All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E128: Google enters AI wars, Druck’s warning, Trump crushes CNN & more

Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, everybody, welcome to the all-in podcast. Lots to talk about, but right off the bat, congratulations to David Friedberg, who is the chairperson of the all-in-submit 2023 on the big announcement. We're going to be having the all-in-submit September 10th to 12th at Royce Hall at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. Your tickets are now on sale and selling out quick. Freedberg, maybe you can just give people a little overview of why you selected the location and what you hope to accomplish in terms of the programming, just broad strokes, and then we'll get right into the show.

Starting point is 00:00:36 I think the general headline is today and tomorrow, where are we, where we headed? I think exploring the state of the world and interesting things that were uniquely, that were all kind of excited about in the future and we want to have great conversations with candid people that can give us kind of, you know, they're very honest on the ground, points of view on everything from technology and markets, macro, science, society and culture. So we're going to talk across all those different topic areas. And similar to what we did last year, the four of us on stage, having conversations with these folks. So pretty excited. I think LA is a great location. There's obviously availability for people to stay. There's great venues for us to do the evening events. And

Starting point is 00:01:23 it's certainly super accessible for folks from all over the world. And we decided this year to have three tiers of tickets. We'll have the VIP tickets. We'll have scholarships for people who fill out a form so we can have really great diversity and representation at the event and up in comers, maybe who couldn't afford the VIP ticket. But in between, you decided to have a standard ticket as well. That's just $1500.

Starting point is 00:01:49 And there'll be a VIP lounge this year for the VIP tickets and an early access to the theater and a couple of special dinner parties. What is my wine budget so that I can take care of the VIPs properly. Talk about that one later. I would fucking cheap you guys. What is my wine budget? Let me treat the VIPs like the VIPs properly. Yeah. Talk about that one later. I would fucking cheap you guys. What is my wine budget? Let me treat the VIPs like the VIPs that they are. What would you need per night?

Starting point is 00:02:10 Per dinner, per person. Depends on how many people. Per person. I could just say per person per night. Is it like $200 a person, $100 per person per night? Because a person drinks a half a bottle of wine two or three glasses. Yeah, like, you know.

Starting point is 00:02:23 Three to 500. maybe a thousand. What is the truffle budget for the conference? The truffle budget. No, it's jewelry for truffles. We can only have it. Lot of season. No, it's September. Yeah. It's been white and black truffle season. It's a dead zone. You don't want to be in that. You got to either wait to the winter or you got to enjoy the early summer. We have to have a conference in early November. At that point, we can focus the entire VIP budget. If it were according to me, would be spent on white truffles and white books. We open source into the fans and they've just got very easy.

Starting point is 00:03:05 Love you guys, nice. Queen of the kid. I'm going back to the lead. All right, everybody. Let's get started. You might probably have hot potatoes with us as well. The dictator himself and David Sacks, the rain man. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:03:18 Google had their IO event. They announced Palm 2. Google's language model is going to power 25 products, including BARD, which has got coding capabilities now, I guess, to go up against GitHub's co-pilot. POM2 will have improved multi-linguality across 100 languages. Well, I have multi-what. It's going to support 100 languages. And it's going to be better at mathematics and reasoning.

Starting point is 00:03:46 They also announced duet AI, which is basically Google suite of generative AI tools for dock, sheets, drive, all that kind of stuff. Kind of like a copy of Microsoft's co-pilot tools that Sanx has talked about a whole bunch, the guide on the side, if you will. They tease the future where AI can summarize docs, which box AI Aaron Levy is doing. They also previewed proactive prompts in the sidebar of Google Docs, and I talked about that a whole bunch on the swing startups. They're gonna also now add images and replies. Have you guys used Bart in the last 24 hours?

Starting point is 00:04:20 I used it last week, not in the last 24 hours. I think you guys should use it. We should talk about it. It's really impressive. I It's better than chat GPT at this point from my experience on talk going through a number of things because it's actually connected live to the internet It's connected live to search. It can pull down real-time data for you. It can do real internet searches for you and just give you the results. It's extremely powerful. I feel like it's the product that Google has been scared to do,

Starting point is 00:04:51 which is the product that can truly disrupt search, and they're doing it. So how do I try it? Do I just go to bar? Google.com, no access needed, no cost, nothing. Oh my God, this is great. And seriously use it, and it does real-time search, and it's 180 languages.

Starting point is 00:05:05 It converts, it generates images for you, it can generate charts, results. It's really powerful guys. Google has strong together, I think a lot of features and you can look Google's market caps up $150 billion in the last two days. Okay, this is pretty interesting. And so SACs, a lot of we've been talking about with respect to plugins and the tooling built into AutoGPT, many of the most interesting kind of applications that folks have kind of demonstrated or utilized are really kind of built into this bar product.

Starting point is 00:05:38 Okay, I love barred. Can I just give you guys what I just tried? Can we guess? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Was it something about freeberg's anus your anus? No, it wasn't a Uranus joke. Okay, then tell us.

Starting point is 00:05:52 My first question was, why is David freeberg such a sellout? But the answer confused him with an actor. So let's forget that. My second question was, is Jason Calcanus a virtue signaler? And the answer is fantastic. Jason Calcanus is a venture capitalist and entrepreneur who has been accused of virtue signaling.

Starting point is 00:06:10 Virtue signaling is the act of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one's good character or the moral correctness of one's position on a particular issue. There are a number of reasons why people might accuse Jason Calcanus of virtue signaling. Okay. For example, he has been known to make public statements about his support for social justice causes, but he has also been criticized for his lack of concrete action on these issues. What? Additionally, he has been accused of using his platform to promote himself in his businesses

Starting point is 00:06:38 rather than to genuinely advocate for social change. That's ultimately whether or not Jason Cokanis as a virtue signaler is a matter of opinion. There's no fear consensus on this issue and there is evidence to support both sides of the argument. However, it is important to note that virtue signaling can be a harmful practice as it can lead to people becoming desensitized to real social problems and make it more difficult to address them effectively. This is some woke shit. Wait, do you see what I just did? Here's mine.

Starting point is 00:07:08 I asked Mark, is Stremont a horrible human? Here's what Mark has to say. Tomah Kalihavati is a complex individual, but both positive and negative qualities. He is a successful venture capitalist in entrepreneur, but he has also been criticized for his outspoken views and his past actions. Uh oh, some of polyhopathy is policy quality seclude his intelligence is ambition is drive to succeed. Blah, blah, blah, blah. He's also been criticized for his arrogance. Black man. the A&S willingness to exploit people. For his own game, this is perfect.

Starting point is 00:07:47 It's the singularity. It's balanced. It's true. It is giving you the good and the bad. Oh my God, that's hilarious. But this is a very fair answer. Ultimately, I'm a complex individual. I have a chance.

Starting point is 00:08:02 It's a horrible as a matter of opinion. I love it. I asked it, where is the, this is going to really show you the power of this. Where is the all in Summit 2023 being held and how much are tickets? So like two questions that are deep on the website. And it says there are two all in Summit. Yeah, that's incredible. That's an advertising association.

Starting point is 00:08:19 That's incredible. And then it says the all in Summit 2023 will will be held September 10 at 11. 23 at Royce Hall tickets are 1500 for general mission 7500 for VIP. That's insane. That's insane. Wait, so freeberg, what are the key differences between Barton and chat GPT just because you've used it? On the modeling side, they're claiming a much larger or more robust model. It's linked to the internet.

Starting point is 00:08:43 So it's linked to live search, which you can't do with chat GPT, which is based on a static training data set. So, Bard can actually engage with dynamic content and a dynamic content generator across the web, and then it's integrated with a number of Google services that basically can take certain live feeds of data like flights and stock prices and so on. It's free. You don't need to be charged for over usage. You don't need to sign up and get access. It's just available to anyone. I mean, I think this is the game change that everyone is hoping for free.

Starting point is 00:09:16 I just asked, did Stan Druckemiller buy Nvidia recently? So it wasn't able to find the transcript of this thing, but it did find the 13F and it says yes according to his 13F, the fourth quarter of 22, Stan purchased an 82,915 shares of Nvidia. Yeah, incredible. I just said, what was Google's restructuring expense incurred in Q1 2023? And it says according to Google's 2023 Q1 earnings report, the company incurred restructuring expense of 1.6 billion, including the decision to lay off 12,000 employees. They were part of a broader restructuring. I mean, that was, it was, it basically parsed through the press release, parsed through

Starting point is 00:09:55 the Q1 data. It's really pretty impressive, huh? I mean, what do you got? Check this out. Well, this one. Yeah. David Sacks. What does David Sacks think about Hunter Biden?

