All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Elon's Anthropic Deal, The Next AI Monopoly?, "FDA for AI" Panic, Trading the AI Boom
Episode Date: May 8, 2026(0:00) Bestie intros! Thoughts on the LA mayor election (4:38) SpaceX-Anthropic deal, Elon Web Services, SpaceX IPO valuation, Anthropic's insane growth trajectory (26:48) Is Anthropic the next great ...monopoly? Early signals or major overreaction? (35:21) "FDA for AI" freakout, how the White House thinks about AI safety (52:01) Flipping AI's negative perception: Giving, healthcare and education innovation (1:00:04) Trading the AI market, state of the economy Apply for Summit 2026: https://allin.com/events Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg https://x.com/altcap Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/2052413443739951366 https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2052073463029055926 https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/2052075296002625942 https://x.ai/news/anthropic-compute-partnership https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/nvidia-pultegroup-span-date-center-backyard https://www.gradesaver.com/there-will-be-blood/study-guide/a-brief-history-of-standard-oil https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/technology/trump-ai-models.html https://x.com/SusieWiles47/status/2052192419718783246 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/05/business/dealbook/trump-ai-regulation.html https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/03.20.26-National-Policy-Framework-for-Artificial-Intelligence-Legislative-Recommendations.pdf https://x.com/ahall_research/status/2052042535661691282 https://x.com/SenSanders/status/2052116733683470556
Transcript
Discussion (0)
How do I sound?
You sound perfect.
You sound great.
How do I look?
Yeah, he sounds great.
Better than you look.
The face made for radio.
You don't look as tired as you have in recent weeks.
That's true.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Somebody was slagging me for the bags and for my eyes.
I mean, this audience is brutal.
They're brutal.
They're brutal.
It's a good thing I'm rich.
Rain Man, David's out.
All right, everybody.
Welcome back.
The number one podcast in the world.
It's the All In Podcasts with us today.
Shemoth Polly Hopatia, David Sacks, and our fifth bestie, Mr. Brad Gersner, is here.
I think David Freeberg is suffering from some socialist-related flu.
He's very sick of reading about socialists.
But he'll be back next week with two incredible, incredible interviews.
You guys see those Spencer Pratt ads?
Wow.
It's one of the best political ads I've ever seen.
Oh, there's like three or four of them.
There are multiples.
Whoever that social media team is is on fire.
If you get a good social media team and you get a good ad production team, I think it's
next gen because these things go crazy.
And Spencer Pratt, if he wins this election, which I think he's going to in Los Angeles,
the reason is what Brad said.
Those ads are incredible.
Well, he's also quite a good debater.
Did you see clips from this debate?
Incredible.
He's so funny.
He's so chill.
Yeah, well, he's up against Karen Bass, who's the mayor, who,
is basically extremely left wing.
And then there's someone who's a city councilwoman
who's even further to the left of Karen Bass.
I mean, she's often like Fidel Castro territory.
She's an Indian Fidel Castro.
Raman.
So she was basically, I guess,
criticizing the mayor for the homelessness problem.
And then Pratt pointed out
that this councilwoman is actually in charge
of all these homeless programs already.
He eviscerated her.
He eviscerated her.
He destroyed her.
He destroyed.
made the key point, which is, look, the problem here is not lack of housing. It's an addiction
issue and it's a mental illness issue. And he said, look, if you...
He said if she went to the street, she gets stabbed in the death.
Yeah.
Which is pretty accurate if you've been to Skid Row. I mean, you would not want to walk through
there. It was like the Spider-Man photo. Wait, Nick's got the clip. Plays a clip.
Oh, God. This clip is brutal. This is a different clip, but this went super viral. It reminded me of
Trump a little bit. Let's see. I'm not sure how to respond to that vision of like
Angeles. This is a MAGA Republicans idea of what Los Angeles looks like. This is, this is really not.
Unbelievable. For those of you listening, he put his hands up and wiggled his stuff like, oh my God.
Hey, Sacks. You know, Stephen Pratt wins mayor. Spencer Pett. And then the, you know, the ballot
initiative, the retirement protection and savings act, right, it's going to pass, going to pass with big
numbers. This is the, you know, referendum that effectively is going to knock out the wealth.
tax, can you imagine if California effectively passes a constitutional amendment, protecting retirement
savings and personal assets, and banning the wealth tax and Prack gets elected, the message that
would send to the country? That's a very non-consensus view that I'm becoming increasingly optimistic
about. Well, from your lips to God's ears, but until that message actually is sent,
I think I'm going to be in Texas. In Texas.
Well, I mean, this is also in the face of, I don't know, just a follow-up story here, but
Mondami did like an attack video on Ken Griffin's house.
We talked about it on the pot a couple of weeks ago.
And like literally stood in front of his house, pointed at it.
And this is in the face of like a CEO getting shot for ideological reasons, Sam Altman's
house being targeted.
This is like a really dangerous thing for Mondami to do.
And Ken Griffin came out today or yesterday in an interview and said, hey, listen, I'm out.
We're going to be putting our efforts into Florida.
And this is the same thing that happened to Chicago.
And he basically said, like, I really felt offended.
And I was, you know, nervous about this because of my personal safety.
And he called him out.
Mondami came out with, like, a mealy-mouthed response that didn't even apologize for what he did.
Just double down on it, essentially.
All right, let's get to the dot.
I don't know if you guys saw it or not.
But who cares?
New York is becoming a flyover city.
it's interesting way to put it
don't disagree
all right first story
Elon just leased all of Colossus
won his data center
he did
nostricanus what
what
yes shocking
to Dario and Anthropic
Chimoth on last week's pod
go ahead and give yourself a pat on the back
you said Elon and Dario should do
a deal tomorrow it didn't happen
the next day it happened five days later
so you came close
Jamath
but no cigar because of
anthropics obvious compute
constraints
Anthropic
Just added, over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, over 300 megawatts of energy.
The deal is already having an impact, as we've discussed here.
Claude users have been experiencing rate limits.
Well, Claude has now doubled the Claude Code rate limits,
remove peak usage caps for paid users and increased API volumes for Opus models.
XAI is now trading their models at Colossus 2.
So they have more than enough compute.
Elon made a great bet on compute and built up those data.
said it was really fast, and that is now paying off. We had the cursor deal we talked about last week.
Let's talk about the emergence of Elon Web Services, EWS, Chumov. He's now in the hyperscalor
competing against Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services in Azure, and I don't know if you had
inside information or just a brilliant epiphany, but take us behind the call and what do you think
about the deal itself? I think the deal is fantastic. I'll say maybe three quick things.
The first is, as I mentioned a couple weeks ago,
Anthropic and Open AI's revenue performance has nothing to do with demand.
Zero.
It is entirely to do with the supply constraints that exist in data centers and specifically
in power.
If they had infinite power, I think that their revenues would probably be even more parabolic.
And so all the breathlessness about either exceeding or underperforming a forecast, in my opinion, mean nothing.
I think the five-year view for those two companies is quite robust.
The thing that they really need is more compute and more power.
That's the first thing.
The second thing is, while they need that, we have a very big problem, which is we unfortunately have very poor leadership.
at the head of most of these AI firms.
I think they are coming off as untrustworthy or too self-interested.
The political reaction now is starting to turn negative.
The community reaction is negative.
You have about nine gigawatts that are supposed to come online this year.
Almost 50% of it now is being protested.
more than likely if history holds, most of that will get turned off, so they will get even more
supply constraint.
So that's the setup.
So what's the opportunity?
I think for Elon, if you look inside of how people try to nitpick the SpaceX valuation case,
or let's be more generous, when people try to paint the bear case or they try to red team
the valuation, the biggest element is the on-the-come value around the orbital.
data centers. And by actually landing a bunch of terrestrial capacity, I think you start to blunt
that because you can now start to say that even if the orbital data centers get delayed by a few
months or a few quarters, even if the technological de-risking of it takes longer, he now has
a structural core business that will effectively subsidize his ability to train GROC, which I think
is a really important and underreported theme. So you have all this infrastructure. He somehow
saw the tea leaves before most people. He built to a level of scale and secure power before
most people. It has now become the critical asset. And now he's kind of kingmaking. And I think that
that's a really interesting valuation reinforcement as SpaceX goes through testing the waters and the
road show. Brad, your take. Yeah, no, I think it's well said. I mean, first,
we know that there's nobody better on planet Earth and Elon at converting electrons to tokens.
