All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Grok 4 Wows, The Bitter Lesson, Elon’s Third Party, AI Browsers, SCOTUS backs POTUS on RIFs
Episode Date: July 11, 2025(0:00) The Besties welcome Travis Kalanick and Keith Rabois! (3:02) Travis on Pony.ai / Uber rumors and the state of Cloud Kitchens (18:51) xAI launches Grok 4, learning "The Bitter Lesson" in AI (40:...36) How Grok can catch ChatGPT in usage, OpenAI's product excellence (46:27) Perplexity and OpenAI building AI-native browsers and taking on Chrome (58:01) Elon's "America Party": is now the right time for a third party, and could he make an impact in 2026? (1:13:12) SCOTUS backs Trump over federal government RIF plans Follow the Keith: https://x.com/rabois Follow the Travis: https://x.com/travisk Get The Besties All-In Tequila: https://tequila.allin.com Join us at the All-In Summit: https://allin.com/summit Summit scholarship application: http://bit.ly/4kyZqFJ Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg 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://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/technology/uber-travis-kalanick-self-driving-car-deal.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW5fJikPmfM https://grok.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wTA90BYo30 https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/08/elon-musk-agrees-that-weve-exhausted-ai-training-data https://x.com/ArtificialAnlys/status/1943166841150644622 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1943192643439337753 http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html https://x.com/chamath/status/1943177837956968499 https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/09/perplexity-launches-comet-an-ai-powered-web-browser https://x.com/perplexity_ai/status/1942969263305671143 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1941584569523732930 https://polymarket.com/event/will-elon-register-the-america-party-by https://ropercenter.cornell.edu/presidential-approval/highslows https://news.gallup.com/poll/651278/support-third-political-party-dips.aspx https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/implementing-the-presidents-department-of-government-efficiency-workforce-optimization-initiative https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/07/supreme-court-allows-trump-administration-to-implement-plans-to-significantly-reduce-the-federal-workforce https://www.afge.org/article/summary-of-afge-lawsuits-against-trump--how-litigation-works https://cei.org/publication/10kc-2025-numbers-of-rules https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/american-manhunt-osama-bin-laden-release-date-news
Transcript
Discussion (0)
I have a very funny story to tell you, Jason.
Where have you been? I've been trying to text you you've been
offline. What's going on? Where have you been?
I've been working feverishly. But yesterday, I had to go to
prepare for some meetings that I have on Sunday, which I can't
tell you about. But can't ask and I that and I went to Pasa
Lackwa, which is in Lake Como, which is an I mean, it's
stunning. The grounds are stunning. The hotel is stunning.
If you have a chance to go to Lake Como.
Anyways, this is us at Paso Lackwa.
Who's the beautiful woman there? Is that the woman?
Is that the queen?
That's that. But the best part is, we had such a good time. You
know how they have like a registry book to leave a
message?
Sure.
So I left a message.
Here we go. What a truly magnificent place above and beyond the expectation we have. Go below. Go below that thought for me. Thanks for you. We took everything.
We took everything. The free birds. Jason, the hangers. OK, the bags.
The laundry bags.
The toothpaste, the robes, the slippers.
Everything.
Absolutely fantastic.
Everything.
They're going to have to send a bill to the Freebergs.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. Rain Man, David Sacks. I'm going all in. And instead, we open source it to the fans
and they've just gone crazy with it.
Love you, besties.
Queen of Kenwa.
I'm going all in.
All right, listen, we've got a great panel this week.
It's the summer, things are slow.
Some people are busy.
I think our Prince of Panic attacks,
our dear Sultan of Science is, he's at the beep.
Sacks is busy, couldn't make it this week. attacks. Our dear Sultan of science is he's at the sex is
busy couldn't make it this week in his place. Another brilliant
PayPal alumni and dare I say GOP supporter Heathra Boy, how are
you, sir? Pleasure to be with you again. Nice to see you and
I'm assuming you're in gorgeous Florida or somewhere in
Italy. Yeah, I'm actually in New York.
Oh, hometown.
Is it safe?
Is it okay?
Mom, Dommy chasing you down the street?
Not yet, but it's safe.
Did he seize your assets?
Safe, yeah.
It's safe right now.
We'll see on November 4th.
As you probably heard, on July 4th was the first time
in recorded history that there were no shootings
or no murders in New York on that day. So right now things are in pretty good shape, but we may be maybe leave in New York
quickly. Yeah. You're going to probably want to sell that place if you got one there because
Momdami is going to seize it and turn it into a drug store for you. Yes. It's going to be
drug stores. Travis Callen is back with us. How you doing bestie?
Yeah. Pretty good. Pretty good.
Yeah, second appearance here on the roundtable.
Yeah.
And third time on the show. Of course, you spoke at the summit.
You've been busy with cloud kitchens. Yeah. Lots of exciting things going on.
Oh, lots of stuff. Lots of stuff. The robots are taking over.
We're rolling out. We're rolling out robots. Yeah.
TK, can you tell us what you're doing with this pony? I think we're not that speculation.
Look, you know, obviously is autonomy. As we you know, in
the US we have, of course, you want to just frame for people
that don't that may not be up to speed what was announced or at
least once you frame it. So
AI is an autonomous company doing self driving. It's one of
the few players that actually have cars on the road. They're
based in China, they've got a lot of operations in the Middle
East, they've got to deal with a delivery company called Uber,
which you might be familiar with.
Okay, so
look, well, the deal was basically that you partner with Uber license in the pony
technology and essentially start a competitor, I guess, to Waymo and Tesla.
Let me work on this one.
Okay, so so in the US we have Waymo.
We see the way most in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, coming soon to Miami, coming soon to Atlanta,
coming soon to DC, or even talking about New York.
Tesla's sort of like, they're doing it the hard way,
classic Elon style, like let's do this
sort of in a fundamental, holy shit,
let's go all the way kind of approach.
And it's unclear when it gets over the line. Of course, he launched sort of a semi-pilot of sorts
in Austin recently, but there's no other alternatives. So what happens is, is some
of the folks who are interested in making sure their alternatives have reached out. They've reached
out to me and there are different discussions that get going because they're like, Travis,
you did autonomy way back in the day. Got the Uber autonomous stuff going in 2014.
Maybe there's something to do here to create optionality. Maybe like, I'm of course very
interested on the food side.
I talk about autonomous burritos being a big deal because if you can automate the kitchen,
the production of food, and then you can automate the logistics around food, you take a huge
amount of costs out of what's going on in food.
That's of course near and dear to my heart.
There's folks that of course,
that want to see autonomy and mobility.
That's a real thing.
It may be that, or I would say,
if you get the autonomy problem right,
you can use it to apply to both problems.
So there's a lot of folks interested in moving things, moving food,
moving people, and if there is some kind of autonomous technology that maybe I
get involved in, it might apply to a bunch of different things. And so I've
got some inbound. Let's just put it that way. There's no real deal right
now, but there is definitely some inbound. And I think there are some news about some of that inbound that may or may not
be occurring. That's probably the best way to put it as long winded. I'll try to tighten that up
next time. No, I think it's great to get the overview here first on all in sharing it with us.
And everybody knows you have been doing a bowl builder lab 37. I think it's called and turn up on the screen. Not sure what the status
of it is. And then I'll let you go to mouth with your follow up
question. But I think there's a pretty interesting concept here
of the bowl getting built and then put into a self driving
car. That machine looks huge, but it's actually 60 square
feet. That picture makes it look monstrous. It's a 60 square foot
machine. Like imagine running like a sweet
green like brand or a Chipotle like brand of making it so it comes to life for people who,
who, you know, are like, Hey, what is this thing? Imagine you just order online exactly the kind of
bowl you want. And actually, this machine could run like many brands at the same time and does
you build the bowl you want, whatever ingredients,
if you look at that bottom, you see those little white bricks at the bottom? That's what carries the bowl underneath dispensers. It fills up. The machine puts a... It sauces the bowl, then it
puts a lid on it. It takes the bowl, puts it in a bag, puts utensils in the bag, seals the bag, and the bag goes
down a conveyor belt where then another machine, what we would call an AGV, takes the bowl
to the front of house.
The bowl gets put into a locker.
The courier, be it DoorDash or UberEats courier, will wave their app in front of a camera and
it will open up the locker
that has the food that they're supposed to pick up. So it just it takes out a lot
of what we would call the cost of assembly which is more than... It reduces mistakes right?
It's hard to make a mistake. We know exactly how many grams of every ingredient are put in.
That's exactly what you're supposed to get. And so you get a higher quality product,
it takes a lot of the cost out. You imagine ultimately that's going to be, there are going
to be couriers with that as well. That, you know, I like to say autonomous burritos, like is Waymo
going to carry a burrito or is Tesla going to have a machine that carries food or, you know,
is there another another company that ends up doing the things, the
autonomous delivery of things?
The point is, well, where we are right now is we've got customers.
Those customers are starting to deploy this quarter and it's pretty interesting.
In our delivery kitchens,
the cost of labor is about 30% of revenue. That's what the successful guy, let's say 30%, 35% of revenue in a brick and mortar in a brick and mortar restaurants. It's even higher. Okay.
When they're running our machine, it's between seven and 10% of revenue.
and they're running our machine is between seven and 10% of revenue.
