All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - OpenAI's GPT-5 Flop, AI's Unlimited Market, China's Big Advantage, Rise in Socialism, Housing Crisis

Episode Date: August 9, 2025

(0:00) Bestie intros! Gavin Baker, Ben Shapiro, and Phil Deutch join the show (7:32) GPT-5 underwhelms, benchmark saturation, OpenAI's product excellence (18:14) AI's TAM, ROIC, and energy implications (27:27) China's major advantage and how the US can counter it (43:46) Political parties picking winners, energy subsidy reversal, how the bureaucratic branch was created and how to fix it (52:38) Socialism, OBBB impact on energy, does socialism in the US rely on Mamdani in NYC? (1:10:00) Tariffs update: $125B+ revenue so far, India and Switzerland hit hard, Trump's ad hoc approach (1:27:51) Nvidia chips being smuggled to China (1:31:13) Apple's $700B in buybacks since 2015 and failing AI strategy (1:40:09) Summer reading recommendations Join us at the All-In Summit: https://allin.com/summit Summit scholarship application: http://bit.ly/4kyZqFJ Get The Besties All-In Tequila: https://tequila.allin.com Follow Ben: https://x.com/benshapiro Follow Gavin: https://x.com/GavinSBaker Follow Phil: https://x.com/pdeutch 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.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-08/openai-s-gpt-5-met-with-mixed-reviews-confusion-in-first-day https://www.anthropic.com/news/build-ai-in-america https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whE75zEFBpU https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/historic.html https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-chinese-nationals-arrested-complaint-alleging-they-illegally-shipped-china-sensitive https://www.ft.com/content/6f806f6e-61c1-4b8d-9694-90d7328a7b54

I just want to let Freiburg know. He told me to stop taking my nicotine patches because I had brought too much energy. Freeburg, you see what I got here? Nick, blurted that out. See what I have here? We're not doing, we're not doing promotions for this. We're not doing any of these promotions.

What you need to know is he sent me my own flavors. Jason's trying to make a side hustle. Just so the rest of you guys know, Jason's trying to get paid. It's not a side hustle. I have no interesting. He's trying to show into an infomercial and he's trying to get paid personally. Freepurg, I'm selling this on eBay.

If anyone wants to get about eBay site, It's me, Deutsch. Let your winners ride. Brainman, David Sack. And it said, we open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, best. I'm going to be queen of Kinwan. All right, everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the all-in podcast.

And we were supposed to take off this week. But no, your independent, moderate, moderators. said, no. Disgratia, taking a week off, no weeks off. So, I told my besties, we're out gallivanting. We're doing a show on Friday with or without you all. Of course, David Freeberg showed up. How you doing, Davey? I'm here. You're here. But you weren't going to come at first. You were a little frustrated that the other boys took the week off. Well, I was annoyed. We were going to record yesterday. Yes. I had gotten a docket, which we're supposed to do, what are we going to talk about? I read it. I mentally prepared. I drank some coffee. I get

dressed in a t-shirt and I get in front of my computer. And then your co-hosts bail. And they're like, I can't. You're co-hots too. I can't. I'm in this country. I can't. I'm on this boat. And here we are. How many hours slash minutes of notice did they give us? Oh, it was like five minutes before we were supposed to record. It was 90 minutes before. 90 minutes before they go. That's true professionalism. But Freiburg, a consummate professional is here and we've got a full docket for everybody. Also with us, my God, Gavin Baker is here. He's at the beach, I'm sure, enjoying a little recreation, but you decided, hey, let me get in here, help J-Cal. Let's lock the show down, take a little time out from the beach and do an episode of Ballin. Thank you for doing that,

Gavin. Always happy to help. I should say that I'm working hard at the beach. I mean, it was supposed to be easy, breezy summer. We had like a busy couple of years, but we're post-election. Everything was supposed to slow down. We get into a groove. It's never been busier, right? Well, we're just, we're still in the thick of public company earnings. Right. Which is always busy. Yeah. And of course, for those who don't know, Gavin is the managing partner and CIO of a treaties. He invests in private companies, public companies, or just public? Public and private. Public and private. So that makes you a crossover fund with us as well today, my guy, fellow broadcaster, Ben Shapiro, host of the Ben Shapiro show, co-founder of the Daily Wire, which gosh, makes a mountain of money and has a new book