It's a critically important evolution to the story. I think our friend Sean McGuire, he sent out a
tweet that summed it up well. And he said SpaceX has his five-layer cake, launch, connectivity,
compute hyperscalor space data centers, and then applications and models, and then other bets,
right? The question on the roadshow has been, but X.com. A.I does, is,
isn't on the revenue trajectory of Open AI and Anthropic, and yet there are huge commitments.
And now we see the ACE card that Elon's playing. He said he was building AWS all along,
or EWS all along. And so I estimate that this is going to generate in this year an incremental
$4 to $5 billion of revenue on top of what I've seen analyst estimates in the mid-20s.
That's a material amount of incremental revenue to offset the cost of the investments that he's
made here, and that will subsidize, to Chama's point, all that he's investing to build the next
generation of Groch. Remember, too, that he has three facilities, Colossus, Macro Hard, and
macro Harder, 1.2 gigawatts in Macro Hard and Macro Harder in Blackwell. So he's given the one that's
kind of less connected. H-100's great for inference to Anthropic. He's monetizing it in a big way.
It's terrific for Anthropic. And it solves what I think was the
biggest question in the valuation story, which is, what if he spends ahead of X.aI's revenue?
It takes the pressure, Chimot, off X.D.A.I. delivering immediate revenue. Now he becomes an immediate
competitor in the hyperscale. I don't think this is the last announcement. I think he's going to make
a lot more, you know, moves in this direction. I think it will be a material part of their story
and their revenue projections as they come together. And I would just say, finally,
you know, again, everybody has talked about how we don't have enough power, how we don't have
enough compute, how the revenues would not show up this year, you know, but the chaos that is
American capitalism somehow finds a way, okay? And there's tremendous demand for Anthropic,
and we find a way I was so happy to see kind of the detente and the kind exchange between the
team of Anthropic and Elon, because we need all of this in order to produce American Frontier
models to stay at the frontier. And then finally, I'd just say, you know, Chimot, you referenced
these activists that are protesting, delaying these data centers in these localities. One thing I want
to dispel this, myth. This is not like organic, hyper-local protests by people in a community that
aren't being spurred on. This is highly organized activists that are moving across the country
to stir up trouble in the exact same way they did to stop all fission reactors being built 30 years ago
in America. Now we have no nuclear reactors being built. China's got a hundred of them. Who was funding
those activists? I think we need to really look into who's funding the activists now. I'm not saying
that there aren't any concerns, but the misinformation about water, the misinformation about electricity
bills. Electricity bills are going up in the places that are not building data centers,
New York and California, because they haven't built any supply on the grid. In Texas, where you're
building the most data centers in the country, electricity costs are going down. So I think that's a
boogeyman that we got to take on. Sacks, your thoughts. Well, look, the deal is highly complimentary,
as Jamatha and Brad pointed out. SpaceX has a profitable, I think very profitable space and
telecommunications, Starlink business, the satellite business. But the XAI business had huge
losses. The reason's pretty straightforward. You need these super large training clusters,
but they cost a lot of money. And until you have a model that's capable of competing at the
frontier, you're not making any revenue. And that problem is compounded by the fact that right
now, all the revenue is in enterprise, which is to say, coding, we know that XAI just did that deal
with cursor to try and catch up, but they don't have a coding product yet. So they're not participating
in the revenue, but they're participating in all of the cost. So this deal fixes that problem.
Elon's now able to have a frontier model company, but he's able to now not have these massive,
unpaid for CAPX commitments, right? Because he's able to kind of lease that capacity. So I think it solves
a major problem for them and their balance sheet. And then you have to say that for Anthropic,
this is a really great thing because they were a compute constraint. And just to build on that point,
I mean, I guess let me be the first to congratulate Dario on winning the AI race.
And you've been, let's be honest, Sacks, you have been, on this podcast, you've been moderately critical of that company and Dario himself for being, you know, a little P. Dumer 110.
And on your X account, you've been even a little spicier.
So now that there's peace in the Middle East of the AI business, what's your take here?
My take is, look, let's just honestly and accurately assess where the state of this AI market is at right now.
Anthropics place within it. So for the last three years, Anthropic has been growing at a rate of
10x a year. I think going into this year, probably the conventional wisdom was that there'd be no way
to sustain that kind of rate of growth at this level of scale. And what happened in the first
four months of the year? First, we find out that from January 1st to March 31st, they grew from
roughly 10 billion of ARR to 30 billion. So it tripled. And then in April, if anything, the rate of
increase seem to accelerate, they went from 30 to 44 billion of ARR. Nobody in Silicon Valley has
ever seen anything like it. Forget about the rest of the country. I mean, all we do in Silicon
Valley is deal with exponentials and still people have never seen that kind of growth at that level
of scale. The only thing holding them back in the future was compute. Now they've made this deal.
They've made other deals as well to get that compute. I think it's pretty much a foregone conclusion
that they will hit that forecast of 10x this year, exiting the year at call it,
roughly 100 billion of ARR. And now the only question is whether they hit a trillion in
2027. And we can debate whether that's...
We can debate whether that's true or not. But look, if they do that, I think they'll easily
be the most valuable tech company in history. In fact, they might even be more valuable
than the rest of the Mag 7 put together. Just to give people some basis for comparison here,
you know, the biggest tech companies, Apple...
Invidia, Google.
I think they kind of do around $400 to $500 billion a year right now of revenue.
I guess Nvidia is a little bit of a different category, but you look at Google.
The hyper scalers, the three hyperscalers.
Yeah.
I mean, Google is doing what, like $120 billion a quarter, something like that, $100 billion a quarter?
Correct.
But growing at what, 20% year over year?
Not 100%.
It's certainly not 1,000%.
So the fact that Anthropic could be on track.
In fact, let me correct that.
Do you see them going to the main?
It'll be a maggie.
I'm saying something else, which is that unless something about their current trajectory changes,
Anthropic will be the most powerful monopoly ever created in human history.
Again, it will be, you know, a trillion dollars of error growing at some exponential.
Interesting.
Dario calls it AGI.
I call it the biggest monopoly in human history.
Interesting to hear that word monopoly sacks.
Very interesting placement, Chama.
Go ahead.
And then we'll come around for.
Apple in 2025 was $420 billion.
Microsoft was $300 billion.
Alphabet was $390 billion.
Amazon, $700 billion.
Invidia, $190 billion.
Meta, $185 billion.
Tesla, $110 billion total.
About $2.3 to $2.35 trillion.
So if SACs is right and anthropic, you know, can tack on a trillion,
it won't be the Mag 7.
It'll be the Mag 1.
Just to put it in perspective, though, Dario and Dworkish said he thought the combined AI revenue of the market leaders would be about a trillion in 29.
I love what you're saying. Sacks, I think there is unlimited, Tam.
We may be over our skis a little bit in terms of, you know, the forecast.
If you back your way from compute, right, they expect to have five gigs by the end of this year, 10 gigs by the end of next year.
It's kind of hard to get to those numbers for a single company.
but I do believe that the trajectory that they're on,
I totally agree with you, is on an exponential,
that not many people believed in four months ago.
Right.
So then the question is, okay,
I think we all agree they're on an exponential curve
and that the TAM is big enough to support that.
Just one data point on TAM,
my understanding of the total market size,
just on coding, is one trillion,
meaning that a trillion dollars a year roughly
is spent on software developers
and all things related to the creation of software.
Now, I'm not saying that they eat that entire market,
but I can easily see the market for software doubling.
Well, hold on, doubling from a trillion to two trillion,
given that coding tokens basically 10xes or 100 Xs,
the value of that market and the ability to generate code.
So I think we all agree that the TAM here is large enough
to support a trillion dollars of revenue.
Brad, I think you bring up a couple of really important constraints.
first, there may not be enough compute and there's not enough energy.
I'd say the second big one is, what's the competitive reaction going to be?
Totally.
Because I would say at the beginning of this year, all these frontier labs were playing around
with a lot of different things.
I mean, Anthropic was the porcupine.
They believed in one thing.
All these other companies were kind of acting like the Fox who thinks are good at a lot
of different things.
They were doing nano banana.
They were doing Sora.
They were doing, you know, they were doing image generation.
They were doing fantasy character chatbots.
in hindsight, they were doing a lot of things that appear to be kind of a waste of time.
The whole market appears now to be coding and the things that we built on coding tokens,
like co-work, like agents.
And so there is going to be a competitive response here where all the other guys realized,
oh, wait a second, we were misfocused.
They're going to get focused.
I just don't know how much share they're going to be able to take.
It does look like OpenAI has already made the pivot.
We hear very good things about Codex now based on GPT 5.5.