Right. Amazing.
Then you take out the cost of the delivery, you know, and now it's becoming,
everybody can have a private check, which was your original vision for Uber.
It was, people don't know the original tagline, but it was your, your,
probably everybody has a private driver.
Everyone's private driver was the original for Uber.
Basically the infrastructure was already there.
And I said this on, you know, one of your recent, I think it was at the All In Summit, Jason,
but like in the mobility, cars, you know,
I'm transport space, the roads were already there.
The cars were already built.
People weren't using their cars 98% of the day.
So the infrastructure is already there to get people around
to do this as a service and do it very efficiently and conveniently.
With food, the infrastructure is not there. Like yes, restaurants have
access capacity. That's what Uber Eats utilizes. But to go and say like, let's make 30% of all meals
in a city sort of prepared and delivered
by a service, the infrastructure is not there, you have to build
it. So our company, the mission is infrastructure for better
food. So that's real estate, that software and robotics for
the production and delivery of food in a super efficient way.
All right. Keith, where are your thoughts? Any questions?
Well, he's not here. But isn't this what David Friedberg tried to do a few years ago?
Yeah, this came up on the last all in. Yeah, there's the last one I was at. Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a the problem was I told
Friedberg people don't want to eat quinoa. You got a little steak in there.
Maybe a piece of salmon, but he was kind of really I think eventually he relented and let people have a little bit of protein.
But yeah, so it's such a great vision.
He died as a vegan martyr.
Business died.
He was a lot of people have died on that hill.
But the bottom line is if you're going to get into automation, you have to it has to be end to end automation. What I mean by that is like,
there are pizza, there are pizza companies that have come and gone automated pizza companies where
it's like, we have a pizza machine. And everybody's like, yeah, this is amazing. And you have a guy,
you have a million dollar pizza machine. And then on the left, you have a guy feeding ingredients
into the pizza machine. And on the right, you have a guy taking the machine, and then on the left you have a guy feeding ingredients into the pizza machine, and on the right you have a guy
taking the pizza out and then putting it in a box
and doing all this.
So instead of one guy making pizzas,
I have a million dollar machine and two guys making pizza.
And so when you look at these like robotic
food production machines or food assembly machines, you have to look at
the full stack and say, does it work with the ecosystem that exists in a restaurant?
And does it go full stack from, you know, like, like we have this thing where that machine
we saw earlier, the staff preps the food, they put the food in the machine, and then
they leave.
Right. They're gone.
This restaurant runs itself for many hours without anybody there.
But this could be McDonald's, Burger King, and Taco Bell. Nobody would know.
That right there, that machine is an assembly machine, right? The food is prepped by humans,
and then assembled by this machine. For a Chipotle or a Sweet Green, this is like a majority of their labor, right? You go up to a
Chipotle, there's like 10 guys at lunch and you're still in line. That machine right there does 300
bowls an hour, right? And so you go, okay, that's the, this is what's called the assembly line.
It's just that front line where you basically assemble things.
I think sometimes I will call it the make line.
What will happen over time is you'll have perpendicular
lines going into it where you're producing food.
So you'll have a production or make line going into
an assembly line here.
And then you go, oh wow, so you have something production or make line going into an assembly line here. And
then you go, Oh, wow. So you have something that dispenses burgers on buns. That's the dispenser. That's the assembly.
Right. But it's like factorial on steroids, basically. Yeah. And
then it's like, how do you cook that burger? That's what I call
that's what we call state change. So state changes that is the
cooking of the food.
Assembly is the like, how do I put it together and plate it?
Doesn't this collapse, like for example,
if you have a yield of 300 per hour, you said,
out of that one machine, very quickly you
can impute the value of having a smaller footprint store
with five of these things in a faceless warehouse with drone delivery or cars
You don't need the physical infrastructure
So then don't you create a wasteland of real estate or how do you repurpose all the real estate?
Well, the way to think about is like 90%
Well, it's probably a little lower than that or now let's say 85% of all meals in the US are at home
They just are
Mm-hmm, and a vast majority of all meals in the US are at home. They just are.
And a vast majority of those meals are cooked at home. So, you know, like Uber Eats and DoorDash,
they represent like 1.8% or 2% of all meals right now.
It's very tiny, right?
So what you're doing is you're using real estate
to, and infrastructure to prepare and deliver meals
to people at their homes.
And so it's not, restaurants still exist.
We're still gonna wanna go to restaurants.
We're still gonna wanna go outside.
We learned that during COVID.
We knew it before, we definitely know it after.
And so I don't, it's not really
like a decimating real estate situation.
It's taking a thing we used to do for ourselves and creating a service that does it higher
quality.
You know, sort of, I like to say, you don't have to be wealthy to be healthy and just
infrastructure to get that cost down.
And so you're doing something as a service that we used to do at home. I think in the super long run, you're like, what, where's the story on grocery stores?
If you go to like in, in 20 years, I think everybody agrees.
You will have machines making very high quality, very personalized meals for everybody.
This would be good for Keith because he measures stuff down to like five calories
based on his Instagram.
What's your body fat?
Like seven percent?
Oh, God, no, it's like 10.
Just open his Instagram.
He posted four times today about his body fat.
He's like so disgusted with himself at 10%.
It's like bad at 10.
But I actually think the vision of this,
actually the natural implication, and maybe actually think the vision of this, actually the natural implication and maybe the home
run version of this is everybody has a private chef in their
house, robot in their house actually does this personalized
because people do want to cook at home, but they don't have the
time.
Yeah, or space and infrastructure. But man, these
delivery services are charging, rich people do this
all the time, right? They do these crazy meal delivery services for 200 bucks a day. And
this is just going to abstract it down to everybody. And man, people get creative when
there's that empty space to your point, Shamoff, about what happens to all this space. When
I lived in New York in the 80s and 90s, it was common to in Tribeca in West Chelsea,
where I lived to take storefronts,
put your little architect's office in the front
and live in the back.
And many people were hacking real estate.
We still need five, 10 million homes in this country.
And they're already doing this with malls.
I keep seeing malls being turned into colleges
and creative spaces.
One of them in Boston,
they turned like the second and third floor
into studio apartments for artists. So, you know, where there's a will, there's a way. creative spaces. One of them in Boston, they turned like the second and third floor into
studio apartments for artists. So, you know, where there's a will, there's a way we could
use the space.
I mean, you know, where this goes with Chimah saying where the real estate goes is we call
it the internet food court where, you know, you're on Amazon, right? It's the everything
store. Now imagine that for food. And then imagine you have an 8,000 square foot facility
where basically anything can be made. Anything can be made. Because if you have
that machine you saw has 18 sort of dispensers for food, 10 different sauces,
you get the idea. Now what about when it's 50 or 100 dispensers for food? What
if you have multiple machines with 100 dispensers for food? That's crazy.
The combinatorial math in terms of what's possible, what can be made, sort of, you know,
goes exponential.
And so the Internet food court is sort of the vision for where this all goes.
Another example of the bitter lesson.
The bitter, yeah, we're going to get to that, I guess, today. In a very full docket before we get to that just a
little bit of housekeeping here. September 7, eighth night in
Los Angeles, the all in summit again, all in comm slash yada,
yada, yada. Lineup is stacked. And we're going to start
announcing the speakers people have been begging us to
announce the speakers. I don't know.
Maybe you got to hold some back.
Careful, careful, hold a couple back.
But we got some really nice speakers lined up.
It is going to be extraordinary.
It is the best one yet.
I mean, well done.
Every year, you have this.
Well done.
Yeah, yeah.
Every year we have this little bit of panic like, you know, we're going to get great speakers
and man, they started flowing in this week.
It's going to be extraordinary.
Almost as extraordinary as this delicious tequila behind my head here.
Get the tequila tequila.
Olin.com deliveries begin late summer.
Moving to the side.
You can't even tell.
It's tequila.
That's right here.
Oh, yeah.
All right.
Listen.
Oh, wow.
Lots to discuss this week.
Obviously, AI is continuing to be the big story
in our industry. And for good reason, our bestie, Elon released grok four, Wednesday night,
two versions base model and a heavy model 30 bucks a month for the base $300 a month
for this heavy model, which has a very unique feature, you can have a multi
agent feature, I got to see this actually, when I visited X AI a couple of weeks ago,
where multiple agents work on the same problems. And they, and they do that simultaneously,
obviously, and then compare each other's work. And it gives you kind of like a study group,
the best answer by consensus really interesting. According to artificial analysis benchmarks, you can
pull that up. Nick rocks for base model has surpassed opening eyes, oh three pro Google
gemini's 2.5 pro as the most intelligent model. This includes like seven different industry
standard evaluation tests. You can look it up, but reasoning, math coding, all that kind
of stuff. This is, you know, book smarts, not necessarily street smarts. So it doesn't mean
that these things can reason. And obviously there was a little, there was a little kerfluffle
on X formerly known as Twitter where X AI got a little frisky and was saying all kinds
of crazy stuff and needed to maybe be red teamed a little bit more decisively. Many of you know,
grok four was trained on Colossus, that's a giant data
center that Elon's been building. And we showed the chart
here, Chamath. You sent us a link to the bitter lesson by
Rich Sutton in the group chat. That's the 2019 blog post, we'll
pull it up here for people to take a look at and put it in the group chat. That's the 2019 blog post, we'll pull it up here for people to take a look at and put it in the show notes. Maybe just generally. Yeah, our reaction to
both how quickly you on has a net chart showed how quickly Elon has caught up. And I don't
think people take the lead. But here we are, before we start, Nick, can you please show Elon's tweet about how they did on the AGI benchmark? It's absolutely incredible. Two
things. One is how quickly starting in March of 2023. So
we're talking about less than two and a half years, what this
team has accomplished, and how far ahead they are
of everybody else that's demonstrated by this. But the second is a fundamental architectural
decision that Elon made, which I think we didn't fully appreciate until now. And it maps to an
architectural decision he made a Tesla as well.