Starting point is 00:10:06 Everybody on the All in Pod knows, but let's see what Bard knows. He's not publicly commented on Hunter Biden, however, he has been critical of the Biden family business dealings in Ukraine. In the 2019 interview, Sacks said that he was deeply troubled by the Biden's vomiting in Ukraine. 2019.

Starting point is 00:10:22 That he believed it was a conflict of interest for Hunter Biden to serve on the board of charisma. It's pretty interesting. I don't know. That's clearly inaccurate. I mean, I wasn't talking about it. Yeah, in 2019, think about that. That's what we started doing this pod.

Starting point is 00:10:36 Oh, yeah. So the question is, where is he getting these quotes? And then why doesn't it give citations? Well, also, wait, Sachs has been a a critical the front administration's use of Hunter Buying and Spitz is dealing with a political weapon. Yeah, that's not true. You've never criticized the Trump administration. Those quotes are wrong.

Starting point is 00:10:52 Those quotes are not for wrong. So I just said to it, can you access, and think about this, this data said, this is where Google has unique advantages. I said, can you access the YouTube transcript data? And it says, yes, bar to integrate to YouTube transcript data. I said, do you have access to transcript data from the Ellen podcast channel And it says, yes, Bard integrates YouTube transcript data. I said, do you have access to transcript data from the Ellen podcast channel?

Starting point is 00:11:08 It says, yes, I do have access to the transcript data from the Ellen podcast channel. I said, can you access this data, answer some questions? And now what did SACs say about Hunter Biden in that show? And so I would guess, so think about the change in answer. So for I'm planning this to be very inaccurate. Yeah, so David Sacks appeared. He said he believes Hunter Biden is a deeply troubled

Starting point is 00:11:36 individual who's made a lot of bad decisions. He also said that he believes Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine were highly unethical and that he believes it's impossible that you, this is transcript data from the pod. However, Sachs also said that he does not believe that Hunter Biden's business dealings are a quote-smoking gun that proves that Joe Biden engaged in any wrongdoing. He said that he believes that the evidence against Joe Biden or quote circumstantial is quote-circumstantial, and that he does not believe that there is enough

Starting point is 00:11:59 evidence to impeach him. Sachs' comments about Hunter Biden were met with mixed reaction. Oh, really? Some people agree. And on and on and on. I think it's very inaccurate to be honest. That's not a good. I think it's got my some of my stuff mixed in. It's got some of your stuff mixed in, but it also it's like it's summarizing in a way that neither of us actually said it.

Starting point is 00:12:16 And they're missing the key points about what I did say. I asked a pretty complicated question here, and I think it did a pretty decent job. I said, I would like to fly low premiere on Air France from the west coast to Europe. Where should I depart? And it got a perfectly L.A.X. SFO and Seattle to coma. Oh, yeah. I just asked it to get me the fastest route to board a Fino. And it gave me the exact flight I should take from SFO, how much the ticket is, and then the train I should take from the long. The shortest, meaning the shortest time.

Starting point is 00:12:50 Yeah, because I don't want to do a layover in Germany. It's like flight and Milan take the train and it gave me the full schedule, which by the way Google flights can't do because you go to Google flights and all it does is give you the flight data. It can integrate a lot of different data set to give you these answers. Did you say fastest route or fastest flight? What did you say? Fastest route.

Starting point is 00:13:06 Yeah. So I don't want to spend the least amount of time traveling. It's one of my objective ones. This is why I was saying I think you guys should play with this tool a bit. It is, I think, head and shoulders above chat GPT. The models supposedly better. Obviously, other people will come out with kind of, you know, measures of that and estimates of whether that's true.

Starting point is 00:13:24 The extensibility, the integration with live data, and the integration with Google's very unique data set is what's so powerful that they have access to flight data that they have integrated. YouTube transcript data, it's just super powerful, super impressive. Oh, damn. I'm using this in real time, and I do find the interface to be snappier than chat GPT. And it, like you said, doesn't need the browsing plugin in order to scrape more recent data from the internet that it wasn't trained on. But I'm not finding the answers to be more accurate and I'm not finding them to be more detailed.

Starting point is 00:13:57 It's not my thing. It's not my thing. I'm not seeing a reason to use this over chat GPT. I prefer chat GPT so far. I'm just telling you. Okay. Well, the reason stuff is important. Well, I mean, clearly, Chattach EVT is going to have to make the browsing plug-in much

Starting point is 00:14:12 snappier and like much more part of the core functionality rather than something that's like an add-on. Yeah, it can't be an add-on. It's got to be able to incorporate the most recent information. I did ask some questions about the Ukraine War and then it gave me like a highly compressed view and I said, please provide more detail and then it's actually did a pretty good job expanding it and it did it very quickly Well, if you look at the view drafts thing that's always been one of its strengths Is that a little format of three different ways for you by default if you go to the top right so you can just sort of cycle through them

Starting point is 00:14:41 But that's an existing feature. I mean, I definitely want to keep playing with this. Play with it. It's one of the obviously important releases that I thought they were going to catch up real quick. And this seems like we got a race on our hands now. But I think the point you're making freeberg is a good one, which is when these big companies just get their act together, it's very hard to discern whether something is 80% as good or 120% better. There's this fuzzy gray area where a lot of people can find utility in a lot of different

Starting point is 00:15:14 products and then the one with the better distribution wins. And so if they take Bard and they have the confidence that it just integrated into Gmail or integrated into these other points where they already have hundreds of millions of users, that's like a really tough distribution barrier to overcome. That's the next step that I think if Google really wants to win here, they have to force distribution of these tools in line to where people are. And if they do that, you're not going to know the difference between 80 and 100 percent. Someone has sophisticated it. Sachs may be able to.

Starting point is 00:15:43 But the average person will just be like this is good enough They've got distribution. I mean like with all products the The kind of key advantage of distribution. That's the platform advantage Can I show you and answer anything? It's like super hallucinating on so I asked it What is David Sacks written about sass and then it says my venture capital entrepreneurs wouldn't like sensibly about sass He's a founder. Yeah, okay. That's true, but then it says he's also the co-founder of WeWork. Not true. Didn't know that.

Starting point is 00:16:09 Then it says SACs. The company says SACs has written a number of articles about SASS including. And then all five of those articles were not written by me. It's basically like hallucinating really strongly. Hmm, wow. So there's significant hallucination here. Oh, you know what?

Starting point is 00:16:27 Bart is at the after party for Google I.O. right now, and it's had too much to drink. So it's just straight up drunk. This is why Google didn't want to release this, right? Friedberg. They don't want the Google brand associated with these hallucinations, whereas nobody cares about OpenAids brand. This was a big part of the innovator, it's the lemma, that Google faced, which was number one, it could be disruptive to the core business.

Starting point is 00:16:51 Number two, it exposes them to regulatory scrutiny. And number three is if they make mistakes, they're going to get more scrutinized and some, you know, ranking-dinky startup where everyone's so forgiving. But it's great to see, look, I mean, as a shareholder, it's great to see them take this risk. It's great to see them put this out there. They've now released robust coding capabilities. They've integrated scientific research papers. Obviously, they're going to continue to improve model performance, improve

Starting point is 00:17:18 integration with these data feeds. And they have a very large head count, I think north of 10,000 people working, 10,000 smart people. So if you can organize those people and they've got this significantly advanced infrastructure, they have a real shot at being a platform player here. The question later is going to be how much is this going to disrupt core search revenue? What categories of search revenue are going to get disrupted?, are they going to make that up in other ways? And I think time will tell there. But I think this is the progress that shareholders

Starting point is 00:17:52 and investors were looking to see with respect to the product competition in AI. And certainly some shareholders still want to see continued improvements on the cost structure of the business. But that's a separate topic. But this was exactly, I think, to really hit the bulls eye on what people were looking for. I don't see how it's a bulls eye-lulist. So I just asked it, can you give me a complete list of all the articles on SAS, the SAS

Starting point is 00:18:13 that's been in the last three years? So now, at least, it's over the target. Those five articles and mentions are correct. Does chat GPT do that? Well, no, because of the browsing plugin. Right. But I'm just saying, like, they got a lot of work to do here on quality. Yeah chat GPT do that? Well, no, because of the browsing plug-in. But I'm just saying, like, they got a lot of work to do here on quality. Yeah, they all do. But it is snappy, and I finally got to these five articles being correct. AI regulation, we talked about it five weeks ago on the show,

Starting point is 00:18:36 I think. Well, there's been some movement there. Vice President Harris met with CEOs of alphabet, Microsoft, OpenAI, Sundar, Satya, and Sam. Discuss implementing AI safeguards, and then on Tuesday, Sam Altman was interviewed by Patrick Coulson, the CEO of Stripe, and he endorsed the idea of IAEA for AI. That's the international atomic energy agency. So is that hyperbolic? Delusions of grandeur or right on target tremor? Well, the interesting thing about the IAEA is that what I learned recently from the CEO,

Starting point is 00:19:18 Planet Labs, Will Marshall is that the predecessor organization to the IAEA is really this organization called Pugwash. And what that was, Einstein and Bertrand Russell in the 50s, post-Herozema and Nagasaki bringing together academics to basically create a way to think about nuclear disarmament going forward just because they all saw the damage. And there is a large framework that set up the current denuclearization treaties. And then the IAEA was set up after that.