5.5 is based on a new base model called SPUD. I think they're very optimistic about
continuing improvements. Their rate of growth appears to be accelerating now because of 5.5.
So look, there's reason to believe that Open AI can take some share here. I'm sure that Google
won't be asleep at the wheel. They're very, very good at coding. They've got a really good team,
and Elon just tied up with cursor. So there is going to be more competition, but still, what you have
to say, and I think all of us know this from Silicon Valley, is you always want to be the
company in the lead that's on that trajectory, where all you have to do is maintain inertia,
whereas the other people have to change something in order to put themselves back in the race.
So this is when I say somewhat sort of facetiously, congratulations Dario on winning the AI race.
I don't mean that he's won it, but he is winning it right now.
But here's the brilliance of what Elon's doing.
If you look at the existing business, which is Starlink and basically the launch services at SpaceX,
incredible business, obviously $20 billion this year, I think, is the estimate.
But if you look at the footprint of Amazon Web Services, Azure and GCP, you're looking at, you know,
$300 billion in revenue and a market cap of combined $5 trillion, $4 trillion, if these were independent companies.
And if you look at what is Elon's core competency at Tesla, it's building factories.
And if you look at the footprint of these factories, they're huge.
What are data centers?
They're basically big giant factories.
And then if you look at energy, what else is Elon extremely good at?
This is the battery deployment.
And he's also got solar deployment from the solar city, often criticized acquisition he did years ago.
So you put this all together.
If this is $5 billion, as I think you referenced, Brad, if it's $5 billion,
in incremental Elon Web Services business and he's a Neo Cloud.
What could he build on planet Earth?
What could he build inside of Tesla's in terms of extra compute?
What could he build inside the power wall?
What if the power walls had his new fabs in them?
And you built a distributed system from home to home.
The power wall has compute in it.
The cars have compute in it.
And of course, the ultimate manifestation of this where nobody can complain is you go right out
into space. And that's what he's going to do. And the sneaky small part of this announcement from
Elon and from Anthropic and Dario was they're also interested in space. So look for the race
to go from factories and data centers to homes. The power wall with compute in it. It's already
online, right? And Starlink also gives them the ability to do distributed compute to people's
homes. Again, you could be paying people to put power walls with compute in it. That's going to be the
next shoe to drop, I believe. Did you guys see the deal that was announced yesterday between Pulte
homes, which is a huge builder? They're doing it as well. Yeah. And span? Yes. Nick, just throw this up here.
It's super cool. What's happening is that these guys are putting many data centers with
Nvidia GPU clusters beside every home and then allowing people to actually run those things.
And that's just incredible. I thought that was so cool. It's a great. What this company did originally,
Chimoth was they did the power panel. They made smart power panels. So you know, when you flip your
breakers, all those breakers are in an app. I looked at it for my house. But I guess they pivoted to add
this. And I think base power, Brad, you're an investor in it. They're going to do the same thing.
Zach Dell is doing that. One of the things I just say in response, Jason, to what you just said about
Elon, right? This is why the SpaceX IPO is going to trade at 40 to 50 times revenue. Okay.
So next year, if they do 40 to 50 billion and this thing goes out at $2 trillion, right,
they're going to trade at a really high revenue multiple compared to the MAG5 that are trading at like 25 times earnings.
And there's only one person on the planet who has a future pipeline of innovation and the largest Tam in the world because he's playing in all these different spaces that can command that multiple and it's Elon and it's deserved and it's great for the country.
that same Tesla has that same Elon variable in it as well, which is people value his
companies at, I would say, two times market, three times market, four times market, because
of the future pipeline.
And they devalue Apple because they don't have somebody like Elon or Steve Jobs there who
is giving them the future.
I don't think it's devalued.
Or properly valued if you don't have an Elon and you have somebody like, I think that's
exactly what it is.
We talked about this last week, but explain why you think it's different.
I think all of these companies are actually very fairly valued.
and then Elon World gets a premium.
And that premium is because of what you guys said.
That I agree with.
The big message that I take away from this, which the markets and retail are telling you is,
you guys have stopped innovating.
There's a lot of incrementalism.
And we as a society aren't benefiting broadly the way that you told us we would be.
And so maybe this is the best way for them to get this message,
which is to whack their valuation.
And by the way, I'll just say it again,
when Tesla and SpaceX merge,
and we have all things Elon and Elon Corp,
which will happen,
probably by the end of the year,
maybe it'll happen in the middle of next year.
It's going to then break everybody's brains again
because you'll have this one asset,
as you guys said,
that will trade at a valuation premium,
and some people will say it's unexplainable.
And I think it's logically explainable,
which is everybody else has stopped
innovating. People know how to draw more blood from the stone, how to target better ads. That does
nothing for society. Yeah, that's literally... In fact, it does the opposite. There is no good left.
That was literally the exact point I was making when you cut me off. If you look, Tim Cook's greatest
innovation, Tim Cook's greatest innovation, before you cut me off, was Apple TV, not even the hardware
product. It was just spending money and making a Netflix knockoff. There's been no other product in... Hold on.
finish again before you interrupt me making my
point of that? Oh, you don't like that? Oh, no. Oh, yeah.
Well, okay. Okay. Go back to tomorrow.
On meat kettle. If you look at their track
record, and I think this is why we had
a change there is, they have not done anything innovative. And in fact,
the things they were doing that were innovating in AI or
self-driving cars, they shut down. They won't take any swing
through the bat. So they are getting penalized in their
evaluation. They're not getting penalized. They're just not
getting a premium. They're not getting penalized. I think they're getting
penalized. By every metric,
they're trading at incredible valuations. Just look at them. Oh, no. I don't, I mean, if you compare
the two valuations, I think they're being penalized. Anyway, let's, anybody else want to get in on this
before we move on to the next one? Yeah. There is the world in which Google and meta and Apple and
Amazon could be viewed as being penalized in valuation. There is very clearly a world where
Elon gets a massive premium because he's innovating. You're saying the same things. You're saying
I think we're saying the same thing.
It's not the same thing.
Listen, I think we're debating semantics here.
I'm not letting you off the hook, Saxie Poo.
When Sachs is very deliberate in how he speaks,
they said he's the captain of the debate club
in his 20,000-word article this week,
and that is a master debater.
He's a master abater.
And you slipped in, you slipped it in.
Are you saying that the FTC or whoever should be going in
and looking at anthropical?
Oh, Brad's book is getting attacked,
headwinds. You said they're a monopoly or they're heading to monopoly.
Tactics, sacks. Are that what you're saying?
Well, look, I mean, we know that tech markets have a history of consolidating down and
turning into either monopolies or duopolis. And if you just look at the revenue right now,
there's only two companies making substantial revenue on AI. It's anthropic and open AI.
We know that open AI is growing at three to four X, which is incredible at the level of scale
they're at. Anthropic, though, we said is growing at an exponential 10x a year. And if they just do that
for 18 more months, they'll be by far the most valuable company in human history, and they'll have
unprecedented control over the most important technology of our time. So I don't know what you
call that, but it is something to think about. And I guess I do have a thought experiment for you
guys, which is, I just want you to think for a second about the case of John D. Rockefeller,
who I think is known as probably the most successful, most ruthless monopolist in American history.
But he wasn't very good at PR. He was terrible at PR. Everyone sort of recognized how ruthless
he is. We see movies like, there will be blood, which is basically about him. In any event,
imagine if John D. Rockefeller was way better at public relations.
And instead of calling his company's standard oil, he called it safe oil.
Okay, let's just play the thought experiment.
Clean beautiful coal.
Yes.
Safe oil.
You call it safe oil because, as we know, kerosene is dangerous.
Their first big product was kerosene.
And kerosene can light your house or it can burn it down.
And in the wrong hands, it can torch a city or you can use it to make a bomb.
So John D, let's say, should have called for the creation of a new government agency to regulate the safety of his product.
And they could have done rigorous testing, licensing, common sense regulation.
There would have been a very intense debate over safety standards.
You know, what should the proper wick thickness be?
And should we allow all those dangerous, independent refiners, right?