And for all we know, we'll figure out
that he made an equivalent decision at SpaceX.
And that decision is really well encapsulated
by this essay, The Bitter Lesson by Rich Sudden.
And Nick, you can just throw this up here.
But just to summarize what this says,
it basically says in a nutshell
that you're always better off when you're trying to solve an AI
problem, taking a general learning approach that can scale
with computation, because it ultimately proves to be the most
effective. And the alternative would be something that's much
more human labored and human involved, that requires human
knowledge. And so the first method, what it essentially
allows you to do is view any problem as an endless scalable
search or learning task. And as it's turned out, whether it's
chess or go or speech recognition or computer vision,
whenever there was two competing approaches,
one that use general computation and one that used human knowledge, the general computation
problem always one. And so it creates this bitter lesson for humans that want to think that we are
at the center of all of this critical learning and all of these leaps in more AI specific language, what it means
is that a lot of these systems create these embeddings that are just not understandable
by humans at all, but it yields incredible results. So why is this crazy? Well, he made
this huge bet on this 100,000 GPU cluster, people thought, wow, that's a lot, is it going to bear
fruit? Then he said, No, actually, I'm scaling it up to 250,000.
Then he said, it's going to scale up to a million.
And what these results show is a general computational
approach that doesn't require as much human labeling,
can actually get to the answer and better answers faster.
That has huge implications because if you think about
all these other companies,
what has llama been doing? They just spent 15 billion to buy 49% of scale AI. That's
exactly a bet on human knowledge. What is Gemini doing? What is open AI doing? What
is anthropic doing? So all these things come into question. And then the last thing I'll
say is if you look back, he made this bet once before,
which was Tesla FSD versus Waymo.
And Tesla FSD only had cameras, it didn't have LiDAR,
but the bet was I'll just collect billions and billions
of driving miles before anybody else does
and apply general compute and it'll get to autonomy
faster than the other more laborious
and very expensive approach.
So I just think it's an incredible moment in technology
where we see so many examples,
Travis is another one, what he's just talked about.
The bitter lesson is you could believe that
food is this immutable thing that's made meticulously
by hand by these individuals, or you can take
this general purpose computer approach, which is what he took,
waited for these costures to come into play. And now you can
scale food to every human on Earth. I just think it's a it's
so profoundly important.
One thing I'll throw out there, Chamath, is the Tesla approach
for autonomy is taking human knowledge.
In fact, the whole idea is to approximate human driving.
That is the whole damn thing.
Now, depending on your approach and the technology,
you can do what's called an end-to-end approach,
or you can look at perception, prediction, planning,
and control, which are like these four modules that
sort of you sort of engineer, if that makes sense. But it's approximating human driving to do it.
The difference is that, you know, I think Elon's taken a almost a more human approach,
which is like, I've got two eyes.
Why can't my car?
Why can't my car do it like a human?
Like I don't have any LIDAR spinning around on my head
as a human.
Why can't my car?
So it's kind of interesting.
He's sort of taking what you're saying Chamath
on the computation side,
because hardware five is coming out on Tesla
probably next year,
which is going to make a big difference
in what FSD can do. That's the compute side you're
talking about. But then he is approximating human.
Yeah, I just meant that other than the first versions of FSD,
which I think Andre talked about under carpet, he talked about,
you know, they're not really so reliant anymore on human
labeling per se, right? So that's that interference.
And then the other crazy thing that he said, subsequent versions of Grok are not going
to be trained on any traditional data set that exists in the wild.
The cumulative sum of human knowledge has been exhausted in AI training that happened
basically last year. And so the only way to then supplement that
is with synthetic data, where the AI creates,
it'll sort of write an essay or it'll come up with a thesis
and then it will grade itself
and sort of go through this process of self-learning
with synthetic data.
He said that he's gonna have agents
creating synthetic data from scratch
that then drive all the training, which I
just think is it's crazy.
Just explain this concept one more time with a better lesson. Hand coding heuristics into
the computer and saying, Hey, here's specific openings and just use yeah, use chess, right?
Yes. You're hand coding specific examples of openings in their end games, etc. Versus
just saying, play every possible game. And here's every game we
have. So here's the two approaches would be, let's say,
like Travis and I were building competing versions of a chess
solver. And Travis's approach would say, I'm just going to
define the chessboard. I'm going to give the players certain
boundaries in which they can move, right?
So the bishop can only move diagonally and there's a couple of boundary conditions.
And I'm going to create a reward function and I'm just going to let the
thing self learn and self play.
That's his version.
And then what happens is when you map out every single permutation,
when you go and play Keith, who's the best chess player in the world,
what you're doing at that point is saying,
okay, Keith made this move.
So you search for what Keith's move is,
and you have a distribution of the best moves
that you could make in response or vice versa.
That was the cutting edge approach.
The different approach, which is more, you know,
what people would think is more quote unquote elegant
and less brute force, would be Jason,
for you and I to sit there and say, okay,
if Keith moves here, we should do this,
we should do this specific variation
of the Sicilian defense.
And it's too much human knowledge.
And I think what it turned out was there was
a psychological need for humans to believe we were part of the answer. But what this is showing is because of Moore's law
and because of general computation, it's just not necessary. You just have to let go give up control.
And that's very hard for some people. And for others, it's not.
It's also very hard in some circumstances where a car is driving down the road, and it's learning in
that process, which is why you need a safety driver. And I think Elon made the right decision to put
one in there.
Yeah, a couple of points. It's not quite that binary, Chamath. I generally agree with your
arc, but like if you think about LLMs being the most important unlock in AI, LLMs are
all trained on human writing. So someone wrote every piece of data that every LLM used a human wrote at some point in history.
So yes, it's true that they've shocked everybody,
including OpenAI's original team,
on the implications, the broad implications,
the general applicability to almost every problem.
But it's not like there was some tablets floating in
space that weren't drafted by humans that we've trained on.
As you get in non-LOM based models, you may be totally right, but almost no one's really
using non-LOM based models at scale.
On driving specifically, Travis is totally right.
The humans are actually really good drivers, except when they get distracted.
They get distracted by drugs or alcohol.
They get distracted by being tired.
They get distracted by turning the radio. They get distracted by being tired. They get distracted by turning the radio.
They get distracted by chatting with their passenger.
So training against human behavior has actually turned out to be a great decision because
for whatever sort of Darwinistic reasons, humans are pretty ideal drivers.
And so you don't have to reason from first principles, this is a much better path.
And I think, again, there may be a broad sort of lesson there. The most important
thing, I think, as a VC that you said, as we've been debating for years, should we invest in
companies like scale or work or any of these surge? The truth is, I think there's a very short half
life on human label data. And so everybody who's investing in these companies, just looking at revenue traction,
really didn't understand that there may be a year, two years, three years max when anybody
uses human label data for maybe anything.
Because we hit the end of human knowledge or just the collection of it. is 99% done. Or you train on it so well
that you don't need to label anymore.
Like the machines know how to label
as good or better than a human.
And so like we're seeing this in the self-driving space
is labeling was huge, right?
You would have a three-dimensional sort of scene
that's created by video plus lidar, let's say.
Okay. I have to label all of these essentially what become boxes.
Like I've identified objects.
You're, you're some of the players in the, in the autonomous software space,
autonomous vehicle software space are no longer doing any labeling because the
machines are doing it all just broadly.
It'll just be built into the chipset that this is a stop
sign. Like it's like we know what a stop sign is. We don't
need the millionth time.
It's like those captures like you're like, find the stop sign
or what's the traffic light. And eventually the machines are just
way better than humans that identify these things.
For you to be very practical, when you see a stop sign, you
don't have to identify that
it's a stop sign. You just see that every human when they encounter a stop sign 99.9%
of the time, they hit a break. And they never, so nobody actually knows it's a stop sign.
It's just that hit a break when you see something that looks like this object.
It's just a vibe. Yeah, it's a vibe.
I would just say that that's like intuitive knowledge
versus like the expressly labeled human knowledge.
The question for me is,
if everybody was so reliant on human labeling initially,
if you're an investor now,
when you see these GROK4 results,
how do you make an investment decision
that's not purely levered to just computation?
So if you look at these results, does it mean that the, you know, there's 300 to 1000 basis points of lag
between just letting the computers vibe itself to the answer versus interjecting ourselves?
If interjecting ourselves slows us down by 300 to
1000 basis points per successive iteration, then over two or three iterations, you've totally lost.