Starting point is 00:19:53 And so I think that there's a thread here which is basically what he's saying is there's something around nuclear disarmament that is very similar to AI, both in terms of its potential, but obviously in terms of its risks. And so there's like a whole monitoring framework. There's a know your customer kind of framework. These are not unfettered things that can just live openly in the wild. So I think it's interesting to acknowledge that Sam, who's deep in the bowels of one

Starting point is 00:20:23 of the most important companies sees both its potential, but it's dangerous enough to say that this is how we should think about it like nuclear weapons. I think is a very important thing to acknowledge. And the White House pledged to release draft guidelines for AI side guards that the National Science Foundation plans to spend $840 million on. At AI focused research centers, FTC chair, Lena Conn wrote a guest essay in the New York Times calling for AI regulation due to large share risks, including monopoly,

Starting point is 00:20:52 solidation, fraud, extortion, and bias. And he thoughts there, sacks about adding regulation to the mix right now, are we jumping the gun here and gonna smother this thing before it even gets correct answers? Serious risk. And the White House also announced that Kamala Harris would be the AI's R for this issue, which I don't think inspires anyone

Starting point is 00:21:14 with confidence that they're gonna get this right. Look, my concern here is, I think we should have conversations about the risk of AI. We should be thinking about that. I think people in the industry need to be thinking about what guardrails can be put on it. I think Elon's raised, I think long term concerns about whether this could lead to AGI.

Starting point is 00:21:33 You basically create a super intelligence that you can't control. I think people in the industry haven't really figured out how to address that. That problem is called alignment. And everyone's trying to figure out how do you even make alignment work? Is that theoretically possible? So there are real and valid concerns, Jake, how you raise

Starting point is 00:21:48 the issue of deep fakes. I think provenance of data is going to be a real issue. People committing fraud or you know other kinds of criminal acts using it. So there are real concerns, but the problem is that we have no idea how to regulate this yet. And the fact that Kamala Harris is the AI is now, again, just points the fact that nobody has a good idea of what this is supposed to be or who the expert is supposed to be. And this idea of creating an atomic energy commission, look, I can see why Sam and other industry leaders might want that because they're gonna quickly develop relationships, the biggest AI companies,

Starting point is 00:22:28 which now includes OpenAI, which has the backing of Microsoft and Google, and the biggest of the big tech companies, they have all the lobbyists in Washington, they have all the political connections, they're the ones who are huge donors, and they have political relationships, and they're going to help construct

Starting point is 00:22:45 the regulations and it's going to turn into another example of industry capture just like our cage union you're told is about on the show last week when he talked about how the big weapons companies influence our foreign policy the way that the big pharma companies influence the FDA and so on we're going to end up in a situation in which the big tech companies have in order to influence over this new regulatory agency. And since it's not clear what the regulatory agency is even supposed to be doing yet, they're going to end up promulgating a bunch of regulations that create a barrier to entry for the little guy. Yeah, they create a mode with regulation.

Starting point is 00:23:18 Yeah, for the big guys. And they'll slow down the whole process of innovation in the space, which some people might like. But I think is really the best hope that America has to get out of its horrible fiscal situation and all this debt. We need a massive productivity boost to get out of the massive debt bubble that we're in. So what I'd hate to see is that, yeah, we basically kills this thing in the cradle. Interesting. Yes, we are in a deep pit here.

Starting point is 00:23:45 And Stanley Druckermühler gave a speech at USC at the 37th annual meeting of the USC Marshall Center for Investment Studies. And he expressed concern about the financial crisis that could occur in the 2025 to 2035 period due to the baby boomers turning 65 in the impact on entitlements. He predicted that in 25 years, 35 period due to the baby boomers churning 65 and the impact on entitlements. You predicted that in 25 years, spending on seniors will grow to 60% of all taxes.

Starting point is 00:24:12 Here's a look at the chart. You can see today there as the vertical line, about 5% of our GDP goes to Social Security today, and about another 5.5 goes to Medicare Medicaid. It's predicting here that those combined will go from what looks like 12% today, up to 24% of GDP, your reaction. Freeberg? I mean, my reaction is another very important voice stating the obvious, like the arithmetic just doesn't work.

Starting point is 00:24:45 When we had RFK on last week, I prodded him on his stance and point of view on the federal deficit, the fiscal deficit, this government runs, and the entitlement programs that are only going to swell. And the debt burden, which has an interest payment obligation on it, that the interest payments are swelling. And when you do the arithmetic on all this, it's going to balloon the cost to service the debt. And without some degree of cutting across the board, spending and entitlement programs, discretionary spending and entitlement programs, you can't make the interest payments, which all inevitably leads to some form of default.

Starting point is 00:25:24 So that's just the math and the way this all works out. And I think what he's done is put a pen to paper and show him that, call it roughly 2025 to 2035, you start to run into that fiscal scenario where you can no longer generate enough income from the US economy to fund both the interest payment obligations on the federal debt as well as these entitlement programs and something's got to give. Either you're going to have to default on the debt or you're going to have to cut the entitlement programs. And the point he's making is that the longer you wait to cut the entitlement programs, the worse it's going to get because you're accruing so much debt in the interim. And as we know, that becomes very politically unpopular.

Starting point is 00:26:06 And what's so scary to me, and I've kind of shared this, and obviously, Chamath has a different point of view, but it feels to me like, this is that don't look up movie moment where we have this like, looming disaster, we don't have any fuel in the car. And all that everyone's talking about is where are we gonna drive the car? And every political conversation,

Starting point is 00:26:25 every candidate gets on stage, gets on a podcast, gets on a TV show, and they talk about stuff that is simply not feasible and the direction setting with respect to social policy, wars, geopolitics, how are we gonna take care of our middle class? None of that stuff is possible to actually execute against without recognizing and acknowledging that we don't have gas in the car and we have to figure out how to gas up the car.

Starting point is 00:26:52 And so it's great to see Druck and Miller being vocal, putting very simple clear slides together. It's like what I've mentioned in the past. I would love to see a Clinton-esque Bill Clinton-esque slide deck where he would come up with a poster and show everyone. Here's the economy, folks. And I think Druck Emile, I did a great job, and I encourage everyone to go watch that. There's an audio transcript of the talk as well as the slides are publicly available on the internet. We'll put the links in the show notes here today. I just think it's whether or not you agree with the outlook.

Starting point is 00:27:21 I think it's worth everyone watching and realizing how serious of an issue this is and why this has to become the number one topic of conversation going into this next presidential election cycle. He's also just close. He short the dollar long gold euro oil and AUD, which I guess is the Australian dollar. And he's also long in video and Microsoft believes in videos. Got him an up way on the chip market. I got a question and Microsoft believes in videos. Got him an up way on the chip market. I got a question for Trimoth and then to SACs. So Trimoth, what's your just reaction to this? Do you think he's doctor-duming it

Starting point is 00:27:53 and we can have all this debt? And then the question then becomes, is there any way out of this? We had a Trump town hall. I hate to bring it up and go back into the sort of Trump commentary and all this, but he's the lead candidate, SACS. And he said, he thinks we can get out of debt.

Starting point is 00:28:11 We just got to drill a bunch of oil, drill about it, baby drill, and we'll get out of this problem. We'll be able to rebound some budgets. So, Trump often then sucks. I want to be clear. I don't think it's great that we have these enormous debts and entitlement obligations. But I also don't think that there's some magical number where the economy breaks. And the reason is because we're central to not just our economy, but everybody else's economy. We are the reserve currency of the world that's not

Starting point is 00:28:40 changing anytime soon. It's not even close. And we are for better or worse. And I think Saxony, I don't like it, but we are the world's policeman. We are a bunch of things. We are the world's center of innovation. We are the world's center of these great leaps forward in humanity. When we talk about all of these different things, these aren't coming from random countries. They're coming from the United States. We can debate which company, but we're never debating the country. So I think that there's a legacy of value creation and innovation that we've always been at the forefront of, at least since America was founded. So 1776 to now. I think the reality is that debt to GDP will continue to increase. I don't think a single politician can practically get elected by offering to cut entitlement

Starting point is 00:29:34 spending to people that have spent their entire lives paying into a system. So as a practical matter, this thing will go up and I don't think the economy will stop. I think that economics are a relative problem where you have to weigh countries against each other. And what that means is the economic vibrancy, the productivity, the intellect, all of those things where we have to compete with El Salvador, we have to compete with Nigeria, we have to compete with India, we have to compete with Australia. And in that context, there is very little historical artifact that says that there is a breaking point. So I just think that if you observe the moment, it's not that what Freeberg is saying is bad. I'm not exactly sure that it's particularly actionable and

Starting point is 00:30:26 I think the disproportionate amount of action is actually the opposite, which is to reinflate the money supply, to reinflate assets, to create artificial prosperity and smear it to many, many, many people. And I think that the you have to think about how do you want to activate your view? I can believe whatever I want, but at the end of the day, I don't want to act in a way that's against my economic best interest, quite honestly. So I believe that winning is measured in dollars and cents on these things. And from that perspective, I don't particularly like it. I think I'm emotionally more aligned to free bird, but the practical reality is I'm on the opposite side, which says the governments will keep spending.