coming out. In September, Lions and Scavengers, the true story of America and her critics. You gendered America, Ben, in your subtitle, a bold move. What's the book about and why are you writing So basically the concept of the book is that we're watching civilization break down between people who want to build and people who want to tear down. And you saw that pretty clearly, I think, in the last election cycle, but you're seeing it all over the world. People who actually are innovators, people who want to build social fabric, people who want to defend the civilization, then people who are interested in getting rid of borders, people who want to destroy businesses, people who are not interested in the foundations of Western civilization and see them as fundamentally bad. So it's really that contrast. And see, I knew that you had. something you wanted to say because the book business for a podcaster, especially as successful as you are now, you know, right behind us, number two in the rankings there. I kid, he's ahead of us. But we're manifesting. We're right there, right with Ben Shapiro and true crime. That's your, and Bill Simmons. So NBA, true crime, Ben and us. But writing a book is a net loser in terms of your productivity and time when compared to doing your daily show and all the other

things the Daily Wire does, yeah? Yeah, for sure. I mean, it started off because I honestly, things have been so pathetic lately that I became pathetic and started journaling, which is not a thing that they really should do. And as I was traveling around and going to, like, Oxford University a month after October 7th and debating people who were telling me about how October 7th was fine and dandy, I just was keeping almost a diary of what that was like. And so part of the book is it's a much more personal book than the other stuff that I write, which honestly is not my, it's usually not my bag. But I felt like, you know, putting it out there. It's interesting, if I'm reading into this correct, you probably had some dismay, anxiety, whatever, hand-wringing over the state of affairs, decided to use journaling just to get it out of the system.

Hey, no shame in the journaling game, Ben. I think it's fine, you know, better than popping some pills. It's in a trapper keeper with it. It's got like a little heart lock. Oh, you went with the trapper keeper? You went with my little pony trapper keeper. So just like when you were in high school. Exactly.

But yeah, you get it out of the system. I, too, have been journaling and meditating because it's just making sense of the world. As Gen Xers here, all of us, I think you're a Gen Xer, maybe you're a millennial. You're on the bubble, I think, Ben. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just weird to see everything be topsy-turvy and rounding out the fivesome here today. We've got a full compliment. My guy Phil Deutsch from NGP Energy Technology Partners.

This is the smartest guy I know when it comes to energy. He's my rabbi when I have a question about energy. I just text him. He explains to me why I'm right about solar batteries being better than clean coal. But we'll find out today. We're going to do a deep dive and energy. Phil Deutsch also, with a protect, that Chamath would be in awe of today. And you come from, we call him Deep State Deutsch, because he comes from a family of politicians.

Yeah, Phil? Government employees, I think, is better than politicians. or public servants would be more accurate. Public servants would be the way to say it. Public servants would be the way to say it. Hey, and then just to get a little plug in here, Freiburg's been working really hard on the All-In Summit. Everybody join us.

Look at this lineup that we put together, mostly Freiburg and I, the CEO of Eli Lilly, Dave Ricks, Ali Baba's co-founder, Joe Sy, also owns the Nets. My guy, Dara, from Uber with the $200 billion market cap. We got the ARMS CEO, Renee, Circles, co-finding. founder, Jeremy O'Lear, Ziplines CEO Keller. That's a $5 billion company, really doing cool stuff. Toma Bravo, co-founder, Orlando, Sequoia's Rolloff Botha, my guy, Kathy Wood, and

science YouTuber, Cleo Abram. One of your favorites, Freedberg. You got a little friend in the science broadcasting game now. We're going to have a great. We're going to have a, there's a lot of big announcements still to come. Other names that we're saving other names for days leading up. Some of them will still be secret. And some will still be secret.

So go to all-in.com slash summit or all-in.com slash yada, yada, and yeah, get your tequila, tequila. dot all-in.com. All right. Chat GPT5 just broke. Large language models continue to drop just four weeks after Grock four Gavin took the crown, a friend of the pod. Sammy the Bull Altman dropped GPT5 and two open weight models. They're not open source.