And I think people would have gotten so wrapped up in this debate over what constituted safety.
oil or safe kerosene that they would have missed what was really going on, which is that
Rockefeller was building the richest, most powerful monopoly of all time. In fact, people might even
have called Rockefeller an effective altruist because, of course, he was so concerned about the safety
of his product. I love it. Shout out to David Sachs's writers. Great, great, great writers. Newman,
Newman wrote this? No, I wrote it. The Emmy Award for Best Writing and a dramatic monologue goes to
Newman, wow, sacks. No, that's my writing. You landed it. Very good sacks. I thought after the Elon
Anthropic detente, where Elon said, you know, complimented Anthropic, and David started off
with a bit of a compliment. I thought we maybe were passes. First, it's ridiculous to think of this
as a monopoly. You know, we're talking about annual run rate revenues, David, but on a gap basis,
they're doing about the same revenue as Open AI in the month of March. Okay. So, we're way
ahead of ourselves. By the way, five months ago, everybody thought Open AI was going to run away with
this. Google's revenues are very substantial in AI. And by the way, Google, Amazon, et cetera,
these companies are producing $100 billion of free cash flow to justify their incremental investment.
At the same time, you have these two startups that are still fledgling, that are still fragile
in the scheme of things. You of all people should know, we've got the best competition in AI on the
planet, which is why we're at the frontier and kicking the tail of everybody else on the planet.
So I just want to see these companies compete. I want to see D.C. stay out of the way. The last thing
I want to be doing is, you know, seeing people talk about this and throwing roadblocks into the way
of the competition. All right. I agree. Well, let me, hold on. Let me translate Brad for you.
Don't fuck with my paper is what he's saying. He's got bets on these. So Sacks, Washington, D.C.,
don't fuck with Brad's paper. Sacks. You want to? You want to.
to get into the regulation stuff right now as a segue?
Let me respond to Brad and also translate what I'm saying satirically.
Okay.
So first of all, nobody wants to see these companies compete vigorously more than me.
That was the whole premise of the action plan that we worked on last year is we want to
bring out the best in everyone.
This is how America is going to win the AI race.
We have five major labs vigorously competing.
And as long as that competition is taking place, that I think that's a good thing.
It doesn't mean we can't have guardrails and the rest of it.
But basically, competition should be our North Star.
All of that being said, okay, what I am pointing out, and I think it's historically true,
that people in Washington have woken up to monopolies on the late side, not early, right?
Because, I mean, once a company has won 80% on the market, that's when they wake up and say,
oh, we have a monopoly here.
And I'm not saying that they have a monopoly yet, but if the trajectory continues for just
18 more months, then I think it will be in this unprecedentedly powerful position.
And hold on, and I don't think people should be distracted from that fact by this rhetoric
around safety because someone like Rockefeller could have used it too.
And I do think, I mean, just like one last point on this, I do think that if you actually
look at what a lot of the safetyist policies are calling for, they're basically calling for a form
of regulatory capture. And they're calling for things that would create a stronger moat around this
monopoly or duopoly that's in the process of being created. And it would get in the way of competition.
So again, I think that people might not have such a charitable view of all this safety rhetoric
if they understood that what was being created here is the biggest monopoly in human history.
And I think we should just be a little bit more skeptical about some of these altruistic claims.
I can't believe that David is like, you know, talking monopolies when we haven't even left the starting gate of AI.
I think this is a, to me.
There's only two companies with revenue.
The last thing I want is DC trying to preemptively.
preemptively, which would be like a disastrous consequence, get in the game of picking winners
and losers at the starting line of AI. That would be a disaster.
Brad, did you just put another soapbox on top of the soapbox you were standing on?
Look, Brad, like I said, my North Star is competition. As long as there's competition going on,
I support it. However, hold on, hold on. We know that monopolists want to stop competition.
And they use regulatory capture to do it. And furthermore, they do things like,
ban their competitors from using their product?
What conceivable reason did Anthropic have for banning OpenClaw using its models?
That is anti-competitive.
Is it not?
I would double-click on it.
I would double-click on it.
I might not file, but I would double-click.
Okay, listen, Chamoth, the girls are fighting.
Let's keep moving through the docket.
We're going to be here all day with these two.
And one thing that you're going to need to act on very quickly is the All-In Summit.
It's selling out fast.
Don't miss it.
Speakers are top tier again.
Freeburg, busy working on some amazing speakers. Sax will be there. He's flying in and out every
day for four hours. And then we're going to have a lot of networking stuff going down. We're building
some networking software. So when you come to our events, you get to meet people. That's what we always
say. My playbook for events. If you learn something from the speakers every day, one or two things,
if you meet somebody new and you eat some great food and have some fun, you get two or three
of those things. Man, even if you get one, you're going to come back to the event. You're going to get all three,
all day long, all-in.com slash events, Los Angeles, September 13th, 14th, and 15th. Apologies to everybody
asking, but liquidity is sold out, and we've shut down the wait list. There's just no more room.
All right, the White House allegedly, possibly, is considering, according to reports, an FDA for
AI, that would vet. You heard that correct, folks, that would vet new models for safety.
The thing we've been talking about not doing here, the thing David Sachs, I spent the last
year on, the White House is considering New York Times reported Trump is considering an executive order
to create an, quote, AI working group. This group would include tech execs and government officials
who would, quote, examine potential oversight procedures, including, quote, a review process
for new AI models. Oi, according to the report, the catalyst was, wait for it, Anthropics,
mythos model, which reportedly scared, spooked, made people really nervous.
at the White House. Quote, the White House wants to avoid any political repercussions if a devastating
AI-enabled cyber attack were to occur. They want to C-YA, according to the New York Times.
Kevin Hassett, that guy, the director of the National Economic Council, confirmed the report
on Fox Business. Here's your 15-second clip.
We're studying possibly an executive order to give a clear roadmap to everybody about how this is
going to go and how future AIs that also potentially create vulnerability.
abilities should go through a process so that, you know, they're released at the wild after they've
been proven safe, just like an FDA drug. Additionally, friend of the pod, Scott Besson, had something
to say. What we've had in the past month was a step change in the power of one large language model,
but we're going to see it from the other AI companies. What we are determined to do is work with
our AI companies to allow them to continue innovate, but our charge of the U.S. government is
maintaining safety. And there is a very important calculus here between innovation and safety.
And at the U.S. government, we're going to make sure that things stay safe.
There you go. Kevin Hassett and Besant. Slightly different positions here, Brad. What do you think?
Actually, I don't think they're slightly different positions, but I would agree that Kevin
bringing up the FDA kind of muddied the water.
I talked to Kevin last night after that clip ran, you know, and I asked him. I just said, do you think
FDA is the right analog here? And he said, you know, I was only bringing it up to say that we want
them to show us the models so that we can coordinate them. Obviously, our job is to make sure
that the government is prepared, that we harden our systems, that our intelligence agencies are up to
speed. But he does not think, and I can't find anybody on the right, you know, that believes that we're going
to move to an approval regime, right? The approval regime, this idea that you're going to have to
share every model with an FDA in Washington and they're going to have to pre-approve the model is a
disaster. Sacks has been effectively fighting against this correctly over the course of the last year.
It would just, it would lead to three bad things. Number one, we do not want to put the
Washington in the position of picking winners and losers when it comes to these models.
We're winning. We're on the winning horse in America. We're out in front of the rest of the
world. There's no reason to change horses and regimes at this point. And we don't want to burden this
with more democracy. But at the same time, obviously, I call these pre-AGI or AGI models, Mistral,
spud, et cetera. I see a lot of coordination going on between the industry and government.
I think we can do an even better job of evolving that framework so that everybody in government
is on the same page. We need to build more capacity in government to quickly be able to do the
cyber review on these models. Right now it takes too long.
when the coordination does occur. So we need to have a finite amount of time that they get
government feedback, et cetera. But the last thing that we want is an FDA of models sitting in Washington.
Kevin understands that. Scott Besson understands that. So I expect that we will continue down the
path that we've been on. Chumath, obviously, I think we all agree. We don't need an FDA for AI.
But there are things that reasonably people would want to have guardrails around AI.
I'm sure you would agree.
It shouldn't be a total free-for-all.
So what's your take on this?
Is it just somebody gave a bad analogy here?
Or maybe some people were weaseling their way into the White House to try to shift things when Sacks was back at home or something?
What's going on here?
Give us the – because that's what people say.
They say the last person to talk to Trump kind of has his ear and that things can bend a certain way.
I don't think it's a – I think that there's a pretty profound vibe shift with respect to tax.
tech, tech oligarchs, Silicon Valley, and particularly the AI. That vibe shift has already happened on Main Street. And I think that that's starting to seep into Washington. I think that regulations are coming. I think they'll be worse under a Democratic regime. But I think that some form of oversight is going to exist under a Republican regime. The question that I think is worth asking is why. And if you listen to everybody,
it's tone. It's all around the negatives of AI. So I think we suffer from two things. Number one is we
have horrible messaging. Nobody spends the time and the money to articulate the positive upside
case so that there is broad-based support. And two, the idea that there's going to be, as
Sacks said earlier, a few winners and many, many, many potential losers, I think is really
disconcerting to everybody. And the response from the tech community, again, should be the
leadership of the tech world coming together and actually reinvesting in America writ large.