So what does it mean for everybody that's not Grok when they wake up today and they have to decide,
how do I change my strategy or double down? I think, look, I'm not in the investment game, but if I were, it would be all
about scientific breakthrough. So I sometimes get in this place where I'm looking, I'm going down a
path. I, you know, I'll be up at four or five in the morning. Uh, my day hasn't quite started,
but I'm not sleeping anymore. And I'll start going, like, I'll be on Quora and see some cool
quantum physics question or something else I'm looking into. And I'll start going, like I'll be on Quora and see some cool quantum physics question
or something else I'm looking into.
And I'll go down this thread with GPT or GRAS.
And I'll start to get to the edge
of what's known in quantum physics.
And then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding
except it's vibe physics. And we're approaching what's known and I'm trying
to poke and see if there's breakthroughs to be had. And I've gotten pretty damn close to
some interesting breakthroughs just doing that. And I, you know, I pinged, I pinged you on at
some point. I'm just like, dude, if I'm, if I'm doing this and I'm super amateur hour physics
enthusiast, like what about all those PhD students and post-docs that are
super legit using this tool?
And this is pre-Grock four.
Now with Grock four, like, like there's a lot of mistakes I was seeing Grock
make that then I would correct and we would talk about it.
Grock four could be this place where breakthroughs are actually happening. that Grok may, then I would correct and we would talk about it.
Grok 4 could be this place where breakthroughs
are actually happening, new breakthroughs.
So if I'm investing in this space,
I would be like, who's got the edge
on scientific breakthroughs?
And the application layer on top of these foundational models
that orients that direction.
Is your perception that the LLMs are actually starting to get to the reasoning level that
they'll come up with a novel concept theory and have that breakthrough or that we're kind
of reading into it and it's just trying random stuff at the margins?
It's a...
Or maybe it doesn't matter.
No, no, no.
So what I've seen, and again, I haven't used grok for, I tried to use it
early this morning, but for some reason I couldn't do it on my, on my app.
But so let's say we're talking grok three and existing chat GPT as it is.
No, it cannot come up with the new idea.
These things are so wedded to what is known.
And they're so like, even when I come up with a new idea, I have to really, it's like pulling a donkey source,
you see you're pulling it, because it doesn't want to break
conventional wisdom. It's like really adhering to conventional
wisdom, you're pulling it out. And then eventually goes, Oh,
shit, you got something. But then when it says that, when it
says that, then you have to you have to go, okay, it said that, but I'm not sure.
Like you have to double and triple check
to make sure that you really got something.
To your point, when these models are fully divorced
from having to learn on the known world,
and instead can just learn synthetically,
then everything gets flipped upside down
to what is the best hypothesis
you have or what is the best question, you could just give it some problem and it would
just figure it out.
So where I go on this one, guys, is it's all about scientific method.
If you have an LM or foundational model of some kind that is the best in the world of the scientific method, game the F over.
You basically, you just light up more GPUs and you just got like a thousand more PhD students
working for you. Keith, you're nodding your head here. I agree with that. I think that's fantastic
because the scientific method also, the faster it is, the more you,
when you have a hypothesis, the faster you get a response, you're more likely to dive
in and dive in and dive in recursively and recursively.
And every lag, every millisecond lag causes you to like lose your train of thought, so
to speak.
So you get the benefits that Travis alluded to plus speed and you go places you never
would have guessed.
This happens all the time when you run a company and you're doing like analytics
and you have a tool that allows you to constantly query quickly, quickly,
quickly, double click, triple click.
You get to answers that you never get to.
Either there's even a second or two second or three seconds, let alone
sending it to a human.
Secondly, where you actually see this today, it's already happening.
If you look at foundational models that just apply to science, there's lots of
things about the human body, let's say in health biology, that we humans don't actually understand all
the connections.
Like, why do we do acts?
Why do some people get cancer?
Why do other people not get cancer?
Why is the brain work this way?
Models trained solely on science tend to expose connections that no human has ever had before.
And that's because like the raw materials there, and we only have a conscious awareness of thought
110%. But when you apply it to other human domains, where
you're training on human sort of data, human produced data, human
produced output, they're limited to that output. So I think you
just take the science and apply it writ large, and you're going
to wind up finding things that no human has ever thought before.
And it's the thing about science though is that it's the hypothesis that you then have to test in
the physical world. So the you're like, okay, have you got this hive mind this like, you know,
this computation engine, this brain of sorts, you it to say consciousness, but you stop yourself. Yeah, there's like, I was like,
how do I describe this?
The big C word, consciousness.
But you need to be able to test in the physical world.
So you can imagine a physical lab connected
to one of these systems where then you could say, okay,
like if it's a chemistry experiment,
you could do chemistry experiments or physics.
You get the idea.
What could go wrong?
It would be, it's yeah, no big deal. It's going to be fine. Okay. So, but, but this is where it goes. Because if you have a scientific method machine, you still have to be able to test your hypothesis. You have to go through the scientific method.
And verification. Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Wow. It's kind of mind blowing. Reminds me of mind blowing.
Remember, I don't know if you guys remember dark matter and
like the discovery of it and everything. And as explained to
me by Lisa Randall, you know, the discovery was made not by
knowing there was dark matter matter there and observing it.
But observing there was something, you know,
gravitational forces around this other matter. And then they said, Well, wait,
what's causing that? And that's why they found dark matter. So
these ideas, you know, the idea that LLM could actually do that,
come up with something so novel is, it doesn't, it feels like
we might be right there, right? Like, we're kind of on the cusp
of it.
One of the seven most difficult problems in math with the most
important problems in math is proving a general solution to this thing
called Navier-Stokes, which is basically
like viscous fluid dynamics and conservation of mass.
We use it every day in the design of everything.
You know what, it hasn't been proved.
Isn't that the craziest thing where you're just like,
how is this even possible?
We use it to design airplanes, to design everything.
It hasn't been proved.
And so you could just point a computer at this thing
and you would unlock all these incredible mysteries of the universe. And we would probably find completely
different propulsion systems. We could probably do things that we didn't think were possible,
teleportation. I mean, who knows what's possible. But remember, remember, you know, how Elon talks
about Brock and about AI generally is about why are we here?
What is the purpose?
Meaning of the universe.
What is the meaning of the universe?
How does it work?
And it's sort of fierce truth seeking mechanism there.
Let me ask you a question, Keith, Travis, Jason.
If you guys were running Grok for?
To be so much fun.
How do you judo flip OpenAI?
Because they are marching steadfastly
towards a billion Mao, then a billion Dao.
It's a juggernaut.
So how do you use the better product
in a moment to
judo flip the less better product?
Look, yeah, I mean, here's the thing, right? So you do the
Elon way. So you have you get a bunch of missionary, like full
on missionary engineers that work twice as hard. And you have
a culture that is ultra fierce truth seeking, and you don't
get caught up in politics, bureaucracy, BS, and you just go for it. And I think, you know,
that's where, you know, and then you go, wow, scientific breakthrough, scientific method, like you start winning on truth
and that will start, I believe that will start to give
the product awesomeness of OpenAI a run for its money.
But like the product of OpenAI, the product department,
those guys are crushing.
They're really good.
They're not only ahead of the game, but they feel like it just, they're just leading in a lot of different ways. But if you are better at truth, you will eventually, you'll eventually have an AI product manager.
physical real world things. What he did standing up Colossus made like Jensen Wan was like how is this possible that you did this right so pressing that his
ability to build factories and he said many times like the factory is the
product of Tesla it's not the cars that come out of the factory or the batteries
it's the factory itself. So if he can keep solving the energy problem with solar on one side and batteries, and standing up, you
know, Colossus 2345, he's going to have a massive advantage
there on top of Travis, you know, the missionary individuals,
which by the way, was what he backed before Sam Altman
corrupted the original missionary basis of opening, I
made it closed AI in a,
you know, nothing derogatory towards him,
but he did hoodwink and stab you on in the back.
It's not nothing personal.
I mean, he just screwed him over.
And would you say he bamboozled him?
Bamboozled him, screwed him, hoodwinked him, you know.
Pick your term here, but he did it.
He did it dirty.
The original mission was to be a was to open source all this content. That's
the other piece I think is a wild card and then I'll measure
certain keys position but open sourcing some of this could have
profound ramifications. I think open sourcing the self driving
data could have a really profound impact. You want to do
something really disruptive like he open sources patents
for, you know, charging, if you open source the data set and
self driving, does anybody have the ability to produce
robotaxes at the scale he can do it? I don't think so.
This hypothesis is true, then everybody will. Well,
everybody will. Sorry, everybody will watch. If you
have access to the money that buys the
compute everyone could solve that problem. Which part which piece I'm talking which problem
he said he said if he published all the FSD data, could somebody build an autonomous vehicle?
Well, yes, but could somebody produce 100 million robo taxis from a factory with batteries
in them? Okay, that's a different that's a different question. I'm saying, and not really, because last time I was a guest on, you know, all, and
we talked about vertical integration, products really require vertical integration. So ultimately,
you have a self driving something that is custom built for knowing it's going to be self driving,
and it interacts differently, the cost structure is different,
the controls are different, the seating is different, everything.
You build a product taking advantage of where in the stock
you have the most competitive advantage,
but then you leverage that and it reinforces.