We'll get Gavin's thoughts on that in a minute. It was a bit underwhelming. I'm assuming you all saw our gentlemen, and a little bit of a messy presentation for GPT5 yesterday. This wasn't like your classic Steve Jobs keynote. The charts were flat and wrong, miscalculations, typos, all kinds of stuff. But the model did top some leaderboards and fairness in the chat bot arena, but many people were disappointed and said the performance was overwhelming, and especially since when

chat GPT 4.0 came out and obviously 3.5, these were major jumps. So, and part of it might have been Sam not managing the hype. He tweeted fellow Star Wars fan, Ben Shapiro, we'll get a kick out of this. He, uh, tweeted the Death Star. I think this is a Rogue One shot where the Death Star is coming up and, uh, don't get triggered, Ben. I don't want you to get into a sequels rant, but you loved Rogue One, correct, Ben? I did like Rogue One. Rogue One is good. Rogue one is, it's exception.

Exception. Rogue One is like the last good Star Wars movie that's been made. Okay, so let's do it. Empire Strikes Back is my number one, then Revenge of the Cyst, then Rogue One. What do you got, Ben? Who's your top three? Oh, I mean, I go Empire and then New Hope, and then probably Rogue One. Wow.

Okay. I like Rogue One a lot. I think it's really good. Me too. It's a perfect film. Gavin? A hundred percent agree with Ben. But Empire Strikes Back is just so much better than all of the others.

Yes. Yeah, Freeberg, what do you got in your ranking? I know you're going to rank. I remain adamant in my point of view that the entire star, War's franchise is built around an anti-technology, anti-utopian view of the world, anti-progress, and the Death Star is the ultimate manifestation of technology, and of course, it's used for evil. That's kind of the main message of the series. Wow. Way to bring the show down, Dave. Way to ruin all our childhoods.

I did like the last one. Jesus. We just had a Gen X moment. He's like, yeah. I did like the last one, though. I'm terrified to ask who you think of like the Wizard of Oz. But I'm going to go with the original. It was a dystopian, gender, take on free will. That was the first Epstein Island.

The original Jake Powell, I remember my mom taking it to me when I was a kid. It was awesome. So I'm going number one, number one. Okay. There you go. And so anyway, Sam did this tweet. It kind of built a lot of expectation that this would be like otherworldly. It wasn't.

Anybody get a chance before we go on to the open models or the open weight models, I should say, anybody get a chance, and Gavin, I think you're at the tip of the spear here. Any of your thoughts, are we hitting, like, either the trial of despair or maybe diminishing returns in the LLM space where maybe it's feeling incremental, not like groundbreaking when we release these iterations? Maybe for Open AI, but if you look at Croc 4 versus Croc 3, that was a pretty giant leap. Okay. And I think what was surprising to me is this is the first time that, you know, Open AI has released a new model that was not decisively the best. Here's GROC 3.

It comes out. It's the purple line. This is in this is artificial analysis. And then, you know, shortly thereafter, maybe six to eight weeks, O3 comes out. And it is clearly significantly better. It's that black dot. And they've had that flex any time they've been surpassed in the past. And, you know, Google and GROC have surpassed Open AI at times.

But shocked me on the next slide. And I do think some of the loss of talent may be beginning to weigh, but a big problem in AI is what's called benchmark saturation, which is just these models are getting so smart that benchmarks that were optimized, even for human graduate students are not sufficient to measure their intelligence. So we've developed these new benchmarks. There's humanity's last exam on the left. And you can see- Can you explain what that is to the audience? It's got such an evocative name. What does it mean? It is a list. Everybody, you can just Google it, but I mean, the questions are ridiculously hard. They're extremely hard questions from a wide range of disciplines. And you can see GROC4 when it came out and it has improved since its release roughly a month ago, was at 44.4% and GPD5 was at 42. And similarly, RKGI2, which is another benchmark, there's something called the Jagged Frontier and AI where things that are very easy for AI,

like maybe math are really hard for humans and vice versa. And RKGI measures tasks that are relatively easy for humans. Maybe you could almost think of it, you know, there's a lot of like geometric puzzle solving, but very hard for AIs. And here again, GROC 4 is, you know, significantly better than GPT5. Now in fairness and, you know, to be balanced and accurate, it is narrowly, very narrowly ahead in artificial analysis on the right. But this is the first time they have not released a model that wasn't decisively better.

And the progress for GROC 4 was exceptional. GROC 5 is coming soon. You know, they have more, and I should note my firm is a shareholder of X-AI. So, you know, as much as I try to be objective, I am for sure biased because I am human and to be, human is to be biased. But they have the largest Blackwell cluster, so I'm optimistic for GROC 5. but, you know, we're waiting on Gemini. I would expect there to be a very, you know, an impressive new Gemini model, and we'll see how that lands relative to both GROC and GCPT5.

