repeated tariff promises literally, so after the State of the Union he called his financial adviser and changed the stock/bond ratio in his portfolio: lighter equities, heavier Treasuries. His reasoning is that there is almost never a hidden 4D-chess motivation with Trump - when he says a thing over and over, he actually wants it to happen - so a disruptive tariff shock was a known known that equity markets had not discounted, while Treasuries would benefit from the resulting risk-off and growth scare.
No Trump put; equities left unprotected.
Tariffs were a known known - Trump has talked about them for 40-plus years and now has a team that backs him - so they will go through with it and see it through, and there will be no grand capitulation. The administration's rhetoric shifted to MAGA, working- and middle-class voters who are not deeply invested in the asset economy, which Bessent confirmed with his line that the equity selloff is a Mag Seven problem, not a MAGA problem. The conclusion is that Washington is comfortable with volatility in the equity markets and will not put a floor under stocks.
Policy is driving 10-year yields lower.
With roughly a trillion dollars to finance in the next nine months, the singular goal of the White House has been to move the 10-year as aggressively and quickly as possible, and the tariff shock has done it - the yield went from kissing 4% on the way up to auctions that should now clear around 4%. The Fed does not control the back end of the curve; had it gone the other way 30-40bp and touched 5%, it would have cost hundreds of billions in extra interest that would have had to be printed, so the move is worth hundreds of billions of savings and the long end is giving the US a respite in the storm.
Tariff retaliation hits US farm exports.
A near-term consequence of the tariffs is lost revenue for a significant chunk of American businesses, and agriculture is the most exposed because China is the biggest buyer of American agricultural products. During the 2016-2020 escalation China stopped buying US exports and the administration had to write farmers two support checks totalling $28 billion in 2018 and 2019. If the tariffs stay in place and global buyers step away from American exports again, farm revenue falls and Washington has to replace it with more government spending, while farmers are a large part of the Republican voting block.
AI leadership gated by power and chips.
If the world tries to reconvene something like a new Bretton Woods, it needs an anchor asset, and the only candidate the US has is AI. But underneath AI sit two unsolved constraints: a meaningful energy problem - we simply do not have enough electrons - and a very delicate technological supply chain for the underlying silicon, where the US does not mine, does not have the materials, does not make lithography systems and has essentially no leading-edge fabs. Neither is trivial or quickly solvable, so American AI leadership is gated on fixing power and the semiconductor supply chain.
Stablecoins create structural bid for Treasuries.
Japan can run 250-260% debt-to-GDP because it has an incredibly deep domestic pool of buyers - insurers, pension funds - creating a permanent bid for its own bonds. Dollar stablecoins start to replicate that advantage for the United States: the issuer that has to back the coin becomes the incremental net buyer of US bonds, which matters enormously if US debt-to-GDP has to scream toward 200%. That is why he argues the pending stablecoin legislation needs to be incredibly permissive, so the bid to US Treasuries is as ferocious as possible.
Dictatorship self-destructs; avoid betting on China.
America keeps winning and China keeps stumbling because the US has rabid entrepreneurship and a crazy investment infrastructure that lets founders become billionaires or flame out and start again tomorrow. He does not believe a dictator can ever compete with that: Xi Jinping saw Jack Ma become popular, sent him off to be re-educated, wiped out the entire education sector and Chinese investment got smashed. That is what dictators do - the same pattern as Putin invading Ukraine and sending his economy off the rails - so a socialist, centrally throttled system is a cul-de-sac.
China's ambition drives a prosperity era.
He explicitly rejects the idea that China is stumbling. China raised GDP per capita roughly 30x in about 30 years by letting entrepreneurs and markets run, pulling the throttle back at times and then pushing it forward again, which drives growth and productivity. The result is extraordinary abundance in energy, mining and now manufacturing, 30,000 miles of high-speed rail, and plans to add more than twice the electricity production capacity the US has today. With or without the conflict with the US, he expects that to lead to a great era of prosperity for China, and says ambition is exactly what China has and America has lost.
China's state model risks a dead end.
China faces serious structural problems ranging from demographics to debt, and what it is attempting is economic fascism - capitalist methodologies used to prop up a tyrannical government - which appears to work for a short period and then lands you in a blind alley fairly quickly. Its model has everyone chasing one thing all the time, so if that single bet hits they do amazingly, but they can also miss it completely, whereas the American market has everybody chasing everything all the time. He also notes the money poured into AI has not yet been justified by the return on investment.
Long CDS protection on corporate default risk.
The one uncontrollable risk is corporate debt. There is a very large stock of private corporate debt supporting American businesses that run on thin operating margins, and many of those loans carry covenants tied to revenue and EBITDA, which the tariff picture directly impairs, raising the chance of a wave of defaults. That is why his best investment idea of the year, flagged in early January, was to be long credit default swaps - buying protection against a default event, a trade that mostly goes to zero but pays asymmetrically: about $1m of cost per $1bn of protection has already turned into roughly $7m in three months as spreads blew out. He says the CDS market is the canary in the coal mine, as it was before the financial crisis, and is where the tariff and recession picture will get played out.
Newsmax retail blowoff reverts toward fundamentals.
The PE ratios on the Newsmax trade are ridiculous and will revert back to something closer to normalcy. The stock was supposed to price at $10, came out at $14 and spiked toward $240 on retail traders who are fans of the network, so it is more like GameStop than a fundamentals-driven listing, and it has already fallen back into the $40s. In the short term the stock market is a voting machine and in the long term it is a weighing machine, and on roughly $150-160m of annual revenue the market cap should eventually land somewhere in the $2-4 billion range, far below the $20bn-plus peak.
Up Next
This All-In Podcast video, published April 04, 2025, features Ben Shapiro, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg, Jason Calacanis discussing TLT, VTI, SPY, IEF, DBA, AI-SECTOR, SMH, FXI, Credit default swaps, NMAX. 12 trade ideas extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.
Speakers: Ben Shapiro, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg, Jason Calacanis · Tickers: TLT, VTI, SPY, IEF, DBA, AI-SECTOR, SMH, FXI, Credit default swaps, NMAX