It's still why Apple, despite missing the AI wave,
still a pretty good company from any empirical standpoint.
I mean, the performance is absolutely miserable
on the most important technology for the last 70 years, but the company is still alive and still worth trillion dollars
because it's vertically integrated.
OpenAI at career point, they do have a good product team and they need to stay ahead on
the product level because they can't compete on the factory level.
The way to stay ahead of the product level is shipping a device.
They've got to ship the device.
It's got to be good. It's got to be right. It's They've got to ship the device. It's got to be good.
It's got to be right.
It's got to be the right form factor.
It's got to do things for humans that are unexpected.
But then if they do that, they're like Apple plus AI.
Chamath, what's the paper you're talking about before?
What was the name of it again?
The bitter lesson.
That it could apply to autonomous driving is right now it's still like, hey, how do
I drive like a human?
We talked about that.
But the leapfrog moment here could be like, hey, drive a car, make sure it's efficient,
don't hit anybody, and just simulate that quadrillion times and it's all good.
But right now we're still trying to drive like humans because we don't have enough data
and therefore can't do enough compute. That's the global lesson, by the way.
Chamath, you're totally right. The conceptual blog post is right, but that's only true when
you have enough data. Depending on the use case, the level of data you need may not be possible for
years, decades, and you may need to hack your way there through human interactions.
Physical world AI is lacking in data.
And so you just try to approximate humans.
I don't know if you guys have seen this in related news,
OpenAI and perplexity are going after the browser,
perplexity launch Comet for their $200 a month tier.
I actually downloaded it, I'll show it to you in a second.
But this is a really interesting category.
It's something developers can do already and they do it all the time, you know, but
having your browser connected to agents lets you do really interesting things.
I'll show you an example here that I just fired off while we're talking.
So I just asked it, hey, give me the best flights from United Airlines and business
class from New York City, from San Francisco to New York
City. It does some searches, but what you see here is it's popped up a browser window
and it's actually doing that work. And you can see the steps it's using. And then I can
actually open that browser window and watch it do that. This is just a screenshot of it.
And it will open multiple of these. So you could, I was doing a search the other day
saying, like, Hey, tell me all the autobiographies I haven't bought on Amazon, put them into my, you know, shopping cart and summarize each of them because I like biographies and like doing here.
And when it did this last time it put my flight into like and I was logged in under my account and it basically put it into my account in
the checkout.
So again, this isn't like if you're a developer, you do this all day long, but this really
seems to be a new product category.
I'm curious if you guys have played with it yet and then what your thoughts are on having
an agentic browser like this available to you to be doing these tasks
in real time. You can also connect obviously your Gmail, your calendar to it. So I did a
search, tell me every restaurant I've been to and then put it by city. And then I was going to open my open table and then pull that data as well.
What's interesting about this, Keith, and I know you're a product guy and done a lot of product
work. I'm curious your thoughts on it is you don't have to do this in the cloud. You're
authenticated already into a lot of your accounts. Nor do you have to worry about being blocked
by these services because it doesn't look like a scraper or a bot. It just it's your
browser doing the work your thoughts on this and we play with it at all.
Yeah, I think it's a great Hail Mary attempt by perplexity. I think absent something like this
perplexities toast, like for the stat about chat, GBT is going to a billion users, like it's becoming
the verb, you know, that the way you describe using AI for a normal consumer, there's nothing
left of perplexity if they can't pull this off. So it's a great idea because the history of
like consumer technology companies is whoever has uphill ground, like in a military sense,
whoever's first has a lot of control. This is actually what Google should be doing,
truthfully. I think Google's also, Google search, cross search is toast. And since they have Chrome
and they theoretically have a quality team in Gemini, they should be putting
these two things together and hoping to compete with Chad GPT, they're going to lose the search
game like the assets that are best at Google right now have nothing to do with search.
It's every other product is the only thing that's going to save that company if they
can figure out how to use them.
Travis, your thoughts on this category, anything come to mind for you in terms of, you know, feature sets that would be extraordinary
here?
I know you like to think about products and the consumer experience.
It's really interesting.
So, you know, I've been spending, as you guys know, I've been spending my time on real estate
and construction and robotics.
And so I've been out of this kind of consumer
software game for a long time, but super interesting over the last six months.
There have been a number of consumer software CEOs. Like when I hang out with them or whatever,
they're like, you know, how are we going to, how are we going to keep doing what we do
when the agents take over? Yeah.
are we going to, how are we going to keep doing what we do when the agents take over?
Yeah.
The paradigm shift is so profound that the idea that you would visit a web page goes away and you're just in a chat.
You have an agent that's just taking care of your flights for you.
So I, I kind of, I think there's a leapfrog of over that.
I think it's just like, you tell something, yo, I want to go to New York.
Can you, you know, I'm sort of looking at this time range.
Can you just go find something I'm probably going to like and give me a couple of options?
Yeah.
And it's just a whole, you have an interface and then.
You know, is perplex is this thing that you just showed him perplexly, is that the interface?
Or do I just have an agent that just goes and does everything for me?
And is this the start? Or do I just have an agent that just goes and does everything for me?
And is this the start of that?
I just haven't spent enough time.
I do know that every consumer software CEO
that has an app in the app store is tripping.
They're tripping right now.
And I mean, big boys, I mean guys with real stuff.
And sometimes I'm doing like almost like
therapy sessions with them. I'm like, it's going to be fine. You actually, you actually have stuff.
You have a note, you have real stuff that's of value. They can't replace it with an agent.
And they're lying to them. You're doing hospice care and you're telling them everything's going
to be okay, but the patients options on Robin Hood. Well, he's like, Yeah, tell me more. Tell me more.
There's certain things that are protected. And there's certain
things that aren't. That's all.
Well, let's talk about that. Because the you and I are old
enough to remember General Magic. This vision was out
there a long time ago with personal digital assistants.
And you would just talk to an agent, it would go do this for
you. This feels
like a step to that, where it does all the work for you presents you the final moment and says,
approve. So look, it's like a concierge or a butler. Yeah, I think what you're describing
is what we want. But I think more specifically for today, Keith and Travis totally nail it. Look, I think building a browser is an absolutely stupid
capital allocation decision. Just totally stupid and unjustifiable in 2025. Specifically for
perplexity, I think their path to building a legacy business is to replace Bloomberg.
Everything that they've done in financial information and financial data in going beyond the model is
been excellent. As somebody who's paid $25,000 to Bloomberg
for many years. The terminal is atrocious. It's terrible. It's
not very good. It's very limited. And anybody that could
build a better product
would take over a $100 billion enterprise,
because I think it's there for the taking.
I wish that perplexity would double and triple down on that.
And so when you see this kind of random sprawl.
Let's do it, Jamoth.
Let's just go do it.
When you do the random sprawl, I think it doesn't work.
I just want to say, like, a browser
is like the dumbest thing to build in 2025. Because in a world of agents, what is a browser, it's a glorified markup reader. It's like handling HTML, it's handling CSS and JavaScript, it's doing some networking, it's doing some security, it's doing some rendering, but it's like, this is all under the water type stuff. I get it that we had
to deal with all that nonsense in 1998 to try Lycos or Google for the first time. But in 2025,
there's something that you just speak to. And eventually, there's probably something that's
in your brain, which you just think, and it just doesn't. You're thinking, I need a flight to JFK.
Or at the maximum today, in a very elegant, beautiful search bar, you type in, get me
a flight.
And it already knows what to do.
Keith, in some ways, this is a step towards that ultimate vision.
So you'd think it's worth it to, you know, sort of perplexity to make this waypoint perhaps,
if you look at it as a waypoint between the ultimate vision, which is a command line and
earpiece, a hot, distribution Jason for the 19th web browser in 2025.
Well, yeah, that is a challenge. And I think most people are speculating Apple, which has a lot of
users might buy perplexity or do a deal with perplexity
and give them that distribution
because of the Justice Department case against Google.
So there's been a lot of speculation about that,
but Keith, what do you think?
Well, I don't think they'd buy anything worth it.
Like what is Apple gonna get?
And if you continue this failed strategy of Apple,
Apple has missed every possible window on AI
and continues to miss it.
And it has cultural, I think the CEO has challenges.
I think culturally they have challenges
and they have infrastructure challenges.
So it's not an easy fix,
but buying perplexity is not gonna help.
Like Chimath Strategy is actually pretty coherent one
for perplexity, quad perplexity.
So I think that's not about-
Not picking a vertical and owning strategy.
Not a bad idea, especially because you need
unique data sources. Some of those data sources may or may not license their data to open AI.
So you can do some clever things there, but I don't think there's any residual value that
Apple would get out of perplexity, except there's some product taste. But what are you going to
spend like a billion dollars for product taste? I mean, Mark's spending hundreds of millions of
dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever he's spending these
days. And, you know, Grok, if anything, Rock for shows that Mark really just needs to spend
money to build a whole new team because everything they've done in AI has also missed the boat.
Well, I mean, Keith, the way you phrase it there almost makes it worth it for Apple to
throw a Hail Mary, have a team with some taste because that's how they tend to do things
is something that is elegant.