But I do think it's significant that this is the first time that Open AI has not been able to clearly beat a competitor on all metrics, you know, a month after a new frontier model was kind of released from one of their chief rivals. Freeberg, let me ask you a question. And have you played with it yet, Dave? Have you gotten into chat, GPT5? So I'll get your initial thoughts, if any. But I'm interested in leveling up the conversation to this concept of, why would they release it if they weren't a definitive winner?

Because, hey, Sam the Bull, Altman, Sammy the Bull is pretty competitive. He knew that this was going to be the reaction, that it wasn't definitively better, but yet he released it anyway, which means, hey, maybe he's having a hard time making those innovations. and there has been the brain drain. So sort of two-parter there and take whichever one you want first. I don't know how much this quote brain drain is affecting things. But I think one of the big milestones that was realized with this upgrade is it's kind of multimodal. So if you guys remember a couple weeks ago, if you're using chat GPT and you have a pro

account, you have to select the model using the drop down, which model do you want to run? And so you know if you're doing a research task or a very simple kind of search task, you would choose the right model to increase speed or increase depth. Part of the factor that I think was a big upgrade with this system is that it kind of recognizes which underlying model to call and which underlying path to draw from. I actually tried by asking a very complicated research question, and then I asked a very simple kind of information retrieval question, and the information retrieval question had very quickly pulled the answer and the deep research, it got into the thinking mode.

So it's self-selected. I think this is really important from a user experience perspective for AI to work. You don't want users going in and technically choosing which model. No one understands what those letters and numbers mean. You want to have a very simple, clean, basic interface where the model figures out on its own, which underlying set of models to pull from, which reasoning process to follow to give you your answer. So I think from a product experience point of view, this was actually a pretty big upgrade for chat GPT, and it'll give them a real advantage as people start to access it. It's also, I think, why they're making a lot of the research functions more broadly available on a

limited use basis to the wide population so people can start to see the depth of what's possible. That was kind of the key milestone for me, less about the actual performance of the underlying model on the benchmarks and more about this kind of big UX upgrade. Gavin, I don't know if you feel similarly. I do. I mean, in all fairness to Open AI, the router that kind of auto-selects the right model was apparently broken for the first kind of 12 or 16 hours of the model's release. It wasn't working. Yeah, it was not working consistently for all users. So, you know, the scores may improve. But yeah, I mean, the one thing, Open AI is like, they are a very good product.

Just really, really good. And I just always go back to the statement from Eric Fisheria, you know, it was a venture capitalist at a benchmark, brilliant man. And he just said it was on X. You know, it might be that if Open AI never releases another model, they're still a really valuable company because they have so many users. and they're so good at product, and they do have a lot of distribution. Phil Deutsch, what ending are we in here?

And how much of your research and do you rely on, or can you rely on these language models now, being in a very specific vertical every day, studying energy, et cetera, and those opportunities? Has it made its way into your workflow? And did you get to play with chat GPT5? Yeah, I mean, I think for investing, we use it all the time, and it really is very efficient. but one thing I'll cite is that NVIDIA did in Freeburg, I don't know if you play with or not, but it's climate in the bottle, C bottle. NVIDIA has done a climate model of the Earth and put that out there.

So I would say we're in like the first half of the first inning when we start seeing AI really help us with the thornyest problems and the tradeoffs in around energy. So I think for us very early, and we're using it just like any other investor would. Yeah. Ben, has it made its way into your workflow at Daily Wire? And are you monitoring this as a business owner with, I think you have a couple of hundred employees. And, you know, do you see a bifurcation of the people who use the tools and who don't? Yeah. I mean, it's definitely bleeding into workflow in terms of being able to gather information, obviously, very quickly or even using some editing tools via AI. We put out Jeremy's Razor commercial two months ago that was entirely AI. And it still had the kind of AI slop field to it a little bit. but it was doing a thing, and it was obviously a lot cheaper than having to shoot something.

But I kind of wanted to, you know, again, I'm the dumb guy in this part of the conversation, for sure, in many conversations. But I just have a general question, which is, do you think that the productivity gains are going to bleed over fast enough to justify the investment? I mean, that's like the dumb guy question, right?