They're not doing that in enough of a scale that blunts this. So what you're seeing is the
buildup of antibodies. Is it avoidable? Yes.
are we doing a good job of avoiding it? Absolutely not. We're doing a horrible job. I'd give the
community, the tech leaders a D-minus trending to an F. The response is what we're seeing. So I think
the question, Jason, isn't regulation, no regulation. It's why did we get here? And I think we got here
because the other version, the glass-half-full version, the demonstrated investment, the broad-based
uplifting of American society hasn't happened. And if it has, it's been very poorly communicated.
And so the response is, hey, hold on, we're going to give three guys, trillion dollar net worths,
and we're going to allow them to control the keys. That's why this is happening.
Exactly correct. And it's very easy, sacks, to imagine all the bad things that can happen.
Our minds are constructed to do that. We're vigilant. We look out for the tiger or, you know,
the tornado to keep ourselves safe, humans have a bias towards safety, and they're going to think
about, you know, deep fakes, they're going to think about robotics, they're going to think about
self-driving cars, taking people's jobs, they're going to think about, you know, all the dark things
that could happen, bio-weapons, et cetera, and we don't have anybody out there really talking about
all the positives that could happen. What's your take on the palace intrigue we all have here?
What's going on in the palace, in the 47th administration, around this debate?
Who is leading Trump down the path of regulation and creating this AI FDA?
We know you're part of the camp that wants to keep this train moving and not overregulated,
not have regulatory capture.
Who are the people trying to slow this down?
Well, look, I think there's several things going on here.
The first one is there's a lot of fake news.
This whole idea of an FDA for AI, I don't think any.
senior officials supports it, just like Brad was saying, I spoke to Hassett as well. That's not where
his head is at. So I don't think anybody in the administration is saying they want an FDA for AI.
Certainly, I don't think that's the way the president thinks about these issues. He's the most
pro-innovation president we've ever had. And the White House chief of staff, Susie Wallace just
put out a statement last night that I think pretty much shoots this down. So I think there's a big
fake news component. Remember, it was not really the White House who was saying it was the New York Times.
And really, I think actually Andrew Ross Sorkin, I'm not criticizing him, but he's a commentator.
And he's the one who said this first.
And then somehow that spin or that gloss somehow took on a life of its own.
And I think Silicon Valley reacted.
Accordingly, there's a very visceral negative reaction here because we know how damaging that would be to innovation.
But look, I think the good news is that that was fake news.
Second, I think that there's another thing going on, which is,
a straw manning of what the Trump administration did on AI in its first year. And in the same way that
they want to spin this FDA for AI, they're also trying to spin what we did as this completely
laissez-faire attitude where there be no regulations whatsoever, nor guardrails. It's a way of
criticizing what we did. They're trying to portray it as unsafe. In fact, if you look, on March 20th,
the White House release, a national AI regulatory framework that I work.
worked on in which we put out a four-page bulleted list of legislation that we would support
if Congress wants to pass it. So we have not been against every conceivable regulation or
every conceivable law. We just believe that there should be specific solutions to specific
problems, as opposed to a giant power grab by Washington that would squash innovation. So I think
that's point number two. Point number three is there is a legitimate
thing happening here with, let's call it mythos or cyber.
We know that it's not just mythos.
Open AI now is a model that's just as cyber capable as mythos.
And within three to six months, all the major frontier labs and including Chinese models
will have cyber capabilities.
In response to that, we do need there to be a hardening of systems, and we do need there to be
a scanning of codebases to find these vulnerabilities.
and patch them before the hackers do it.
Because the hackers will have these capabilities in a matter of months.
That's a certainty.
Because the same capabilities you use for cyber defense can also be used for cyber offense.
It's the same tool set.
And the open source models will have these capabilities.
Anyway, they already have it to a certain extent.
Let's be honest.
They have 80% of it.
So look, it's simply the case that AI will be good at cyber.
And so we do need a response to that.
Now, my view on what should that response be should be, first of all, we should want the government and the private sector to work cooperatively. And I think they are. We have a giant cybersecurity industry in the United States whose sole job it is to protect systems and protect against breaches.
We have the best companies in the world at doing that. We have CrowdStrike. We have Palo Alto networks. We talked about that before. We have the best defense.
Right. Exactly. And so.
what we should be doing, I think, is getting these tools, mythos, and then the open AI model and
others like it in the hands of our cybersecurity industry. And by the way, not just the public
companies like Palo Alto networks and crowd strike, although certainly they're two of the most
noteworthy, but there's also some incredibly strong startups on the way up that are the
that are the cutting edge of doing AI powered pen testing and all the rest of it. We need to get
these tools into their hands as quickly as possible because they're a force multiplier
For all the companies out there that aren't that good at cybersecurity or maybe they've got IT departments, they can use these companies as vendors.
So I think that there is a role for us to play.
Do you think that the models should have a KYC wrapper going forward?
KYC for the audience is know you're a customer.
Yeah.
So really what it would mean is that identity.
Before you can use mythos, you have to identify yourself so that we can try to know that you're not a state.
sponsored actor or, you know, a bad guy.
I think that's the type of thing that we should be thinking about.
So first of all, I want to say that both Anthropic and Open AI acted responsibly here.
No one was trying to release these super powerful models.
So in a way, all the people who are saying that we need pre-release approvals for models,
they're trying to solve a problem that didn't exist.
They self-regulated.
Yeah, which is the ideal situation.
Open AI wasn't trying to release this.
They all understood the power and they were all acting responsibly.
They understood the ramifications acts.
would have been sued. So there is a self-policing going on here, which is the ultimate way to do this.
Yes. But to your point, Chamath, yeah, look, I think that before giving your API for a super
powerful model, you should not give that to a company or an actor, you don't know who they are.
So yeah, some basic KYC makes sense. They should know who we were giving these tools to.
And I guess my view on the Mythos preview and whatever the equivalent is of what OpenAI is doing,
is that we very rapidly need to get these tools into the hands.
of more good guys, you need to know who those good guys are. You need to know who they are.
So, yeah, KYC is like a predicate for that, right? And just to be clear, we'd all agree that
if you did have identity for those frontier models, which they're probably doing anyway right now,
and you logged what people were doing with them to look for security breaches, that wouldn't
necessarily happen when you released it to the public because of privacy issues. Here's your
polymarket for Trump ordering a federal review of AI models by May 31st.
21% chance, I think to our partner at Polymarket, man, I got to get in here.
Do I have inside information here being the world's greatest moderator on this podcast?
Or can I collect this money, Chimov?
What am I going to do here?
I would not.
Do not place a bet, Jekal.
Don't place a bet.
Don't place a bet.
Don't place a bet.
To Chmah's point, I mean, look, I think we're kind of workshopping this in real time.
We are.
I think that for the preview period, we should definitely have K-Y-C.
What about logging?
What about logging?
Well, look, once you're past the preview period,
period, and it's in general release. I'm not sure if the KYC matters as much because so many people
are going to have it. But during the preview period, there should be KYC. Let me just say one thing.
All the labs are already tracking API use, okay? And anything suspicious, because they're,
there are major anti-distillation efforts going on by all the labs. There's a ton of coordination going on
with the government. There's way more happening, I think, in terms about API and API use.
and anything suspicious is being flagged and being shared with the government.
So the idea that we have no idea who's doing it, I think is not the case.
And in fact, in some cases, we may want to allow people to use it so that we can see exactly
the types of things that they are extracting.
So I would just, I would say we're already down that path, but better coordination
may in fact be called for.
Yeah.
And just one last point in this whole thing is I just want to build on my point that free release
approvals of solving a problem that didn't really exist because, again,
anthropic and open AI weren't trying to release these models yet,
is that there is a substantial faction of, let's say, AI ideologues or Dumers who are basically
employing the classic never let a crisis go to waste strategy, right?
That, yes, we do have this cyber issue.
That is real.
You know, everyone needs to harden their systems now over the next three to six months.
That is a real issue.
But that is a problem that we will solve.
over the next six months, we have to. But what they're trying to do is use that issue to try
and create a permanent new infrastructure in Washington. Again, I don't think that's not the administration's
intention. That's not the administration's agenda. But you saw a lot of people on social media,
a lot of the think tanks, and even Bernie Sanders weighed in. And he said, for the first time,
I like something that the Trump administration wants to do. The administration understands the 1% of the 1%
the sacks and everybody understand that this is out of control.