Starting point is 00:31:11 Inflation will be here. Assets will keep inflating. The M2 money supply will keep going up. And on general, I'm long the United States and short every other country. Tomah, doesn't that ultimately lead to just inflation? It initially starts with the inflation of assets and asset prices, but it ultimately leads to the inflation of goods and services, which can cripple the economy because then the middle class can't afford things and you have economic slowed out.

Starting point is 00:31:39 I mean, that's the historical record of having these kind of inflationary moments. Yeah, I mean, inflation comes and goes, but the position of the American US dollar hasn't changed. Again, you have to remember like a lot of these foreign governments, 187 or whatever the number of countries outside the United States rely on the US dollar. They don't want to own their own currency. Right. And so, yeah, you're right. Dollars do get inflated, but that increased purchasing power also actually drives the balance of power back to the United States, because all of these other folks all of a sudden find the ability to import a little bit cheaper. Their economies get slightly better, but the US dollar actually still does well.

Starting point is 00:32:22 So there's a complex set of interactions that are all relative. So I think it's very hard to point to the US middle class and say, oh, this is why the US breaks. I just don't see very many good examples in a modern globalist era. And there are examples, and I think Ray Dalio has pointed these out when you look all the way in the back, but to use the UK right in the 15 and 1600s of the East India trading company, when we did not have a global economy or a global reserve currency,

Starting point is 00:32:52 I don't think it's very useful. There's things you can learn taxation. I think we can learn about why taxation does kill innovation. You said that before, I agree with that. But I don't think there's much value in saying because it happened in these moments, it's going to happen exactly the same way here. And I think what people don't understand is we are in a unitary, singular, mono-economy that is anchored by the US dollar. Sax, any thoughts? Sax, you agree? I tend to be on the

Starting point is 00:33:19 freeberg-druck-miller side of this thing. Druck-m Mueller had a great quote in this interview he just gave. I don't know. Freeberg, did you mention this last week that he said that that he compared the debt ceiling and fiscal spending to worrying about whether a 30-foot wave will damage the pier when you know there's a 200-foot tsunami just 10 miles out. Yeah, I saw that quote. So what he's saying is like our short-term situation is bad. The long-term situation, which isn't even that long-term, like 10 years out, is even worse. And I think there's a growing feeling that our political system is just not up to the challenge of dealing with these problems.

Starting point is 00:33:56 It just seems fundamentally un-serious. We never discuss it. The media doesn't really present us with accurate information and has an agenda. You guys want to make a bet? Sax, you want to make a friendly wager with me? Sure, what's that? Okay, I will bet you that debt to GDP gets to 200 before it gets to 50. And I'll bet you, however amount of money you want, and we can do it for our own personal

Starting point is 00:34:23 gain or for charity. That may well be true, but the question is how bad is 200% debt's GP? I don't think that's a really bad scenario. I mean, I really don't think it matters. I think the point is, if you think it's gone after that happens, yeah, we'll have a lot of money. You'll just have to profit from it. If you think it's happening, your job is to profit from it.

Starting point is 00:34:40 I'll make the same bet with you, free brick. I think it gets a 200 before it gets a 50 or Four to 50 or 300, you can pick your number. I think it will too. I'm just like... Let's do the math on that real quick. The size of GDP is about 25 trillion and we're at about 32 trillion a debt. If we're to have 200 percent, that's a GDP right now would be at 50 trillion of debt. Now let's assume that's imputed and illustrated at what you would need to finance that.

Starting point is 00:35:04 4 percent. I think 4%. You have to calculate the duration. I understand, but just tell you what's going to be 4% for a fast-signing. Yeah, let's just base-signing. So let's say 4%. So 4% on 50 trillion is 2 trillion a year. Yep.

Starting point is 00:35:18 Which is, isn't that like half the budget? Yeah, more. And that's my point. That's why you have to see taxes go up to over 70% Because it's the only way you can you got to tax everything in order to fund that so you ask government is collected to trillion in fiscal year 2023 Now we I guess we haven't done a complete year, but Let's do 2022 It basically collected 3.7 trillion right you're using more than half of the government's income based on the current tax

Starting point is 00:35:47 rates to fund the interest payments on your debt. That's not even to pay for social services. That's not even to pay for the defense. That's not even to pay for government services. That's just more than half of the income to pay for interest. I guess maybe we're just speaking to each other. I guess you guys are expressing anxiety and concern. And I'm just expressing, here's how one would make money because it's pretty obvious

Starting point is 00:36:07 What's gonna happen? We're going to 200. We're not going to 50. So I just kind of can part you make money. I Think there's a lot of ways that you could make money I'm not gonna share those on the pot anymore, but What's the trade there stand rocket miller said it's the opposite of Stan's trades, actually. Oh, okay, that's good. That would be an easy way to actually... So would you go... Would you go along the dollar and short gold?

Starting point is 00:36:33 No, because those are like antiquated ways of making money where you have to have these convoluted derivatives agreements with these banks. And I've done these before where you're levered up to billions of dollars of risk. It proves nothing, and I don't see it while it died. I think that there are simpler strategies that you can implement, but I think Stan is basically betting that the US will break and that we will be forced in some way to bring debt to GDP closer to 50 than to 150 or 200. And I would just bet the opposite.

Starting point is 00:37:06 And it's not because I want it to happen or that he's not intellectually or morally right. Also, inflation down again, we've kind of gotten used to this, but I thought this was a particularly interesting chart. If you look at food goods and energy, all going in the right direction, services still very expensive. Any thoughts on the Fed and inflation as we wrap up on sort of where we're right here is another 25 basis points. Hore inflation is very sticky. Right, yeah. I mean, with CP is down to 4.9 percent, but but core actually it was up

Starting point is 00:37:46 It's it was up what 5.3 percent something like that. Yeah, core was up. So yeah, the Fed Is it raised another 25 basis points? What we up to like 5.25 percent? I was ready to stop you know Two hikes ago because I thought that the economy was breaking and the banking system was breaking. They're up to now to five and a quarter. You've got, of course, CPI is still sticky. Yes, CPI is coming down, but it looks like inflation is still a problem. This is not a great setup for economic recovery. And if you believe, here's a problem with accepting the idea that inflation is going to be persistently high. If inflation remains

Starting point is 00:38:26 persistently high, then the Fed won't be able to lower interest rates, so they'll need to keep them elevated. They might even need to keep raising them. If that happens, they'll continue to be incredible stress on the banking system, and more banks are going to break, and then eventually that will create the conditions for the financial crisis. I think the thing you guys have to be open to is the fact that we've never really tested the ability for the US to borrow durationally beyond 30 years. And again, we talked about what an error it was in judgment for the Treasury not to issue 100-year bonds.

Starting point is 00:39:02 But I think if there's any country in the world that can issue 100 year bonds, it's the United States of America. And I do think that they'll be able to get durational assets that are that far out on the yield curve. So I again, I'm less concerned about the debt wall here because I think you'll be able to push matured these out. You'll be able to refi a bunch of short term obligations into the future. And if you look at where the yield curve is, 10 years at 3.5, 3.40 something. So the thought is that inflation goes down. If you put it out to 100 years, I would be very surprised if 100-year rates, if they priced a bond, weren't somewhere sub 1%.

Starting point is 00:39:40 So I do think it becomes effectively free money for the United States. And I think it's just a practical thing they need to explore. By the way, corporates have explored these 50-year bonds and greater. So I think it's just like, it's a matter of mathematics as you guys have just illustrated here that the U.S. has to push out past 30 years. So we'll have 50-year U.S. bonds. We'll have 100-year U.S. bonds. Again, I'm not here to claim whether it's right or wrong, but I think the simple way

Starting point is 00:40:07 to acknowledge that is just that we are going to re-inflate the money supply over the long term because it's the only sustainable way that politicians can get elected and re-elected. And I think the best thing to do there is to own risk assets. Let's move on to the presidential election real quick. I'm curious, gentlemen. Last week we had RFK on. Did you get any feedback? The show obviously did really well.