Yeah. Like, so much money is pouring into this. And I'm looking at the valuation of these companies, and I'm seeing that like 60, 70% of all S&P 500 gains are happening in the Magnificent 7. And I'm thinking to myself, I mean, when you look at the internet, the internet was working by 99, 2000, and it took until maybe 2006, 2007 for all that productivity to really enter the marketplace.

Is this stuff going to hit fast enough to actually justify the amount of investment? Are you going to see a crater here? I think there's a good question for Gavin and just to sort of set it up. We are now seeing hundreds of billions, low hundreds of billions per year being deployed, and we'll see a trillion or two deployed, I think, in the next five years on data centers and this. And we put the TAM, or I put the TAM last year for just business or less week, just for business at about $50 to $100 per business user, a billion business users in the world. It's going

to put you at a billion dollars in revenue, which would be like a, you know, $5 to $10 trillion tam just for the business side. How do you calculate it, Gavin? Do you have a back of the envelope way to answer this question? And if we catch up, or do we even need to catch up, is there enough capital in the world that they can be patient? I think estimating the tam this early, It's hard to do it with any precision. I think your methodology is as good as any, but we can measure the economic return on these investments. Most of the companies investing these big dollars into AI data centers are public.

They report quarterly financials. You can calculate something called return on invested capital. And it's actually gone up since they started making these AI investments. And at first, a lot of it was maybe through OPEC savings. But that is what you would expect with AI, kind of, you know, silicon to replace, you know, Silicon OPEX to replace human OPEX. But more recently, you are starting to see some really significant accelerations in revenue growth. You know, meta just reported a quarter with revenue significantly ahead. And I think a lot of that was due to AI, AI making people spend longer and AI improving, you know, the quality of their ad targeting systems.

such that advertisers get a better ROAS and spend more. But the economic return thus far has been here. And it is, you know, even Microsoft, I mean, for me, copilot is not the best product, but even Microsoft on their call talked, you know, they shared some pretty astonishing stats about co-pilot uptake. So I do think the economic returns are here thus far, and that is a good sign because, you know, this early in the internet, the economic returns weren't there. And I think maybe the biggest difference between this and the internet is a lot of the capital that went in during the internet era, which is often called the tech bubble, it was really a telecom bubble, it was deployed into something called dark fiber. And that means exactly what it sounds like. Fiber optics, the people spent tens of billions of dollars laying. And then it was dark because it was not utilized. But there was an expectation it would be utilized. Completely different here with AI, where one of the biggest problems with GPS,

and, you know, AI data centers, is the GPUs are used so intensively that they melt. So all of the dollars that are going into the ground are being used. We're not building ahead of demand. In fact, we're clearly still behind demand. You know, so they can always change. Which is really interesting observation, Gavin, because this idea of training a model, there's no analogy to that in the dot-com era. You know, it's not like you had to, I don't know, upload all these video files and you needed

all that dark fiber to do it. It's a silly analogy, I know, but that also did lead to, you know, the dot-com bust. Ben, the other side is the energy side of this. I think that the energy implications of AI are probably bigger than the Inflation Reduction Act and certainly will be longer lasting. And so just to kind of give you, to give credit where credits do, I think all the stuff we're seeing on the small module reactors at some level owes its are renaissance to AI and the energy demands of AI to focus on energies we'll get to later really wouldn't exist except for the hyperscalers, giving very specific concrete and immediate demands for energy that have changed the energy landscape, as I say, probably bigger even

than the legislation or the Biden administration. Give an example of what they're asking for, because you are active in investing in, these projects, you know, what's a pre, what's like a large pre-A.I. Boom project versus a post AI boom project in terms of scale footprint investment. Well, a quick way to say this and Freiburg knows of stuff as well as I do. Anthropic just released a paper this month saying we want 50 gigawatts of power for the AI in America and over the next three years. And so that's about as much power as was added all this year. So you're talking, you know, huge amounts that in our lifetimes, you've basically been able

to say the electricity demand has been zero in the United States. Now it's 2 to 3 percent. And a data center needs continuous power in specific locations, and it's relatively price insensitive. So that's what's – and the hypers – in bed, you may or may not like this, but they're – they want carbon-free power. They're willing to pay for it. Not because of the government, just that's what they want for their workforce. So when you say you hit the market with, you know, 50 gigawatts of demand, much of it clean, that changes a lot in a very exciting way. And for reasons we may get into later in the pod, it's a real pleasure not to have to rely on the government, be it

Democrats or Republicans as we think about those things. 50 megawatts. That's a small town. Gigawatts, gigawatts, gigawatts. Oh, you say gigawatts, gigawatts, wow. So what is that? If 50 megawatts is... That's 5% of the total U.S. electricity production. My lord. And Freeberg, I think it's about what you add a year, right?