The AI is going to take the jobs.
They're going to take my summer home.
It's going to be terrible.
So there are people who have this agenda.
Look, Bernie Sanders just wants to stop the progress.
I mean, he's, he wants to ban data centers.
He's put out a bunch of,
he basically is bought into the whole Dumer narrative.
So look, that's why he likes the FDA idea is because it would put the cabosh on innovation.
It's enough already.
Let's go back to paper and pen.
It was a better society,
Jason, what do you think?
I think there's two really interesting things I want to build on here.
The first is your point, Chimov, around how do we turn around the sort of bad vibes around AI?
I think we have to have two strategies here.
One is giving what you've been working on, Brad, with your project.
We should see more people giving.
There's no reason why Nvidia, SpaceX, when they go public, Anthropic, when they go public,
open AI if and when they go public or if they stay as nonprofit. There's no reason those folks in an
IPO couldn't give a portion of the IPO to every American citizen. So IPOK, IPO for kids,
they all take, you know, whatever it is, 5%, 1%, whatever they choose, and they put it into the Invest
America accounts. And we should see some major giving from the people who are becoming
trillionaires, 100 billionaires, whatever it happens to be. There's no reason not to. But those
people haven't been doing that. We had this giving pledge, which was a little bit of virtue signaling,
and it wasn't real. It was just, you know, at the end of your life, you promise to give away
half your money. So let's have something real. Let's have something where, you know, people say,
I'm going to give away 1% of my stock over the next 20 years of my life. Every year, 1% will go
into Invest America, whatever it is. It won't cost anybody anything. You can't spend this money,
whether it's Bezos or whoever. Second, in that same thing in terms of giving back,
We have not talked about how massive this could be for health and extending people's life and reducing
suffering.
We need to work on that.
That's where contributions to basic science could come in and obviously education and lowering
the cost of education.
And if you look at what Americans on the bottom have, you were talking about the cup half
empty, there's really two or three things they really feel anxiety about.
One of it is income.
And the second is health care.
and on the margins, housing and their kids, you know, their kids' education and the cost of those things,
we should really take a look deeply at, and I know this is very unpopular amongst capitalists,
including myself, we should really look at the minimum wage and study what happened in New Zealand,
Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, when they raised it, what actually happened when they raised it
and there was a lot of hand-wringing about it, but when they slowly raised it, what they found
was those consumers don't save money, they spend it, they're always behind the eight-ball
in terms of their spending.
we should opt in to trying to raise the minimum wage company by company by company and just give
people who are at the end of the spectrum that understanding that, hey, year over year, whether it's
Amazon or Target, et cetera, restaurants, we're all collectively going to add a little bit to that
minimum wage and try to lift the bottom third of society. That's the stuff we're not talking about.
We don't talk about it here on this podcast. We don't talk about universal health care.
We don't talk about the minimum wage. But that's what capitalists should be talking.
about. And if we did that, if we increased the minimum wage, and I'm not a socialist, I'm a capitalist
who think this is good for capitalism. If we increase the minimum wage just modestly each year,
and we opted into doing that, and we figured out a way to give universal health care,
companies wouldn't have to deal with universal health care, and we would have customers,
and we're a customer-driven economy. Like 60, 70, 80 percent of what happens in this country
is driven by the consumer. We need consumer spending. It's great for companies if we had more
people being able to buy Netflix or order shit on Amazon.
Anyway, that's my that's my Ted talk.
Thanks for coming.
How do we get from AI to the minimum wage?
I'm still a little bit confused.
No, the black eye we have in this country with polarization of wealth and people scared
of losing their jobs.
We should look at why are they scared, David.
And I've talked to you privately and you said to me privately, you can strike this if you
want, but you said to me privately, you wouldn't be against necessarily figuring out a way
to do universal health care if there was a way to do.
it. You want to see every human have health care, yes?
Sure. I mean, the issue is not the desirability of it. It's the cost.
Right. So you're a great entrepreneur of our time. How would you do it? Have you given
any cycles to it? I haven't studied that issue. So I don't know. I just know that. How about you
study it? The countries, I remember what PJ O'Rourke once said, which is if you think health care is
expensive now, just wait until you make it free. Yeah. So you take away all the incentives and you have an even
a bigger problem. What do you think of minimum wage? Yeah, man. Well, let me just,
please get back to AI. Listen, you guys are right about the unpopularity of AI. We've all seen
those polls, but I want to just put up this additional poll that came out about the salience
of this issue, which is how important do people think it is? And AI ranked 29 out of 39.
So although AI is not very popular, it is certainly not top of mind for voters. It's not in the
top 10 issues. It's not in the top 20 issues. What is top of mind for voters? Number one,
One, cost of living, number two, the economy.
And we know that AI is deflationary.
It helps with the cost of living.
And it's creating an economic boom right now.
Okay?
It's 75% of GDP growth in Q1.
By the way, that economic growth is not just limited to startups in Silicon Valley.
We're seeing a construction boom.
We're seeing a blue collar boom.
We're seeing 25 to 30% wage increases for construction workers.
And so on down the line.
And Brad, if you look at that chart,
There's health care in there too.
So look, my point is that AI may not be popular, but the effects of it actually are popular
if the media would honestly report what was happening, which is AI is creating an economic boom
right now.
It couldn't be better said, David.
You know, Bernie Sanders calling for a moratorium shutting out all data centers.
We'd have negative GDP growth this year.
The stock market would be down 15 to 20 percent.
Unemployment would be on the rise.
You know, there is a consequence to the government control.
controlling through command of control the economy. In 1929, we had 4% unemployment. Three years later,
it was unemployment was 23% because government got involved in regulating everything and shutting
down, you know, what was working. That is the greatest threat we have here. AI is delivering
huge net benefits today in terms of unemployment rate, in terms of economic growth and productivity
growth. We need to tell the story. But to Chmast's earlier point, we also need to deliver
net benefits. Jason, thanks for the shout-out. Yes, every American having an investment account that
compounds with the upside of AI, we're going to do that, going to deliver that, and that's going to be
massive. But I also think ideas like, if we're going to put a data center in Abilene, Texas,
let's make electricity in Abilene, free for the households in Abilene, Texas, right? There are
ideas that can deliver net benefits. We've got to deliver those. I think optimism will be on the
march. I think we're in the trough right now. What's your take on minimum wage and universal
health care, Brad. How do you think about it as a capitalist, as an innovator, and in the face of
AI, which could have a dramatic impact on these issues? You know, like Sacks, I, you know, to me,
I haven't spent a ton of time thinking about those, except that as a society, we're $38 trillion
in debt. We haven't been able to afford to deliver those things. I generally think the market
works out those issues better than the government top down, trying to, you know, the government gets
more and more involved in health care and the only thing that happens, it gets more expensive. So we've all
seen the charts of the most expensive categories where we've had inflation, education, healthcare,
etc. It's where the government's involved. I actually think if you just let the markets work,
we're entering into an age of abundance. A lot of these problems are going to be solved. People are
going to have a lot of AI coaches in healthcare and education, etc. Let the market work. Government
stay at bay. Keep things safe. We're on a good march. I think this proves my point perfectly. If you'd
talk to any founder. They're not thinking about housing. They're not thinking about higher education
costs. They're not thinking about minimum wage. And they're not thinking about health care all that often.
Some do, though. There's some innovation there. And it's because it's so regulated that entrepreneurs
and VCs are just like, that's kryptonite. The government has poisoned the well. We can't
participate in that. And that's the roadblock. And that's where Americans are suffering.
And that's where it would be great if founders actually put their minds to it. And the government's
got to get rid of all that regulation and let us cook in those specific
verticals. All right, the market is in hyperdrive. Hyper-scaler revenue has made the markets move up.
We hit on this briefly, but we didn't have you here. Fifth Best E BG, cloud computing, on a tear.
I referenced it earlier, but AWS is now on a $150 billion run rate. Azure, $108 billion,
GCP, Google Cloud, 80 billion. There's a little bit of fun with numbers there because Azure and Microsoft
include some of their software products in there, and Google Cloud includes things like Google Office or Google
suite in there. But the growth numbers are tremendous. AWS, which is the more pure play of the
three, 28% growth on a very big number. Azure 39% Google Cloud, stunning everybody with 63% growth.