And why not just throw your search to it,
throw 10 billion at,
what's elegant is if there would be a bunch of,
what's elegant would be if there's a bunch of agents
and just a chat box,
seeing a bunch of visual diarrhea is not elegant.
It's lazy.
All right.
Shmoff on our little Bloomberg clone,
I'll give you naming rights.
So you can call it
the polyhapetia. So hey, can somebody bring up the polyhapetia?
You know what's so funny?
Actually, how to play you good.
It just rolls right off your tongue.
TK, listen, we were trying to do a screen of companies and it maxes out at five companies
on a specific
type of screen where you're like you're trying to compare stock
price to EBIT and you're like, okay, I can only choose five, I
guess. So which one was on right like two episodes ago, he was
like, I can't pull this up. It's limited to six companies,
dude, you it's so what do people use bloom? They use it for the
messaging. Now, like my team has traded huge position via text message on Bloomberg. So there
is something very valuable there. But the core usability and
the core UI of that company has not evolved. I have my
contribution. And complexity is very good at that, by the way,
it they do a very good job. I got a new domain name Travis,
let this one just sink in here. This is my way to weasel my way into the deal. Begin.com. Begin.com.
You own it, don't you?
I do. I'm just a little I sniped some good ones once in a while. I got
begin.com and I got annotated.com. Those are my two little domains.
Bro, you're like you're like one of these old people that show up at
those flea markets.
Oh, like the road show and then they all of a sudden you got a Picasso.
And you're like, Oh, I have this thing that I bought 1845.
Guys, Jason is the daddy and go daddy.
Okay, that's just what it is.
That's what it is.
Who's your daddy?
Hey, speaking of daddy, let's go on to our next story.
Is now the right time for a third party.
Elon seems to think so. Last week, he announced that
actually would be creating a new political party. I'll let you decide who daddy is in this one.
He said, quote, when it comes to bankrupting our country with waste and graph, we live in a one
party system, not a democracy. He's not yet outlined a platform for the American Party. We talked about it
here last week, I listed four core values, which seem to get a good reaction on x fiscal
responsibility slash Doge sustainable energy and dominance in that manufacturing in the
US which he won has done single handedly here. pro natalism, which I think is a passion project
for him. And Shabat, you punched it out with the fifth technological
excellence, according to Polymarket 55% chance that you
on registers the American Party by the end of the year. And you
know, one thing I was trying to figure out is just how unpopular
are these candidates? And these political parties, this is a
very interesting chart that I think we can have a great conversation around.
It turns out we used to love our presidents.
If you look here from Kennedy at 83%,
his highest approval rating, his lowest was 56%.
That was his lowest approval rating.
So he operated in a very high band.
Look at Bush too, during, after 9-11, 92% was his peak.
His lowest was 19%, right 19 right wartime president.
But then you get to Trump won Biden and Trump to historically low high approval their high watermark 49 for Trump 163 for Biden one of one and then 47 for Trump to end their lowest 29 31 40. So maybe
it is time for a third party candidate. Let's discuss it,
boys.
I have no idea how to read this graph. It's the worst. I'm like,
what is happening here?
This is the worst formatted chart. This is a confusing
chart. But well, the reason I'm putting it up is for debate. So
I should be saying thank you for creating great debate. Why did you put it up?
Here's another one. Gallup, all Americans desire for a viable third party 63% in 2023. So it's
bumping along an all time high. Okay, I'm really concentrating on this one.
Okay, anyway, I'm gonna stop there. What's the gray?
I'm gonna let you Okay, God, I'm going to stop there. What's the gray? I'm going to let you
different sense.
I got period and how popular party I got. Let's stop here. This is a good,
this is a good place to stop.
I just blew a GPU.
Yeah. Look, a couple of points.
Yes.
The idea of the third party is for any other human being like absolutely absurd and ridiculous. Elon has obviously done incredible things. So dismissing anything he's touching is a bad idea. However, I think the best metaphor I've seen is
it's a little bit like Michael Jordan tried to play baseball, became a replacement level baseball
player, which actually really hard to do by the way. Elon is probably a replacement level
politician. He's Michael Jordan for entrepreneurial stuff. but the third party stuff is not going to
work.
First of all, that chart is misleading.
It's a flaw of average.
It was badly designed and it's a flaw of average.
Trump is incredibly popular among Republicans.
He actually has the highest approval rate of any Republican ever measured in recorded
history.
It's 95%.
Reagan was peaked out at 93%.
It's just Democrats don't like
them, which is perfectly fine. Being polarizing is an ingredient to being successful, including
with people on the show. The point of accomplishing things in the world is you don't really care
what half the world thinks. You need to make sure that there's a lot of people who like
you and really approve and are enthusiastic about what you do. And Trump is about as popular
with his party as anybody's ever been ever, period. No exceptions. Secondly, there's,
MAGA has kind of already changed the Republican Party. Trump is sort of like a third party takeover
of the Republican Party. And so it's kind of already happened. And maybe you can do this every
20 years or 30 years. I don't think you can have like this kind of already happened. And maybe you can do this every 20 years or 30 years.
I don't think you can have like this kind of transformation on one party within a
too compressed period of time for a lot of reasons.
Third is really smart parties absorb the lesson of political science.
Unfortunately, I studied political science.
I wasted kind of my college years.
And instead of saying CS and maybe then I'd be coding stuff and doing physics like Travis. But one thing I did learn is smart parties absorb the best ideas of third parties.
So the oxygen is usually not there. Because there's a Darwinistic evolution of if you get
traction on an idea, it's really easy to conscript some of those ideas and take away the
momentum. No third party candidate that's a true third party has won a Senate seat since 1970.
And that's actually Bill Buckley's brother and so he has some name ID.
The other thing Elon, I think, is missing and the proponents of what he's doing is
people vote not just for ideas, they vote for people.
It's a combination.
The product is what do you believe and who are you?
And you can't divorce the two.
Trump is a person and that generates a lot of enthusiasm.
And it's one of the reasons why he has challenges
in midterms, because he's not on the ballot.
His ideas may be on the ballot,
but he is not specifically on the ballot.
So unless, because Elon can't be the figurehead
of the party, he literally can't constitutionally,
you need a face that's a person, Obama, a Clinton.
Like, there's reasons why people resonate.
Reagan, without that personality, specific ideas just are not going to galvanize the
American people.
Okay.
So the counter to that and what people believe he's going to try to do is win a couple
of seats in the House, Travis, win maybe one or two Senate seats. If you were to do that,
those things are pretty affordable to back a couple of million dollars for a House race.
Senate, maybe 25 million. If Elon puts, I don don't know 250 million to work every two years, which he
may put 280 million to work on the last one, he could kind of create the Joe Manchin moment.
And he could build a caucus, a platform, Grover Norquist kind of pledge along these lines.
So what do you think of that? If he's not going to create a viable third party presidential candidate, could he
Travis, pick off a couple of Senate seats, pick up a couple
of congressional seats?
Okay, so first, I have this axiom that I'm making up right now.
Okay, okay. It's called Elon is almost always right. Okay. All
right. Yeah, I was right about everything. Seriously, let's
just be real. And like, honestly, the things he's upset about and that he's riled up about, especially when
you look at the deficit, like, man, I am right on board that train.
Part one, part two.
We've never had somebody with this kind of capital that can be a quote unquote party boss outside of the system.
Right.
And there's a lot of people that agree with the types of things he's saying.
And he knows how to draw, you know, he, he, he, on his own, right.
I kind of has a populist vibe.
Like he does his thing and he's turned X into what it is,
and he's a big part of X.
And so I think it's great.
And honestly, there's the moves you can make
on Senate and House and just having a few folks
and then being levers then to get the things you want done.
That's part one.
And then part two of that is
the threat of that happening can make good things happen separately, even if it doesn't go all the
way. I just love it. I'm on the train. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm in love with this role for Elon
more than picking a party because he's picking a very specific platform that I think resonates
with folks, which is just balance the budget. Don't put
us in so much debt and let's have some sustainable energy, you know, job done, free jobs.
The problem with that is like he's actually wrong about the reason why we have a deficit
or debt. It's not because we're under taxed. It's we're massively overspending. If we just
I think he believes we're overspending.
They should have been supporting the last, you know, beautiful bill because if you just held federal spending
to 2019 levels, 2019 is not like decades ago, literally with our current tax revenues, we
would be in a surplus. 500 billion. Yeah. So there, all we need to do is cut spending.
Now I admit that why didn't that happen with the big beautiful bill?
This is where details do matter.
I think there is a willingness and a discipline problem on both parties and I think maybe
he can help fix that.
The second thing is that we have these arcane rules, particularly in the Senate, that you
need 60 votes in many ways to cut things except through very hacky methods.
And that's a reality.
So the best thing truthfully you could do
is help get a Republican party to 60 votes.
And then in theory, he could be absolutely furious
if you didn't cut back to 2019 levels,
but it's very tricky or you can just overrule.
Like the filibuster is an artifact of history.
And at some point, some majority leader is just gonna say, we like this, the filibuster is an artifact of history.
At some point, some majority leaders just going to say we're done with the filibuster
and just steamroll through all the cuts at 50 or 51 votes, which you can do.
There's no constitutional right to a filibuster.
It is an artifact of centuries of American history.