In new capacity. The U.S. Yes. Yeah. Meanwhile, China's adding one terawatt, a thousand gigawatts every 18 months. Okay. I want to say one thing about that, David. But where is China getting?

its gas and coal from. That's being imported. It's imported. So I get the stat on China increasing things quickly, which I think you're right on, particularly the nuclear side. But on the gas and coal side, unlike us, they are looking to others for their source to their fuel. I think their biggest ad, isn't their biggest ad in hydro right now?

I'm talking about imports versus ads, but the hydro and nukes presumably are I'll count as non-import dependent, but the coal and that gas, it's not a great story for them on that side of it, David. By the way, just my understanding was by far the biggest source of China's incremental electricity was solar. Like, this is a verifiable stat that we should just be able to quickly verify. Yeah, that, Gavin, let me just say one. thing. You got it, and Freiburg knows this, you got to be a little careful when you say

where the electricity is coming from and what the additions are, right? So the U.S., our additions are like 80% solar to wind, but the installed base, it's under 20. So I think that stat you're signing is probably at best additions, not. Oh, no, for sure it's additions. For sure, it's additions. But they're bringing out a lot of power every year relative to the installed base of the United States, and a lot of it is solar. Here's an interesting chart. This is China's solar surge. This comes from Bloomberg.

China added more panels last year than any of the country has in the total. So in other words, they added more than the U.S. It looks like U.S., India, Japan, and Germany, they added in one year. And that's a 2023 number. I think 2024 took a massive jump. So here's the question. See, Jake, how? and Freyberg, here's the question that I would have asked Secretary Wright. Do you care about that

slide? Because if you care about that slide, then you would have done different things than the one big, beautiful bill. You might not care about that slide, but we're certainly not attacking the problem on that slide. As well as we could be. Right. And they're also putting, they have 150 plus nuclear reactors in some state of deployment. We've talked about that here countless times. So circling back to you, Ben, winning AI, do you consider that existential for America as somebody who's not in the industry? When you hear this discussion that we had in D.C. last week, when you hear technologists like ourselves who obviously are investing in this, this is our book of business right now, do you think we are in an existential race for humanity to

win the AI race with China? Or do you think that's like a construct maybe, that's just everybody wins and it's not an existential race, that one person wins and the other person loses. As you might imagine, I'm definitely in the existential race category. I just look at how China has utilized TikTok as a sci-op weapon in a myriad of ways, gathering data, putting out its own propaganda at scale, and think about how they would do that with control of the tools that everybody uses in all their businesses. that's putting aside the military connotations. I was talking to my friend Mike Gallagher,

who is a congressman on the subcommittee on China and who's now over a palantier doing policy over there. And he was pointing out correctly that, you know, China's capacity if they win the IRAs militarily, is going to explode. And that's going to mean an awful lot for things like freedom of the seas. It's going to be a lot for our allies, for America's economic dominance in the world. And so, you know, that opens up a whole can of worms as you know, as goes to the Trump administration's policies with regard to invidia and what kind of ships we should be allowing Nvidia to ship over to China. Which we're going to get to on the docket in a moment. Interestingly enough, did you, did you gentlemen see the luck in coffee announcement in

New York City and the socialist reaction to it by chance? Nobody saw it. Okay. So people are not spending too much time on the TikTok. TikTok has a bunch of like young socialist New Yorkers in communist t-shirts, going to Luckin Coffee and talking about how Starbucks, you know, is a, you know, are capitalist and that they're glad that the Chinese company Luckin, which does $2 coffees, has come to America to destroy the American company, Starbucks, and Duncan, because communists know how to do capitalism better than Americans. That is like the central position in my hometown of New York City. right now. Here's the TikTok. It's hilarious. Watch this. Follow us up for a second, Nick.