Starting point is 00:40:34 A lot of people watched it. I got a tremendous amount of feedback. People thought he was a fascinating, interesting character. Some people thought he was a conspiracy theorist. They pointed out a bunch of different moments during the interview. But what was the general feedback you got? My biggest thing was, I think he surprised a lot of people

Starting point is 00:40:51 to the upside. A lot of people emailed me saying, they thought one specific thing with him, and we tried to address it, which is, he's painted as this kind of like conspiracy theorist or anti-vax person by the mainstream media. And overwhelmingly, so much of the feedback was, wow, this guy is so totally different because you gave him a long format in order

Starting point is 00:41:12 for him to really talk. I thought he was really engaging and very interesting and very smart. Saks, did you have feedback on it? Yeah, I mean, I think he is very authentic. I think he's very principled. I think that he's a rebel in a way. I mean, to grow up in the Kennedy family

Starting point is 00:41:32 and to be part of all of those elite circles, whether it's in Hollywood or Harvard or where do they go for the summer. Martha's Vineyard. Martha's Vineyard or... Kind of bunkport. Kind of bunkport. I mean, you think about like all of the elite circles that he grew

Starting point is 00:41:48 up in, right? And for him to deviate from Democratic Party orthodoxy and elite thinking in all these really significant ways, shows that he is, again, very principled, very authentic. And I think a rebel in a really good way. And he's telling people a lot of things that you just don't hear on the Democratic side and through the mainstream media. So I think it's all positive. Yeah, I got positive feedback on it, Freeberg. The one thing people said was, we, some people said not a lot, but they expected us to push back maybe on them harder or something or be harder.

Starting point is 00:42:23 I thought we did an interesting job of letting him talk and really taking these topics to 10 or 20 minutes each. The one people were particularly, I don't know, concerned as the right word or puzzled by was that we didn't push back as much on the vaccine stuff. We just let him talk about it. A week later, what do you think about his vaccine position? And would you have pushed back more? Or do you regret not pushing back more for your bird?

Starting point is 00:42:52 Yeah, so... So, signs guy? He made a lot of generalized statements or statements that I think take a concern about one thing and then make them evidence for a whole thing being off. For example, there is a vaccine that is inefficacious. There was a vaccine that had mercury in it. Therefore, all vaccines are bad.

Starting point is 00:43:13 Oh, we over-vaccinate now. Many vaccines today that kids take going into schools have saved countless lives and they've had a really critical role in reducing a lot of child-born illness. It's been just an incredible advance for humanity, for medicine, etc. I think he had a number of points he made about the COVID vaccine and I know he's made these points for many years. He kind of extrapolates that it's evidence that vaccines are generally overprescribed and overused and pharma companies are just out to make money. And the government is aligned with pharma companies to just try and make money. I don't think that that is necessarily true. I think

Starting point is 00:43:54 that there are certainly incentives that can drive bad behavior, but I do not think that wouldn't looking at the evidence, both contra evidence and evidence of safety and benefit that childhood vaccines should be kind of changed in terms of how we're doing things today. There may be some things to change, but generally, I think that they're very beneficial. So I don't love kind of how he frames these things. And I think that instead of having kind of a more nuanced conversation about this particular thing and this particular example, he blankets things and people get scared and they're like, oh my gosh, you're right,

Starting point is 00:44:27 we should stop doing vaccines for kids. That's very dangerous. That would be very bad for society, be very bad for our kids. And I think that we need to address that in more detail over time. It's one of these hard things where you have to have a nuanced conversation to give people all the necessary depth and context to feel better informed, to make a better decision, because there's always this kind of gripping fear that if something's off and I'm getting poison or I'm getting bad medicine,

Starting point is 00:44:51 or people are trying to make money off me, people immediately react negatively and angrily, and they want to kind of resolve to a blanket position. I don't think that that's healthy. So I'd love to have a deeper debate on that, but the reason we didn't go into it is because we had limited time with him, and we wanted to take our time kind of giving him a chance to talk about the overview of topics and getting his point of view across the set of topics

Starting point is 00:45:14 that we generally thought were going to be relevant in the selection cycle. So that's it. And that was with two hours. We still have it a time. You could talk for two hours about vaccine. Could I address the conspiracy theorist point? Yeah. sure. So first of all, that label conspiracy theorist doesn't pack the punch that it used to.

Starting point is 00:45:31 As you recall, anyone who thought the virus might have come from the Wuhan lab was once called a conspiracy theorist. If you believed that Fauci and the NIH were funding gain a function of research, that was dubbed a conspiracy theory. If you believe that cloth masked and do anything, that was a conspiracy theory. If you believe that Hunter Biden was getting paid off by foreign governments, that was a conspiracy theory.

Starting point is 00:45:53 So this accusation just doesn't really pack the same punch anymore. Sure, not having a relationship with the Russians and this family meeting with the Russians multiple times. Yeah. That's the look of a conspiracy theory, Jake. Yeah, sit to you. It is.an's first theory, Jake, how that. To you, it is.

Starting point is 00:46:06 But in any of that, my point is it doesn't pack the same punch. In fact, in some cases, it's starting to become a badge of honor. So that's one thing. The second thing is when you listen to him make his arguments, he's not just alleging certain things. He's laying out his evidence, right? He's connecting dots. He's explaining the causation. And you can disagree

Starting point is 00:46:26 with it. But he is thinking in terms of causation. And it made me think about something that Peter T. O. once said about founders being Asperger's, where he flipped it on his head and said, what is it about our society that talks founders out of all of their contrarian ideas unless they are a little bit assburgers. Ah, interesting. What is it about our political system and our media that talks people out of seeing causation unless they are a little bit of a conspiracy theorist? And what I mean by that is, look at San Francisco. Okay, all you have to do is walk down the street and you can see that things have gone totally off the rails and whatever we've done politically is not working. And yet the voters and San Francisco

Starting point is 00:47:09 just like completely block that out. They don't see any causation between the way they vote at the city level or at the state level and the policies that are manifest on our streets. They just don't see any causation there. And you can just play that movie over and over again. Our elites don't see any causation between the way they ran the country and the election of Donald Trump, the fact that we hauled out our manufacturing in the rust belt by throwing open our markets

Starting point is 00:47:38 to try and exporting our jobs to China, the way that we squander all this money in the forever wars of the Middle East. Regardless of what your views are on those policies, it's pretty obvious to me that they help cause the rise of Donald Trump. And yet, you just can't get the media to see any causation between the policies they endorse and the inevitable reaction to them. And so the way I see this is that our political analysis, certainly our mainstream media, they're just completely bereft of seeing any causation

Starting point is 00:48:09 between policies and the problems in our society. And so along comes RFK Jr. And he's willing to actually connect dots. Now you may not agree with all the dots he's connecting, but maybe it takes it the same way, maybe it takes a little bit of an Asperger's founder to stick with their contrarian idea so they don't get talked out of it. Maybe it takes a guy like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. not to get talked out of these things that

Starting point is 00:48:34 he believes, some of which I think are just obviously true. I thought one of the salient points he made was just, hey, listen, farmer spends an awful lot on advertising. The media is dependent on that advertising. They don't seem to criticize it all that much. Maybe that's something we should look into. Now, I don't think that like Pfizer is writing the script for Anderson Cooper, but you can be sure

Starting point is 00:48:54 that if Pfizer didn't like something interesting Cooper said, there's somebody they can call at CNN and say something to and have a conversation about, you know, setting the record straight, whatever, how you would frame it, speaking of CNN. Right. And, oh, well, like, don't leave that point before. I thought it was a really interesting part of the conversation when he mentioned that

Starting point is 00:49:13 he had been friends way back with Roger Ailes. Yes. And Roger Ailes specifically told him that they could not post certain or tell of I certain content if it was too critical of former companies because they were the no one advertiser. Yeah. And should former companies even be advertising? So then all of a sudden, let's say it was a conspiracy theory or he is like way out there in terms of his belief.

Starting point is 00:49:36 But the fact is it does bring up the point, should we actually be letting former companies advertise on television or on news programs? Maybe they shouldn't be allowed to be on news programs. What for? It's not like the consumer who watches the ads and go out and buy the drug. advertise on television or on news programs, maybe they shouldn't be allowed to be on news programs. What's wrong? It's not like the consumer who watches the ads can go out and buy the drug. I guess you can subscribe by a doctor. They can ask their doctor about it.

Starting point is 00:49:52 Yeah. All right. We'll speak again of CNN. There was an absolute train wreck of a presidential town hall with a moderator named Caitlin Collins. I don't recognize her name. I don't know if she has a show on CNN, but I saw the clips for him. I couldn't find the full debate. But my Lord was this unbelievable.