And at some point it's going to go away.
So maybe the time is now, maybe we should just fix everything now.
I think you're exactly right. I think that the filibuster, it's just a matter of time.
I think it's on borrowed time. And I think in a world where it is on borrowed time, Jason,
I think your path is probably the one that gives the American party if it does come into existence,
the most leverage, which is if you control three to five independent candidates, you gain substantial leverage.
I just want to take a step back and just note something.
I don't know if you guys know this,
but the only reason we're even having this conversation
or this is even possible is because in 2023,
the FEC, Federal Elections Commission,
they actually released guidance and they changed a bunch of rules. And
the big change that they made then was it allowed super PACs
to do a lot more than just run ads up until that point. All you
could do if you were a super PAC is just basically run
advertising, television and radio, I guess online as well.
But what they were allowed to do starting in 23 was they were allowed to fund ground
operations.
They were allowed to do things like door knocking, phone banking, you know, get out the vote.
So in other words, what happened was a super PAC became more like a full campaign machine.
And Trump showed the blueprint of using a super PAC, specifically his, to win the presidential election.
So he was able to fund this massive ground game. He built infrastructure across the swing states.
He was obviously incredibly effective. And now that playbook can actually be used by other folks.
And so to the extent that Elon decides to use those changed FEC rules, Jason, I think what you said is the only
path but I just I thought I just wanted to double click on Keith's
point because it's so important. I do think the
filibuster is going to go away. And it is because the the
arcane is of these rules, having to do a reconciliation bill, then
you know, needing a supermajority veto proof supermajority and
and the other case, it just means that nothing gets done. And I think somebody will eventually
get impatient and just steamroll this thing. We've never had so many people say they feel
politically homeless, as we did the last two cycles. And that includes many people on this
podcast people in our friend circle. And I think just the idea that Elon could create a platform that people
could opt into and support just the existence of that would make the other two parties get
their act together.
By the way, the other thing that we need is a little bit of a stick there and a carrot.
Yeah. Hey, if you don't control spending, there's this third option. And if Travis and
I are in it, and Keith, I know you'll never leave the Republican Party, but your mouth, you know,
you're probably set where you're where you want to be right now.
But I can tell you, we go to our top 1020 friend list. Out of
those 50% will join you on its party. Well, the other the other
thing, Jason, that that Keith said, which I think is, is
really important is, if he were to run people, I think they have to
transcend politics and policy. And I think they need to be
straight up bosses, people that have enormous name recognition,
so that effectively what you're voting is a name and not an
agenda equivalent to I think what happened to Schwarzenegger
when he ran he ran on an enormous amount of name
recognition in the great Davis recall, he ran on an enormous amount of name recognition in the
great Davis recall, he didn't run on the platform. I don't think any of us can mention this.
JD Vance had this great book, capture people's imagination. He's an incredible speaker.
He pisses off a third or two thirds of the country depending on where you are in the country.
But you can't ignore him. I think Elon can find 10 JD Vance type characters and back them fairly easily. He is a magnet for
talent. People will line up. I have been contacted by high
profile people. I was actually thinking of running. Can you put
me in touch with Elon?
More like actors and sports stars meaning where they just
come with their own inbuilt distribute like I think you
almost have to to rank X followers
and Instagram followers and do a join and say,
okay, do you know what I mean?
Like I think it's like totally different.
Yeah, yeah, you create X, Y axis.
It's painful, guys, it's painful.
Like let's not get more celebrities as politicians.
Like let's get like people who've led large efforts,
large initiatives, complex things.
Ideally, but they still have to communicate, right? They have to be able to communicate on a podcast.
That's the new platform. If they can't spend two hours, three hours chopping it up on a podcast,
like this or Joe Rogan, you know, that's Kamala's, the reason she couldn't even
contend was because she couldn't hang for two hours in an intellectual discussion.
You can't hang, you're out. Yeah. I get that. Yeah.
I got that. That's interesting to see if he can tune his algorithm for talent, which is epic
to tune for politics because it's a slightly different audience. But if you can tune the
algorithm and quality that might work. I think you can win a few house races. I think that's doable.
I don't think you can win a Senate race. Well, there it is. Elon, Keith doesn I think you can win a few house races. I think that's doable. I don't think you can win a Senate race.
Well, there it is. Elon Keith doesn't think you can win a
Senate race, but he thinks you won a couple of congressional
ones. Thanks for giving him the motivation. He's I appreciate
it.
I'm sure he's gonna love that.
He's not gonna win too. People in the Republican Party right
now are going Oh, no, don't poke the tiger. Listen,
speaking of Trump got into politics, so I don't want to be Obama here.
You just don't bomb it. You on right? Yeah. Congratulations.
All right, listen. SCOTUS made a big decision here. This is a
really important decision. They've sided with Trump for
plans for federal workforce rifts reductions in workforce.
For those of you don't know, As you know, Elon Trump, they
wanted to downsize the 3 million people who are federal employees.
This is just federal employees we're talking about. We're not
talking about military and we're not talking about state and
city that's 10s of millions of additional people. If you
remember, Trump issued this executive order back in February, we got an office implementing the president's
Doge workforce optimization initiative. And he asked all the federal agencies, Hey, just
prepare a riff for their departments consistent with applicable laws was part of this EO.
Okay. In April, the American Federation of government employees AFGE sued the Trump administration
saying the president must consult Congress on large scale workforce changes. This is a key debate
because the Congress as you know, has power of the purse, they set up the money, but the
president and the executive branch, they have to execute on that. And that's what the key
is here. So they accuse Trump of violating the separation of powers under the Constitution Act. AFGE has 820,000 members.
In May, a San Francisco-based federal judge sided with the unions, blocking the executive
order.
The judge, who was appointed by Clinton, said any reduction in the federal workforce must
be authorized by Congress.
This is a key issue.
And the White House submitted an emergency appeal, yada,
yada, eight of nine Supreme Court justices sided with the White House in overturning
this block. And so the reasoning it's very likely the White House will win the argument
of the executive order. They have the right to prepare a riff. The question is, can they
actually execute on that riff? And who has that power? Chamath? Does the power reside
with the president to make large-scale rifts,
or do they have to consult Congress first,
your thoughts on this issue?
It's an incredibly important ruling, incredibly right.
I think President Trump should have absolute leeway
to decide how the people that report to him
act and do their job. If you take a step back, Jason,
there are more than 2,000 federal agencies, employees plus contractors, I think number
almost 3 million people. If you put 3 million people into 2,000 agencies, and then you give them very poor and outdated technology, which unfortunately
most of the government operates on, what are you going to get?
You're going to get incredibly slow processes, you're going to get a lot of checking and
double checking.
And you're going to ultimately just get a lot of regulations because they're trying to do what they think is the right job.
So since 1993, what have we seen? Regulations have gotten out of control. It's like a hundred thousand new rules per some number of months. It's just crazy. So eventually we all succumb
to an infinite number of rules that we all end up violating and not even know it.
So if the CEO of the United States, President Trump isn't
allowed to fire people, then all of that stuff just compounds. So
I think that this is a really important thing that just
happened. It allows us to now level set how big should the government
be. But more importantly, the number of people in the government are also the ones that then
direct downstream spend that make net new rules. And if you can slow the growth of that
down, you're actually doing a lot in many ways. I wish Elon had come in and created Doge now. Like,
could you imagine if Doge was created the day after this
Supreme Court ruling? It would have been a totally different
outcome, I think, because with that Supreme Court ruling in
hand, these guys probably would have been like a hot knife
through butter. Travis, so I think it's a big deal.
Except that ruling doesn't happen without Doge that Doge caused that ruling to occur.
True. Well, the EO did. You could have passed the layer.
Right. Right. That was all Doge style though. You know what I'm saying?
Yeah. If they wasn't firing people, yeah, they probably wouldn't felt the need to your point,
Travis, to actually file this. But Travis, if you are living in the age of AI efficiency right
now, operations of companies is changing dramatically. Can you imagine telling somebody you can
be CEO, but you can't change personnel. That's the job you get to be CEO, but you just can't
change the players on the team. You can buy the next but you can't change the coach. You
can grow. You just can't shrink it. It's like running a unionized company, which
actually does exist. Our large companies where you can't do any of these things. Right. Do they
still exist or are they all gone? I think they're going quickly. Yeah, probably. I think this just
gets back to what is actually Congress authorizing when a bill occurs. And there are certain things
that are specific and certain things that are specific
and certain things that aren't.
And I don't, I'm not sure that in a lot of these bills,
it's not very specific about exactly
how many people must be hired.
And so if it's, I'm just doing the common man's
sort of approach to this, which is like,
if the law says you have to hire X number of people, then that is what it is. If the law says you, here's some money to this, which is like, if, if the law says you have to hire X number of people,
then that is what it is. If the law says you, here's some money to spend here, the ways in which
to spend it, but it's not specific about how many people you hire, then that's different.
Yeah. It should be outcome-based. Hey, here's the goal. Here's the key objectives, right?
Travis is totally right. Like there are, there's a variety of different laws,
some with incredible specificities, some with very
broad manage.
The Constitution clearly says that all executive power resides in the President of the United
States, period.
There's no exceptions there.