It's a worthy diversion. This should just some red meat for my friend then. Hey guys, companies are getting a $2 cup of communist coffee. So this specific coffee shop has more locations in China than Starbucks does. Um, okay, I'm going to come back to make a video there later. But no, this company went through a $300 million accounting scandal where they fake their profits because capitalism sucks, and then they started paying their workers and putting the money back into the coffee and what actually matters. And now they're more successful than Starbucks. Back in Soho. Of course, this location is right by NYU campus. Should have paid your workers. I think we get the idea. I have a new theory, Ben,

that the Chinese, because I do, I'm with you on the existential threat of that competitor, I have a theory. They're going to try to beat us on capitalism and then use brands, like we've used brands, like Apple and Google, to defeat us. B-Y-D producing cars now for half the price of American cars, and they're shipping them on their own shipping containers, lucking coffee, infecting the U.S. now. And I had a third example of, oh, in TikTok, the example you just gave competing with and using that.

What do you think of my theory, Ben? No, I think that that's totally right. And the truth is that what you're talking about in China, obviously, is in communism. It's state-sponsored corporatism. And so you can pour extraordinary resources into, you know, one path-dependent part of industry. And you could have competing coffee if you decide to subsidize that at extraordinary cost. And then you can undercut the rest of the market. And this is one of the things President Trump is totally right on.

When you talk about the tariff wars, I've always been in favor of tariffing a living shit out of China. I think that's actually quite right. My problem when it comes to the tariffs, I know I'm jumping ahead in the docket here. My problem is that if you're going to do it, what you really ought to be doing, is boxing in China with free trade networks with literally everybody else and exclude China from that network. You have to do all the preliminary steps before you box in China. Otherwise, China is able to sort of climb out the window, which is, I think, what they've done on everything from Nvidia chips to TikTok to their actual tariff rate, which I believe is now lower than the

tariff rate we have against Canada. Let me bring it to you, Freeberg, because I think this is like a super interesting discussion. Our bestie Bill Gurley has a position that, hey, everybody can win. It's not an existential, they win or we win. I mean, obviously, it's a competition, but there could be many winners. What's your take on all this, Dave? And if any. Well, I'm in the place, like I've said before, it's kind of like who's going to win the internet if we said that back in 1996.

Like, no one, quote, wins the internet. It's an open standard. It's a platform. It's an evolution of access for markets, of productivity for the world. I think AI is very similar. I don't think that there's a. You know, there's this concept that you end up in some sort of state of superintelligence that perhaps reigns supreme and creates superiority, but there's many vectors of competition.

So within drone warfare, as an example, there's going to be a massive vector of competition. It's pretty clear that remote autonomous devices are going to be the kind of front lines in battles going forward. And China has both a manufacturing productivity, materials advantage over the United States on that front. So it's not about having the best model. It's about having a supply chain that can support their ambitions in warfare. And similarly in economics or in business, there's many dimensions upon which we're going to have advantage over China. And China may have advantages over us that are going to be enabled, accelerated, or magnified by tools in AI. Actual models, I think, are going to be this continuously kind of evolving set of systems that

it's unclear where things are going to head. But to kind of bring up your point, I do think that the CCP has a unique ability to throttle up and throttle down entrepreneurship to drive productivity in that nation. When they throttle it up, you end up seeing massive gains in individual capital accumulation, which is counter to the Communist Party's intentions. And so then they throttle it back. And as you can see in this image from the Financial Times, this shows the number of companies founded in China by year. It peaked in 2018, which, by the way, aligns pretty well with the peaking of venture capital investment in China from the United States and from VCs around the world. And then it began its rapid decline because there was a set of

policy changes. And you guys may remember, Jack Maude disappeared and these other sorts of things happened around that time. And so there's this challenge to the CCP that resulted and then throttling back the entrepreneurship. I don't think you can have massive crew, natural market progress without having entrepreneurship, without having a more free market. And so they are, I would say, rate limited at this point by this particular chart in terms of their competitiveness. We can argue about their resourcefulness and their ability to do central planning

and central command of the economy. But at the end of the day, much of what brought the Chinese, there was a great podcast on this by the guys from the Brookings Institute years ago where they talk about what got China out of poverty, you know, where their GDP per capita went from whatever it was $3,000 to $30,000 in a very short period of time. And it wasn't the government central planning. It was the entrepreneurship of the peasants

and their ability to kind of self-organize and self-mobilize and build business and create better productivity from the ground up. And it was the individual Chinese citizens that drove that economic boom, not central planning. Central planning had some enabling factors. but that was really important. And so I do think one of the challenges ahead is this entrepreneurship suppression that's manifest.