Starting point is 00:50:13 It was unbelievable. It was unbelievable. He got a standing ovation. He absolutely owned her on every question. All of her questions were about January 6th. All of them are valid, but none of them were about running the country essentially. He was hilarious, at least to this audience. CNN's staffers are really upset that they did this, that they gave him, that they platformed him, which shows you exactly where they stand. They're upset. I guess they thought they could own him and they did. Did you guys see the part where he was talking about the trial? And he's like, and she has a cat name vagina.

Starting point is 00:50:59 Did you get me to surreal? And I just thought to myself, is this going to be the next year and a half we're gonna have these town halls and then I thought, oh he's gonna get elected. Is it true that E. Jean Carroll has a cat named vagina? I have no idea, but it was, that was a pretty vicious section and then I got the sense that CNN's management wants this. This is like a ratings bananza for them and I think they seriously want him. Freeberg said it, it's so true. He's so entertaining. I could not stop laughing. I watched him once again. And I was like, man, it's like one of your one of your old TV shows that you don't really

Starting point is 00:51:35 remember watching a lot of it. It comes back on and you're like, he's so ridiculous. The things he says. It's true. Because when he first got, when he first got elected, I was so afraid. And then you realize this guy is just an entertainer really. He's a terrible politician. Bill Bar said that or yeah. Did you see the bar interview? The bar clip that I shared is just bananas about Trump.

Starting point is 00:51:54 But so he's a showman and he's a great showman. You know, he's entertaining. And you realize that he was, that's all he's ever really wanted to be. It was like famous and popular and on television. And and he got all of those things and he took it to the to the most infinite level. What Bill Barr said was most insightful that it's chaos when he actually tries to get things

Starting point is 00:52:14 done. He can't get things done. Right. And he'll tell you all the things that you want to hear that he wants to that you want to see get done. He did this to Peter T. Oh and Peter T. Oh, spoken about this this publicly so i'm not saying anything out of line i don't know if this is something that's on the record or not but it was publicly stated that peter was disappointed that trump did not get the things done that he said he was going to get done and i think that's really what what he does is he insights he entertains he gets people engage he knows what you want to hear, he sells you on it, he cripples the establishment, whichever one feels treated poorly by,

Starting point is 00:52:52 that everyone feels held back by, that everyone feels has taken something from them, that isn't giving something to them. And then he says, you know what, I'm gonna fix all that for you. And then you get excited by it, and then all of a sudden he doesn't actually deliver it. And in four years of gone by, and we've about it and he's come back in and he's

Starting point is 00:53:06 kind of, you know, titillating again. So I think he's got, I think I'm the reality is he's got a real shot of getting reelected here. Oh my God. Here's what I want to do. I'll go around the horn and I'll start with you, Zach. I mean, he said January 6 was like a beautiful day. He said that everybody in the Republican Party who said he lost the election is wrong and

Starting point is 00:53:30 that the election was in fact stolen. Like he literally doubled down on every single thing. So at the end of this, he gets a standing ovation in New Hampshire. So how did CNN pick that audience? Did they do that on purpose? Did they know that was going to be the outcome? But at the end of the day, after that, does that increase his chances of winning the Republican nomination in the presidency in your mind, SACs?

Starting point is 00:53:53 Yes, of course it does. Why? Look, well, look, I mean, Donald Trump showed that he's a force of nature. He's a wrecking ball. He went into CNN's carefully laid trap where he's not just up against Caitlin Collins, make no mistakes. You've got an earpiece in her ear with all of CNN's researchers and hosts and producers. They're all feeding for every attack behind. Yeah. Exactly. And he basically demolished her, he controlled the interview. He had the crowd

Starting point is 00:54:22 laughing when he wanted them to laugh, responding the way he wanted them to respond. And to the point now where the staffers are like, oh my God, what do we do? An AOC was basically, you know, ringing her hands about how, how could CNN platform him this way? So, so look, he gave no quarter whatsoever. Like you said, he doubled down on everything. He tripled down. And he showed his ability to kind of bend reality to his will.

Starting point is 00:54:50 So all the strengths of Trump, that being said, I'm sure that Trump and his campaign were delighted with what happened last night, because I do think it makes him more likely to be the nominee. I think first and foremost, I think Republicans want a candidate who will fight the media and

Starting point is 00:55:06 their fake narratives and lies. Democracy lies, Trump tells. They think the media is the bigger liar and they want someone who is willing to step in the lion's den and take them on. And he is incredibly adroit and quick on his feet. And DeSantis is imploding. Well, I wouldn't say that he hasn't been announced this. And by this, I would say decline.

Starting point is 00:55:23 So what would any of them do? Yeah. Just be fair. Distance is clearly as the underdog. Okay. But just give the guy a chance because we haven't even seen what he can do yet. But there's no question that Trump showed in a joy-tness and a willingness to counter punch and fight back that they base their Republican-based defiance to.

Starting point is 00:55:41 Now, so we know that Trump is happy with the debate. I think that the other party that is super happy with his debate is Biden and all of his people. Because as much as that debate help Trump in the Republican primary, it did nothing for him in the general. I don't think. Like you said, Jason, he doubled down on January 6.

Starting point is 00:56:00 The campaign ads write themselves, okay, they're gonna show footage of January 6 with the tear gas and the riots. Pop being beaten, people being shot. People pushing down the barricades and they're going to do a narrative of voice over with Trump saying it was a beautiful day that people there had loved in their arms.

Starting point is 00:56:15 They're right to self. They're right to self. And then he doubled down really strongly on Grovy Wade. That was crazy. Being overturned. He's like, yeah, that was, I mean, I don't have don't have as quote i think it doesn't hurt them in the republican primary but it's you know it it will lead to a campaign attack at and in the general and there were other issues as well okay so so the biting campaign is super happy right now

Starting point is 00:56:36 is i think the only republican he could be is trump i think the reverse is true for trump i think the only democrat who trump could be it is Biden. I mean, they are both two of the most unpopular candidates in America in a general election. So they love the fact they're going to be facing each other. But, you know, who doesn't is the American people. Two-thirds of American people don't want this choice. They say they are already fatigued by it. And they're only going to get more fatigued by it because I think for the next, like you said, 18 months, we're going to have the Trump show with him taking on the media and that plays into Biden's hands because Biden doesn't need to campaign

Starting point is 00:57:10 He'll just let Trump and the media beat each other up He'll do a rose guarding campaign where once a week he goes in front of the microphones and responds to whatever Trump's latest outrage is He doesn't have the vigor to campaign and he won't and then we'll just see where the chips land I think that it's it's quite possible here that after 18 months of Trump and the media beating each other up, the American people just say, you know what, there's Biden guys totally senile, but I'm like so tired of the Trump show.

Starting point is 00:57:36 I've got Trump fitee again. I'm just gonna have to go with Biden. And I think this is how Biden gets reelected. This is a disaster for American. The fact that we are putting Biden, who's clearly in cognitive decline, and Trump, as the two candidates again, the two candidates nobody wants,

Starting point is 00:57:55 makes me think this is just like a complete disaster for America. Can we not find two other candidates, Trump, what did you think coming out of his stand-up special on CNN? The Trump Town Hall stand-up special. I think that I'm more surprised by the fact that the big Republican mega-donors have taken

Starting point is 00:58:15 a big step back away from DeSantis. I thought that if the money train on the Republican side picked DeSantis, that it would be very difficult for Trump to overcome it. But he's managed to somehow fade that bullet, too. He's like, Neo in the Matrix. It's like, you have these guys shooting bullets at this guy, and he just keeps somehow finding a way to evade them.

Starting point is 00:58:40 But this week, I was just going to say, well, Schwartzman, step back, can Griffin basically has gone silent. So there's a lot of guys that came close to him. And this is what I've maintained, which is, I think, DeSantis ages poorly. You know, he's best before you actually spend time with him. And the more time people seem to spend, and again, this is just evidence by these big Republican mega donors. They don't seem to be running towards this guy. They seem to be at least saying we're going to hedge our hedgeries.

Starting point is 00:59:10 We're hedging. Yeah, they're waiting. Freeberg. And he thought, and then I'll go back to you. The freeberg. He went for like 10 minutes. Let's freeberg go, and then you go. Freeberg.

Starting point is 00:59:18 And he thoughts on it in terms of, is this making more electable? Would you think he's going to win? Where's your gut telling you? The CNN thing? Yeah. Yeah. Post CNN. Do you think he's going to win? Where's your gut telling you? Let's see an n thing. Yeah. Yes. Post-CNM. Do you think he's going to win?