However, Congress does appropriate money and post Watergate, many people think Congress
has the power to force the President to spend the money, and you can debate that, and
you can debate it on a per statute basis. And that will be more nuanced, and that's going to get
litigated whether the president can refuse to spend money that Congress explicitly instructed
him to spend, sometimes called impoundment. That's a very interesting intellectual debate. This one's
a little bit easier. It'll get more complicated again. Like this EO is
only approved to allow for the planning. I think the vote might be closer. I think there's
still a majority on the Supreme Court for the actual implementation, but it may not
be eight one when there's a specific plan that has to navigate its way through the courts
again.
Yeah. It's super fascinating. Yeah. I wonder if they're going to get to the point where
they're going to say in every bill, you need to hire this number of people to hit this
goal.
I don't know if they can. Like that's where it gets borderline unconstitutional. Like
where you actually prescribe that the president in the exercise of his constitutional duties
has to hire a certain number of people. That feels pretty precarious. Well, I'm not sure, Keith.
It's just like they prescribe a whole bunch of other things.
I know, but they must, you must appropriate money
to this specific institution to do this specific work.
But that's not an executive function.
Like if you said, like the Secretary of State has to have
X number of employees doing something, the Secretary of State has to have X number of employees doing something.
The Secretary of State is your personal representative to conduct foreign affairs on
behalf of the President of the United States. It gets a little bit more messy as you translate it
to people that the President should... I mean, yes, Congress does set which people are subject
to Senate confirmation, what their
salaries and compensation bands are. So it's, it's never going to be fully binary, where
the president can do whatever he wants. And it's never going to, I don't think it'll be
constitutional for Congress to mandate and put all kinds of handcuffs on the president.
Well then you also have performance that comes in here. What if you look at the Department
of Education say scores have gone down, we've spent this money, we're not getting the results. Therefore, these people are incompetent. Therefore,
I'm firing them for cause. And I'm going to hire new people. How are you going to stop
the executive from doing that?
There's been a bunch of litigation, you know, in parallel to this litigation about the president's
ability to fire people. And for the most part, the Supreme courts, basically,
with maybe the exception of the federal reserve chair said that the president can fire pretty
much anybody who wants.
I mean, that's the way to go is like, I mean, I hate to be cutthroat about it, but if the
results aren't there, I think they're presidential. Yeah. If they're a presidential appointee,
the president should be able to fire you at will. Just like if you were a VP at one of
our companies, the CEO should be able to fire you at will. Just like if you were a VP at one of our companies,
the CEO should be able to fire you at will. But what about Keith, if the whole department sucks, Hey, you guys were responsible for early education. You had to put together a plan.
The plan failed. Everybody's fired. We're starting over. Like you should be allowed to do that. How
are we having efficient government? Some of these departments were created by congressional statute,
like the Department of Education in 1979. And you're right, every single educational stat has got
worse in the United States since the department was created. But there is a law on the books that
says there shall be a Department of Education. So you may have to repeal that. All right, listen,
we're at an hour and a half, gentlemen, do you want to do the FICO story or should we just wrap Chema?
And we got plenty of show here.
It's a great episode.
Anything else you want to hear?
I don't really have much to say on the FICO story.
I thought these other topics were really good though.
We did great today.
This is a great panel.
I'm so excited you guys are here.
Let me just ask you guys, any off duty stuff that you can share with us with the audience any recommendations, restaurants, hotels, trips, movies, you watch
books, you read Keith, I know that you are an active guy. What
what's on your agenda this summer? Anything interesting you
can share with the audience that you're consuming conspicuous or
otherwise?
Well, I don't want to share any good restaurants or hotels
because you're gay keeping.
Come on, man. Give us your favorite. It's like you've got a babysitter.
Yes. Can I get your nanny's email?
There are things that are, what do you call it? No marginal cost consumption like Netflix. So for example, you know, this documentary on Osama Bin Laden is phenomenal. I don't know if
any of you have seen it. It's brand new. I haven't seen it.
I'm a student of this stuff and I thought I knew the whole story and et cetera. Watch episode one,
just start with episode one and it just blew me away with new information, new footage,
just absolutely incredible stuff. So highly, highly recommend it.
What was the big takeaway for you so far?
I don't know if there's any like specific takeaway, but just like so many parts of the story are
misunderstood and not really understood and how the various confluences of somewhat random things
lead to a very catastrophic result. But it's, it's like as, um, dramatic as the best movie,
but it's a full documentary,
and you will learn things and absorb things.
I've had friends, I've been recommending it to friends,
and for a story you think you know,
it's incredibly revealing.
Okay, Travis, anything you got on your plate there
that you're enjoying, a restaurant, a dish?
I mean, look, you know,
I mean, Jason, you know, I go to Austin a lot.
Yes.
Like basically from March till October, I do about 15 weekends in Austin.
I have a lake house.
Jason's hung out a couple of times.
So I love water skiing.
That's my whole thing.
That's my like, that's, I just love it. It's just my thing. Since I was a kid. Very zen. Yeah. And's my like, that's just, I just love it.
It's just my thing since I was a kid.
Very zen.
Yeah, and it's like, it's, I call it lake life.
So that's a thing.
And then I recently, this little bit of like a side quest,
I recently purchased the preeminent backgammon engine.
XG.
XG, that's right. It's acronym is, it's backgammon engine. XG. XG. That's right. Its acronym is it's extreme gammon.
And so the preeminent engine, so all the pros rate themselves based on this. It was done,
it was built by this amazing entrepreneur, this guy Xavier, who is just a full-on sort of ultra, ultra, I mean, just what's the word I'm looking for?
It's not a savant, like a savant essentially, but hasn't worked on it for many years.
So I'm getting back into it and love it and making it like taking modern machine learning
sort of deep learning techniques and like big compute and saying can we push the game of backgammon
forward so super exciting and ultra training apps to get
people up to speed quickly. I played in my first backgammon
tournament and cashed. So that was pretty cool.
Wait, yeah. Okay. Yeah. All due respect. You found Uber, you're
very high profile, you go to this back end.
Is this like held at the Motel 8
in like a conference room in the back?
I mean, take things goodbye.
It was amazing.
It was like a month ago or so.
There's like a big tournament and it was,
so the United States back end federation
had this big tournament.
It was, I guess it was at the Los Angeles LAX,
at the LAX Hilton.
And it was in the basement of the Hilton.
Great.
And it was like-
Next to the Dungeons and Dragons convention?
It had those kinds of legit vibes.
I love it.
And like people would, so I went in super low pro,
just did my thing, but eventually was recognized,
but I was not recognized as the founder of Uber.
I was recognized as the owner of XG.
Ooh, the owner of XG's here.
And then there was like a full on melee
that basically occurred.
They're like, oh, the owner XG, Travis is here.
Chamath, I feel like we've got a window here to do the all in backgammon
high end tournament. We got to lock this down. Now we've got to lock down
the all in backgammon set.
I get the co-branding rights on this. Okay.
Absolutely.
XG.
Well, no, the all in XG, you know, like, cause I love a great backgammon set.
If we could make like a $10,000 one. Chamath, we could kill turtles or white rhinos,
all the animals that, you know,
Freebird's trying to protect.
We could murder them and then make-
That would be so great.
Yes.
Like maybe the white could be, you know, rhinos,
and then you could take something else, elephant skin,
something, you know, just really tragic,
and then eat the meat and make the back end set for you.
I love backgammon. Honestly, like, if I wasn't attempting to
be like expert poker player, that is the game. I mean, if
you're talking about a Pandora's box where once you open it, oh
my god, you can go to the rabbit.
Backgammon is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful game.
I love the vibes of sitting with Travis and I sat I got some
cigars out, you know, we pour a little of the all in tequila
tequila.com. We get that going. A couple of the all in cigars.
And then we have the all in back. It's a wonderful hang.
Yeah, Keith, would you consider giving us some of your money
playing back?
We gotta we gotta get some of that money on the table because you don't play poker with us. I don't play poker, but backgammon. Yeah, that sounds great.
And I'll bring better tequila. I have better tequila. We're like, we're going to do a little
taste off. Yeah. So you've insulted now. Elon with the Senate seats and facts with his tequila.
My tequila is much better, trust me.
Oh, no.
He was left in the PayPal mafia you'd like to insult before this episode is done.
Yeah, and he can also insult Reid Hoffman.
Or Peter. Anything about Peter?
Reid can join Elon's party. He's collecting a bunch of misfits.
So he might as well take Reid too.
All right, listen, this has been another amazing episode of the number one podcast in the world, the all in podcast for your Sultan
of science who couldn't make it today is that the conference so
we don't mention and David Sachs who is out making America
safe and AI and crypto.
Shmoth, Pai, Hopatia, World's Great operator, Travis, Keith,
TK. Thanks for pinch hitting. You guys were great today. What a panel.
See you all next time. Bye bye. to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. I'm the queen of Ken Wives. I'm going all in.
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what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what,
what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what,
what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what,
what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, I'm a dash or we'll meet me at the hotel We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cause they're all just useless
It's like this sexual tension but they just need to release them out
What? You're a bee
What? You're a bee
What? You're a bee
Bee? That's gonna be a...
We need to get merch
Bitches are back
I'm doing all in
I'm doing all in