It is incredible what the ARR numbers are. Google Cloud Edit 10, AWS 10, Azure 9.5, so basically
30 billion collectively. Jammin Ball, who works for you, I think put out some data on the
Twitter, Brad, markets at all-time highs, Mag 7, cooking, Uber blowing out growth, Disney blowing
out growth. The consumer seems absurdly strong based on those two bellwethers. Tech seems extremely
strong based on the cloud computing. What's your take on the overall market and overall economy?
Obviously, inflation up a bit, people hand-wringing about the never-ending war and the cost of oil.
Let's just telescope way up.
You know, the level of criticism directed to this administration, right, tariffs were going to cause hyperinflation, we're going to destroy GDP, conflicts in Venezuela and Iran were going to do the same.
You know, we've heard all of the negative stories.
But what's happening?
Accelerating GDP.
A tenure that's sitting at 4-3.
Inflation totally under control.
AI, AI, AI, compute, compute, we're leading the world.
it's contributing massively, right, to GDP growth in the country.
We see the S&P only up 8% this year, right?
So we're not in bubble territory here.
Meta's trading at 17 times fully tax gap earnings,
Nvidia at 19 times, Microsoft at 20 times,
Google at 24 times.
And then the memory stocks that everybody's excited about,
we have 25% of our portfolio in, S.K. Hynix,
five times fully tax gap earnings,
Samsung six times, micron, seven times, right? This is not the stuff that bubbles are made up.
You know, David referenced it earlier. We started the year OpenAI and Anthropic. We're doing
combined about 30 billion in revenue. Now combined four months later, 80 billion in revenue.
The policies of this administration on the economy are working. They're working in spades.
Our gap on the rest of the world in AI is growing. And so from my perspective,
you know, we've been all in on the market.
I talked about it earlier in the year.
We're heavily tilted by it.
When did you make that switch to go all in on the market?
Because you were bearish.
I would say toward the end of last year, the market had run up a lot.
We had a lot of these questions.
Listen, entering this year, there was a huge question hanging over the market.
Would the AI revenue show up?
If the anthropic revenues hadn't shown up and we didn't see this reacceleration out of the hyperscalers,
the market would be down 10 to 15% because people would say there's no ROI on all of this investment
in infrastructure. Exactly. When I saw the numbers start showing up in December and into January,
we went from medium to large in terms of our exposures and 80% of our exposures or more have been
in compute, AI, memory, et cetera. And this is why it's great to operate in the private market and
the public market, because you can see things in the private markets that inform the public
markets. But the question remains, Brad, how much better would the economy have been doing,
you know, as much credit as you're giving to the administration if they didn't start a hundred
billion dollar war that we did not need to go into, according to all reports? And if we didn't do
a bunch of tariffs, that wound up being unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, which Trump himself
put in. We would have been further ahead. That's my take on it. We would be ripping even more
if we didn't have those silly diversions.
It's hard to imagine, okay, just to set up again here.
It's hard to imagine a more Goldilocks situation for the United States of America.
We have reset the table geopolitically.
The discount rate globally is actually coming down, not going up evidence by markets
at all time high and the bond market in control.
And then look at the private markets.
We have multiple trillion dollar companies that have been created in the private markets
that are now coming public, SpaceX coming public is going to be a multi-trillion dollar,
you know, open-a-eye anthropics.
At some point, you just have to acknowledge, USA is winning.
Of course, there are always things that we could be doing better, but there's not a country
on the world that wouldn't trade all of its fortune for the United States fortune today.
100% in agreement, American exceptionalism, as embodied by the great companies in America,
SpaceX, Google, et cetera, all the ones we've been talking to here.
that is the story. And I give infinite credit to this administration for being business friendly. I do think
they've made two critical mistakes. I think the tariffs were poorly executed. And I think we shouldn't have
gone to this war. And we should find a quick resolution to it, which the administration seems to be
desperately doing. Sachs, your take on the economy. Well, look, we have an AI boom going on right now.
And I think that's thanks to President Trump's policies. Remember, the first week he was in an office,
he rescinded the Biden policies on chips and models. And what were those policies? It was the
approval regime that we're talking about. Models would have to go to Washington to get approved
if they were trained with some number of flops, and then every sale of a GPU worldwide would
have to be licensed from Washington unless it fit into some narrow exemptions. So the whole approach
of the Biden administration that President Trump inherited was everything approved in Washington. He rescinded
that. He declared that we had to win the AI race, and he unleashed our companies to do that. Now, one other
really important thing is energy. Remember, it was this president going back a decade who said
drill baby drill. He said, we have to unleash American energy. That's the basis for the American economy.
It's also the basis for AI. He also has said that he wanted to allow our AI companies to become
energy companies so they could bring their own power to these data centers. So they're not
drawing off the grid. They're not competing with consumers for electricity. They're generating
their own power. And it's thanks to this president that we have seen this blue-collar construction
boom right now powering all of this infrastructure. What would the alternative have been?
We know. I mean, Bernie Sanders has said it. It would have been banned on data centers.
So I think you need to give credit. That would be a much, a much worse choice.
Chabal, I'll give you the last word here as we wrap on the economy generally. I think the
markets are going to keep going up for a while.
and then at some point they're going to go down.
Okay.
I wrote it down, Chimoth.
You said, markets are up and then eventually they're going to come down.
Those are the two things.
We put a U here and then a D here.
I think you're doing an impression of the taking notes emoji.
Is that what you're doing?
Yes.
Okay.
Up and down.
Wow.
Thank you for doing to get to All In,
where you can get your great calls and market action advice.
It's going to go up and then down, folks.
Act accordingly.
Good, Chimaudit.
No seriousness.
But what makes you bullish, you know, let's say in the next six months, 12 months,
catalysts, and then what do you think the headwinds are as well?
Let's take the short to midterm, six months to two years.
I think that in the short term, the people that makes the new thing needs to get valued
and needs to demonstrate value.
So who are the people making the new thing?
It's the invidias.
It's the memory makers.
it's the Anthropics, it's the SpaceX's, and it's the Open AIs.
But eventually, it all comes home to roost, and you can't just make things for a market
who then doesn't have a measurable benefit themselves.
To be very clear and blunt, there is literally not a scintilla of evidence that AI has helped
lift the operating margins of the S&P 500.
There's all kinds of bluster.
There's going to be an important fork in the road.
It's probably two or three years from now.
One path will be OPEX shrinks, hence margins increase.
And the other path is revenues grow and margins expand.
And OPEC stays flat, or maybe it even goes up.
Those two things are very important differences, because in the former, you're talking about
shrinking workforce and shrinking OPEX as a percentage of operating margin and revenue.
In the latter, you're actually growing through it.
The answer to that question, I think, is critical about how the markets will
respond and how society will respond. So I think we have kind of call it 500 days where you just
got to be net long. But I think it's literally in the hundreds of days from now, 500, you're going to have
to have an important reckoning moment. The people that are paying for all these tokens need to see
an actual benefit. Yeah, that's reasonable. Yeah. That's a really interesting point. Let me connect a couple of dots
between something Chmoth said and what Brad said, which is, Brad said at the beginning of the year,
we went into this year with this massive CAPEX, this massive investment infrastructure,
but people weren't sure that the ROI was going to be there in terms of model revenue.
And that was true.
And then the model revenue has proven out.
And now what Chmoth is saying is that we're going to be at another fork in the road
soon in terms of whether there's going to be ROI on all those tokens that are being sold
and generating the revenue for those model companies.
And I agree with you that that is not proven out yet.
But I'm optimistic that it is going to be proven out.
And otherwise you wouldn't be seeing enterprise has continued to buy.
Hold on.
Let me just from this point.
You wouldn't be seeing enterprise continue their month over a month spend on coding tokens
if they didn't feel like the ROI was going to be there.
But you make a good point, which is what is the impact on the economy going to be
when all of this new software, this bespoke software that's being created,
through, again, all these coding tokens are being bought.
It's going to power a wave of productivity like I think we've never seen before.
So I think what you're seeing is the ROI is getting, it's sort of trickling down from
infrastructure to model, to application, to end user.
And I think it's going to create an economic boom.
I got to, I'm with you, Sacks.
This is deja vu all over again.
We watch this happen with the PC revolution, the internet revolution, cloud revolution,
mobile revolution.
We had all this hand-wringing, will this ever pay off?
Should I build an app?
Should I build a website?
Should I not?
Should I move to the cloud?
Should I keep it on-prem?
All of these questions over and over and over again.
And then they went from question marks to exclamation points.
I can tell you inside of my firm, we have started, we were using agents.
Then we started building code.