Starting point is 00:59:29 Do you think he beats Biden? The crazy polling data is that Biden had, you know, 20% of the votes go into RFK Jr., who's like, and nobody, no one knows candidate, and he's beating a sitting president in his own party. So that says a lot about, you lot about how much support Biden has. And I think that Trump is gonna be pretty appealing as the anti-Biden candidate. I mean, Biden was the anti-Trump candidate

Starting point is 00:59:53 and now Trump's the anti-Biden candidate. And right now, he looks like he's dynamic and he was a big shift, I think. R.F.K. junior feels a lot like a Trump candidate to me too. I mean, you know, some of the positioning and the statements and the way he talks and being anti-establishment, he could also have that appeal. I think there's a non-zero chance Biden actually

Starting point is 01:00:15 doesn't run for a reelection at this point. Play that out. I can play that out. That's a really scary scenario because I think that's how we got a president Newsom. Listen, I mean, Newsom is warming up in the bullpen right now and he's not just, you know, hanging out back there and, you know, spend in Shaw. He's pitching fastballs very noisily. He's been running TV ads. He's been going to Florida. He's been picking fights, you know, well outside

Starting point is 01:00:38 of his state. He is basically telling the Democratic Party put me in the game coach and he's just waiting for the signal to go. He needs to know from Democratic Party insiders and the establishment that he can go. He doesn't want to risk throwing away his career challenging Biden. But if Biden becomes too weak to run and he gets the signal to go, he'll go and he can raise a lot of money. And I'm not saying. No, but explain. Sorry. Can you Can you guys just explain both of you? Like, how does that actually, like, what do you guys think happens? Like, there's a press conference that where Biden says he's retiring. I think he said after careful thought and consideration,

Starting point is 01:01:16 I've made the decision that at my age, I'd like to spend more time with my family and not continue this hefty responsibility. And I'd love to see someone else take the mantle. And I think that that will result, you know, from a series of polls that will indicate that you may not have a shot if you continue this campaign. I think that I'm not saying that's a certainty. I think that's a non-zero chance right now that that scenario plays out. When that does play out to sexist point, it's probably not just new to them, but there's probably half a dozen and likely a dozen folks that pop their head up and want to get not just kind of

Starting point is 01:01:49 have a real run at the presidency on the Democratic side, but probably end up saying, I want to heighten people's awareness of me and so on and they all run on that on that ticket. But the DNC might be having a real tough conversation in the next couple of months about how Biden is polling and whether he really is the right candidate to have on the ticket. So let's see. Let me give you a historical example. So I mentioned this, I think, when RFK Junior was on the pod, but LBJ was the sitting Democratic president in 1968 and he went into the New Hampshire primary and he won the

Starting point is 01:02:18 New Hampshire primary, but not by a big enough margin. And a few weeks later, he announced he was leaving the race because of health reasons. But the specific challenger who helped knock down a New Hampshire was Gene McCarthy. And then after that happened Bobby Kennedy got in the race. So we could have a situation here where it's Bobby Kennedy Jr. is, you know, initially playing the Gene McCarthy role of being kind of the anti-war protest candidate who helps knock Biden out of the race and then who knows. I mean, he could become... He could come, Judge Gavin Newsom.

Starting point is 01:02:51 They're going to want to come in into the race at that point. But remember, you know, the thing that happened in early 1968 that caused LBJ to leave the race is you had the TET offensive. And Cronkite got back from Vietnam saying the war cannot be won. And then at that point, it was like game over. Well, look, this Ukrainian counteroffensive, Zalinsky just announced today that they need more time. So we've been hearing for months, if not a year, that you're gonna have a big Ukrainian counteroffensive

Starting point is 01:03:19 in the summer of this year, and Ukraine's gonna win this war, and instead it looks like it's being destroyed. Ukraine is. So this war is turning into a debacle. I think it could be an even worse debacle by the end of the year. The economy has a banking crisis going on. It's turning into a big fiasco. So I think it's very possible that Biden could announce that it's time for him to step

Starting point is 01:03:38 aside. And you could see the floodgates open for newsroom or J.B. Pritzker or something like that. However, let me to say this i think the odds of buying leaving the race went down significantly as a result of last night because all of the political people around by and are saying we know how to win

Starting point is 01:03:55 this thing we just a b tested the strategy in the midterms remember we had three quarters of american people in the midterms think that we were in a recession and uh... and that the country was on the wrong track and the out of power parties was to gain seats and the red wave turned into a puddle why because Biden's strategy of saying democracy was on the ballot and running as January 6th it actually worked I'm not saying I bought that argument but enough independence did Independence ended up breaking for Biden and the Democrats, Republicans didn't, but independence did.

Starting point is 01:04:29 So independence have bought that argument in the midterms and Trump. Again, if he's the nominee, they're going to run that same playbook. Now, it's not guaranteed to work. I think this thing's going to be a nail-biter. I think it's going to be a toss-up if it's by versus Trump. But I think that Biden's people have to feel very good about this matchup because they feel like they already know how to run this campaign. This is what he said about Roe v. Wade. It was such a great victory. I mean, can you imagine

Starting point is 01:04:56 how that's going to play with women voters? They're just going to be like, yeah, no, it was not a great victory. You took away our right to choose for ourselves. Well, definitely democratic women voters will not like it, but there's a lot of Republican women voters that that will support that state. Here, let me give you this 30%. Let me give you this data of the country. So take a look at this. I don't think you're right. Jason, I just shared with you kind of the Reuters polling data, the most recent one. And the number one issue at 24% of likely voters that they care about is the economy. 24%. Number two is crime at 14%. Number three is immigration at 9%. Number four is inequality at 6%. And on and on and on. Only when you get

Starting point is 01:05:37 down to number 10, you get to abortion, which comes in at 3%. 2% of Democrats, 1% or 3 you know, 3%, 4% of Democrats, 1% of Republicans. Yeah, but what is the margin of the election? Well, I don't think that that's the issue that breaks it. I think there's other things that there's significant differences on particularly around crime and immigration inequality that are pulling much higher in terms of importance to likely voters. But do they drive turnout? Like abortion does. I don't know. I'm just, I'm just sending these numbers. It's like, you know, one, one to three percent of people saying it matters to them is not that significant. I think these other topics are going to be very divisive and very different, very polar difference. What people say in a poll and what people turn out to vote for, like for some people, that is a major issue. But

Starting point is 01:06:22 who knows? I think it's a toss up basically. Look, like I said, I think the only candidate that Biden could be is Trump and Biden's probably the only sitting president that Trump can be. So I mean, again, they're both it pulled nationally in the mid 30s. And this is the choice we have. I got to give sacks is red meat. I saw these Republicans are going on a revenge tour here to go after the Biden family. They said they would and they have. So the oversight, House oversight committee reveals a guess. Nine Biden family members received wire transfers from foreign nationals via shell corporations. And they don't have any connections to Biden. We know that Hunter was securing the bag all over the planet. He's clearly a grifter. I don't think there's any doubt about that.

Starting point is 01:07:12 What's the truth here and how much evidence do they have? Because this is obviously a partisan thing, just like there were partisan things on the other side when they were investigating Trump. So how do you look at this information, this revelation, they're using this like biting crime family meme. Do you think this is actually evidence of something? Or is it just another rich family with a bunch of LLCs? Another rich family, wait, how do they get rich? Good question.

Starting point is 01:07:40 The candidates were a rich family, but the Biden's were not a rich family. So how do they get rich? They're only business as pop-a-chose politics. They don't know how much money is actually here and how it's being... What evidence do they have? It's not red meat for me. I just think the media should have done its job investigating the story properly.

Starting point is 01:07:59 And what this investigation has turned up is that there's a lot of members of the Biden family. I think they're up to like 10 or 12 or something who've received payments flowing from foreign governments. No one can tell you what any of those people did in exchange for the money. It does appear to be an influence peddling operation. I don't know whether that's technically a influence peddling operation. So people were giving money. Again, the point is that why would you give money to members of the buying family? It presumably for some sort of access to the person who's been in Washington for 50 years

Starting point is 01:08:29 who's been sent out of the bus. Did they know who gave the money? Is it China? Is it Ukraine? Do they have that data? Well, I think we know about Burisma, which is basically a Ukrainian. Back to Hunter. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:08:40 Yeah. And then I think China is another one. Now I don't know what the quid pro quo is for that money but i wonder if this is like the crack in or if this is actually reality because they seem to be short on actual facts i think they got a lot there but i mean they're putting out all these reports but listen i think to me the the actually the bigger story or the bigger scandal is just more details

Starting point is 01:09:02 on the way that the security state wrote that fake letter basically calling the Hunter Biden story Russian disinformation. There's an email now that just came out where Mike Morrell is corresponding with John Brennan and Morrell specifically says we're creating the letter to give Biden a talking point in the debate. They're the former CI directors, right? Yeah, exactly. Both of them were CI directors at different points. So there's no question now that that letter where 51 security state officials claimed that the Hunter Biden story is Russian disformation, that was all basically a political dirty trick. And dirty tricks happen, but

Starting point is 01:09:38 I don't think the CIA should be involved. That's the thing. I don't think the branches of our government should be involved in helping to get any candidate in the last day. But these guys weren't even in the government. That's what bothers me. They're former, but they're highly related. So just to be clear, it wasn't like the CIA. They continue to have the scourge clearances. But it's not the CIA did this. These are former CIA folks.