And I've got three people on the team who are making all the interfaces and products
that a 22-person investment firm should not be making internally.
They should be using SaaS software.
And they are shipping product day in and day out.
The ROI is fate accompli, Brad.
it is fatal complete. I think this has been decided. I think it's been decided. It has not been
decided at all. It has not been decided at all. You have 80, 90. You're working with the big
enterprises. I invest in 100 startups a year. I work with the small ones. It is fate accompli
with startups. They are building software. They're shipping. They are getting massive value from
these tokens. And they're getting so much value that they don't have to add, you know,
but half the number of employees that they would with the same amount of capital. They're getting
further with less money. It is working in startup land. I don't know.
happening at 80-90, you would have a better picture, obviously, of the enterprise. Tell us what you
see there. I mean, our business is doing well, but what I'm trying to get across to you guys
is that you can't will profits to go up. Okay? So ultimately what happens is, I'm just going to take a
company randomly. Anheuser-Busch, they have to eventually sell more beer. Take Nike. They ultimately
have to sell more shoes. Take a medical devices company. They have to sell more artificial
hips and knees. So the point I'm trying to get across is right now, there's an enormous
amount of very constructive and creative experimentation. But I think what is also true is a lot of that
has not yet proven value. I don't think that means it's going to stop. All I'm just trying to say
is until a company can trace very directly, I spent X and I made Y where Y is now greater
than X and it's lifted my margins, that is the thing that causes the flywheel to spin faster.
And right now, we've started the first part of that equation. We've spent the X and we have not
seen the Y. You would see it in global GDP. You haven't. You would see it in global productivity.
You haven't. You would see it in the global
profit margins of the S&P 500. We haven't. It doesn't mean it's not coming. Brad, you want to pick up
on this because I'm definitely taking the other side of it because I'm seeing with a lot of these
companies massive lowering of costs. Their ads are getting more effective. At the same time,
they've stopped hiring. They're not adding positions in a lot of cases. And things like, just pick
the Nike example, a lot of the photo shoots they used to do for their app, excuse me, a lot of the
imagery they used to make. Now they're able to make more of it without having to hire a photographer.
and do that stuff. I know this example because we have a startup that does this specifically
for brands like Nike. They've seen a massive drop. We have one that helped DoorDash with their food
pictures. All those pictures used to be taken by photographers. Now it's all done by AI. Massive
and cost. And they're using ads and ad creative now that is, you know, double digit percentage
more effective while costing half as much. So I definitely think we're seeing it on the earnings,
but is that true? Are you seeing it in the earnings of these companies yet?
Yeah, so two data points. Number one, we just saw Azure grow 39% in the quarter. We saw Google Cloud grow 63% in the quarter. Headcount growth for those companies, the last three years, MAG5 combined is about 3%. So their operating margins are all expanding. If you look at the S&P 500 writ large, in Q1 of 24, operating margins were about 11.8%. That was up from 11% and 23. This year, they're 13%. So we've had a 200,
basis point improvement in the operating margins of the S&P 500, which is massive.
Do you think that's AI?
Across those businesses.
And Chumath, I think that that's the question where it could dovetail with what you're saying.
I bet you dollars to donuts, it's not AI.
Yeah.
So any amount of money is not air.
I bet you're the same financial engineering that got these earnings to rise in the last
decade.
Yeah.
So I think that's the question.
Is this margin expansion durable?
The forecast, the consensus forecast in.
estimate is that margins are going to continue to expand over the course of the next two years.
You and I both know back in 22, 23, we went from the age of access to the age of fitness,
right? A lot of these companies were able to shed people, you know, with the excuse of AI,
just because they had become, you know, too excessive during the period of COVID.
So I think it's a legitimate question whether or not that's all from AI, but I will tell you
anecdotally, it maps for me. I'm hearing like Jason and David.
A lot of these companies that are really growing their top lines at an accelerating rate without
expanding headcount nearly at the same pace.
Okay.
Sax, I'll give you the final word while we're around.
Brad was talking about how we got all these operating efficiency improvements.
The unemployment rate stayed at historic lows during that time.
I mean, the economists consider full employment to be 4 to 5%.
And we've stayed at, you know, the low 4%.
It's 4.2% roughly during this time.
So you're able to get these efficiency improvements while unemployment is still extremely low.
Moreover, there was just a big article saying that the unemployment rate for young college graduates has dropped.
So, you know, there was this whole narrative recently that recent college graduates were going to have the hardest time finding jobs because, you know, there's going to be no work left for entry level jobs because of AI.
And in fact, it has gotten easier for recent college graduates to find work recently.
Maybe that's because they're AI natives.
Maybe that's because they know how to use AI better.
So in any event, I mean, we're just not seeing any evidence yet of these theoretical downsides of AI around job loss and unemployment.
And we are starting to see big productivity gains.
Yeah.
This is going to be a circular discussion.
But, yeah, there's a lot of conflicting evidence.
The last piece of collective evidence, obviously, is the labor participation rate.
Because if you are not even opting into participate, then you don't get counted as unemployed.
And that's been, I think, a big challenge.
61.9% in March labor participation rate back in before COVID.
We were at 63.3.
Yeah, and college graduates are hearing different stories, certain degrees, getting jobs,
other ones not getting jobs.
It's too early to tell, I think, is probably what we all agree in.
And it's a mixed bag.
No, no, I don't agree with that.
No.
Look, whenever I have data to refute one of your narratives, you always say it's too soon to tell.
No, no, no.
What I do, that.
One, Wall Street Journal, Nick put it on the screen.
College graduates are finally catching a break in this job market.
Jake, you should be happy about this.
I know, listen, I'm happy anybody gets a job.
But what you do is then you say, we don't trust the numbers,
and we should get rid of the Fed, and we should get rid of the number.
So we all know the debate.
I never said to get rid of the Fed.
No, that was Tremov.
Let's get rid of the Fed because we don't like the numbers.
Listen, it's all great.
Come on. Welcome to the debate club.
What did I say?
What did I say?
He said abolish the Fed.
Abolish the Fed.
What is the Fed here for?
All right, listen, enough.
We're getting into Trump Darrangement Syndrome or Trump,
Ben the Knee Syndrome.
It's the end of the show.
We had a great show, everybody.
We had some laughs.
We all learned.
We workshops some stuff.
Let's leave it where it is.
Great job, President Trump.
I want to congratulate.
Oh, here we go.
I want to congratulate all of our innovators.
And I want to congratulate Elon and D. Rockefeller on their recent deal.
Oh, shots fired.
He's getting straight.
I'm on the program any time, Dario.
Hey, you know Dario well, Brad.
Get him on the program.
Next week, I want him on the program.
Have him, come on.
Will you ask him for me?
Will you ask him for me?
Well, sure, I'll ask him.
Thank you.
The fact of the matter is, I think our lucky stars that we have Elon, that we have
Anthropic, that we have Open AI, that we have Google, that we have Amazon, all innovating
in this country.
And, you know, I know we like to, you know, kind of poke fun on the edges of these things.
But the fact of the matter is, you know, I see them all.
showing up, sharing their models, driving as hard as they can to innovate.
We have the best competitive framework in the country.
David's right.
It's been transformed over the course of the last 14 months.
We need to stay the course.
We're on the winning horse.
We just had the derby last week.
We're on the winning horse.
America for the win.
America for the win.
There it is.
Senator Brad Gersner.
I think if you're going to run, you've got to get rid of the red glasses.
We're going to get maybe tortoiseshells in there.
But I think you got a serious shot.
Senator. Senator Gersner. I like Secretary better. Secretary. Secretary. Who's, yes, Secretary of the Treasury
Brad Gersner. Secretary. Secretary of State. David Sacks. Secretary of Kashmir and wine.
How are you doing with your... There's so much fake news out there because, I mean, look, I totally
agree with everything Brad said. Look, I poke fun at some of these companies for some of the things they do,
but I am happy that they are American companies and that they're innovating here. Of course.
Congratulations on your mouth.
Absolutely.
Yes.
And look, there's so much fake news out there.
I mean, we just covered on this podcast how beneficial some of these economic trends are.
You never get it from the media.
No.
And they are trying to derail us from, you know, the policies that have been so successful.
Yes.
But they did some great inspiring coverage of micro looting.
So get your micro looting on.
Congressional, New York Times.
We'll see you next time, everybody.
Bye, bye.
Love you, boys.
I love you.
We'll let your winners ride.
Rain Man, David Sack.
Open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.
Love you, West.
Because they're all just full tension, but they just...
Merchies are back.