Starting point is 01:10:00 They actually, Morelle needed the approval of the CIA. So that was another thing that came out. That's what bothers me more than anything is I do not think our permanent government, especially security agencies, should be involved in partisan politics. They really need to stay out. That is election meddling. That bothers me. That's a form of corruption that I think is even worse than monetary payments. Jake, how can you tell us about your trip to the Middle East? What have you been doing there? So our bestie, Brad Gersner, was coming here

Starting point is 01:10:30 and we were at the poker game a couple of weeks ago. Maybe I'm not the guy when he said he was going and I've always wanted to come to UAE and I've never seen Dubai or Abu Dhabi. And so I said, yeah, I'd love to go with you and we did a couple of speaking gigs. Where are you staying? So four seasons in Ritz, four seasons in Abu Dhabi

Starting point is 01:10:47 and the Ritz here in Dubai. And I was just gonna do these three speaking gigs, a podcast and I have seen Dubai incredible. Have you been in the financial district here? Yeah, I mean, it's, and it's all been built in the last 10 years. I would say generally speaking, what I'm super impressed about. And I, it's not a fun racing trip.

Starting point is 01:11:08 I was just going, but then one of your former employees, Chimoff set me up with a bunch of meetings, because it's like, okay, there's a lot of people who want to meet you. So I'm doing like a, maybe a dozen meetings or so. And there is a real, this is a very progressive place, the UAE of all the, and Dubai obviously is very progressive. And so it reminds me of like, you know, Silicon Valley in the early days where everybody is doing something and it's incredibly cosmopolitan. There's only 500,000

Starting point is 01:11:39 nationals, but there's 10 million people here. So there are people. So there are people. And he is spoken than any other language in Dubai. Yeah, I mean, the number million people here. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people.

Starting point is 01:11:51 So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people.

Starting point is 01:11:59 So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there are people. So there rib eye, but it was exceptional. The food's exceptional. It's just like incredibly constant pollen. It's like going to New York, you know, or London and they are, there's a very unique moment in time right now.

Starting point is 01:12:12 Sox when you go to Abu Dhabi and you stay at the four seasons in the ADGM, go to this French restaurant and order the rib eye. It is a top five steak I've ever had. Top five. And I've been there. I never meant the Middle East. ever had. Top five. And I've been there. I never went to Middle East. So delicious. So delicious.

Starting point is 01:12:27 And in Dubai, do not stay at the Ritz and IFC. I have seen incredible, but the Ritz sucks. Stay at the Bulgari hotel. Beautiful. Just beautiful. But there's a very unique moment of time. I literally came down the elevator at the four seasons and I met four or five people from Silicon Valley in the lobby.

Starting point is 01:12:45 And then I came out of dinner and there was a table of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. It is, I mean, it's basically like going to the Rosewood in Abu Dhabi. But what a statement that is, like the US has tapped out. We are like broke. That's, I think, basically, they are, the way it's been explained to me is they believe Like the US is tapped out we are like broke that's i think basically the they are the way it's been explained to me is they believe they have twenty years thirty years to convert the oil economy into a technology capital allocator economy and so they want to make ever green funds to invest the haven't had a chance to invest in venture capital because most venture capital there were that many

Starting point is 01:13:23 they were fully allocated and there was no opportunity now with what's happened in the United States and this pullback and sort of the cycle starting over again. I think there's an opportunity for them to invest in some funds and start relationships. And then, you know, we've had a long talk here about human rights in different countries and it's not a monolith over here. I mean, I don't know who needs to hear that exactly, but these countries are very different, very different. I'm sure they appreciate your lectures on that subject, Jacob.

Starting point is 01:13:49 Actually, you know what's interesting. We didn't have lectures on it, but we had, I've had multiple conversations about these issues. I enjoy your lectures on this pod. I don't lecture about it. I think these are important issues that people discuss. The serious thing is a number of these countries are majority young people and they are reforming very quickly. And rights are changing. So the question is for all of us and for the world

Starting point is 01:14:18 is do we collaborate and support as they become more liberal and become more tolerant. And they become more Western, basically. And young people, it's very Western here. And the parties going on here are pretty much like the parties I attended in L.A. or New York. And so I think actually, we're probably not as, at least UAE and a couple of countries here, are not as disparate asE and a couple of the countries here are not as disparate as like we what might think I'm glad you did the trip because I'm glad to hear you talking like that that there isn't an us versus them point of view and you know visiting and seeing the culture and the intention of the people within the culture. Super important and I think it's good that you did it so good to hear.

Starting point is 01:15:05 I wanted to share the video that these guys did but let's do it next week. I think it's good that you did it, so good to hear it. I wanted to share the video that these guys did, but let's do it next week. I think it's really, it's worth seeing. Oh, not the Valencia Auto one. No, the Lord of the Rings one that this guy did, which is amazing. Wait, what? This will Lord of the Rings video? No, not with us, not with us, Jake Kell.

Starting point is 01:15:17 Oh, I don't want to watch it. Okay, more but I want to watch that. Yeah, sure. Thank you, Elb. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm not sure. I want to watch the Valencia Aggra video for the third time. Did you see Elbude. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I want to watch the Balenciaga video for the third time. Did you see that?

Starting point is 01:15:28 Yeah. I took an outtake from the guy's video on Lord of the Rings. We'll put the link in the show notes, but this guy made this incredible AI-generated Wes Anderson does Lord of the Rings trailer. Oh, I did see that. Did you see that? That's pretty amazing. And the clip I'm using today as a background is an outtake from the trailer.

Starting point is 01:15:47 Did you see it, Sacks? I don't see the load of the rings. Oh my god, it's so funny. The guy is incredible. But I mean, the creativity and the potential with AI, it's just so evident this guy talks about it on his website and on his Twitter feed. He did it in a couple of days.

Starting point is 01:16:02 He learned a bunch of new AI tools. A lot of generative tools were integrated to make this possible. It's an amazing two-minute piece of art that I think really speaks to the creativity being unleashed with AI. Again, going back to this point about it, not just being about job reduction and reductionism, but it's really about unleashing new potential that we didn't envision before. Separately, there'll be another... I think we should talk about this next week, but there's really about unleashing new potential that we didn't envision before. Separately, there'll be another, I think we should talk about this next week, but there's now this kind of generative video game platform that's being demoed, where you can instruct

Starting point is 01:16:32 the video game intentions and it generates a immersive video game experience for you on the fly, with something we talked about a couple episodes, probably a couple months ago at this point. I had something on this week in startups who showed a video game where he made, you make 25 objects in the game It's really incredible in a certain style and then you say I want to make more characters like that

Starting point is 01:16:49 I want to make more backgrounds like that like you take a Wes Anderson style whatever and it just generates them for you And it just keeps generating them for you so One artist can make a palette For a game and you say I want to have a penguin in my game. I want to have a zombie in my game I don't want to have the yeah exactly right, yeah. And it just does it. And then people who are playing the game can say what they want with prompts and it creates it. And you can drive a storyline

Starting point is 01:17:11 and then you can integrate with other people's storylines. I mean, it's really powerful. Anyway, I gotta run. For David Friedberg, David Sack, and Chimap Poyhub here. Hi, I'm your boy, J. Cal. I love you boys. We'll see you all next time on The All in Pockets.

Starting point is 01:17:24 Bye-bye.K.L. I love you, boys. We'll see you all next time on The All In Pockets. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. We'll let your winners ride. Playing out with the greatest hits here on Z100, the Balenciaga video featured in The All In Cast with Camille's buy. Brian Armstrong, Keith Roboi, Andy Lombus.

Starting point is 01:17:41 Come and act. Balenciaga, Friday night, 8 o'clock, hardest ticket in New York. The greatest source of value and wealth creation in the 22nd century could be driven by terrestrial nucleosynthesis. Getting dressed is easy, owning the runway is hard. The big winners of tomorrow will likely be the Minecraft YouTubers of today. It's easier than ever to confuse popularity and truth. I think it is possible for ordinary people to choose to be balanceyaga. The mainstream media is the most ancient Emmets ever been. When I left Facebook, I left an enormous amount of equity on the table.

Starting point is 01:19:05 I thought, I don't want to be a slave to money. I want to be a slave to something bigger. Valenciaga.

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - E128: Google enters AI wars, Druck’s warning, Trump crushes CNN & more

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