And Gavin, I'm sure you have a point on this. Yeah, well, I was going to say, Gavin, the East-West Conference that are friends at Koto do was named after like this really amazing boom period we had 15 to 10 years ago before Americans were not allowed to invest in China. And not only that, people had to American companies had to like basically divest. They shut down in China, all the education companies that were very. venture-backed, nationalized those. Jack Ma went for painting lessons, et cetera. So he's an incredible painter right now, by the way. Some of those oil prints are, I think, are going to be much bigger

in their impact than Alibaba. But, Gavin, you would, I think, agree, like we, an investment in China, we were on a really great track that got shut down. Do you think when super intelligence comes that that is the race? Because we're looking at general intelligence, you know, a lawyer, an accountant, a developer. But super intelligence, I think, is where people get to the existential piece. Yeah? Yeah, well, they for sure believe it's existential. I have it on good authority that if you work for deep sea, you are not allowed to be in

the same room as an American while you're in China. And you have kind of a CCP minder with you most of the time. And that's kind of astonishing. So they believe it's existential. The second thing I would say is, I do think they are making an effort to throttle it up. You know, Xi Jinping had a dinner with kind of, you know, 20 entrepreneurs. I think Pony Ma from Tencent was there. You know, the Deep Seek CEO was there. But they kind of gave pride of place to the people who were making physical goods plus Deep Seek and maybe deemphasize

some of the social networks. And the last thing, I would say, just a stat that just builds on what David just said about, you know, how entrepreneurship amongst kind of like rural Chinese is kind of what jump started China's economy. I think towards the end of the Soviet Union, they could not produce enough food using kind of socialist systems. So they let two percent of the acreage in the Soviet Union kind of like be, you know, more entrepreneurial and self-organized. And that two percent of the acreage produced a majority of their food, you know, just kind of shows the superiority of kind of capitalism to socialism in a world in which they're a world in which they're resource constraints. What's better, Phil? Capitalism and democracy, capitalism and communism.

You know, long term, I think we all agree. We have the winning combination, I hope. But in the short term, this sounds like an incredible advantage to put your finger on the scale and say, hey, BYD cars can lose money forever. We just want to kill the American car industry. We want to kill the German car industry. Well, first of all, nothing can lose money forever. But the one thing I think is implicit about Dave and Gavin said is you need rule of law. You can't just have innovation. You need rule of law. And it's yet to be shown that China can do that in a way that will create long-term success absent government propping it up. And I'll give you an example. We've had factories in China, one-making windblades. And basically, every day was renegotiation on terms, no matter what you

want to do. And if you didn't control the chop, the thing that made the stamp, you didn't actually control the factory. That is not a long-term recipe for success. And I think eventually, no matter how strong the centralized government is, you've got to have a rule of law if you really want to see decades and decades of innovation. Okay, Gavin, go ahead. Just a hundred percent agree, you need rule of law. It's essential for, you know, any system of government, but particularly for capitalism. I mean, in some ways, capitalism is the rule of law with private property. But I would say, going back to 2018, being like kind of glory days for China, they were working. You know, these kind of internet entrepreneurs, they did create kind of the only kind of

internet companies that were capable of challenging American internet companies, not just in China, but globally. And obviously, most American internet companies aren't allowed to participate in China. But, you know, the problem was those, those, you know, CEOs, became so powerful that they were started to feel comfortable challenging the CCP and you know jack ma made some comments in 2000 i don't remember exactly when that we just vaguely critical and you know that was it you know then he disappears okay can we haven can we stop with it hey wait hold on a second pull up my hold on pull up this picture Gavin you keep saying he disappeared he opted in to oil painting this beautiful painting which jack ma did here went out auction for five point

million dollars to an environmental nonprofit. I mean, he didn't just disappear for saying that the old people in the got, I think the quote was something like, oh, we got to pull it up, that the government was a little old and didn't get it. Ben, you've been a little quiet here, but in politics is your wheelhouse. Question for you, we've seen a centralization of authority in the federal government and we're sitting here talking about, hey, central government plus capital and doesn't work as well as rule of law, do you worry sometimes, hey, Biden wanted to use executive orders to do the student loan thing? And, you know, Trump obviously has taken tariffs. And there's a big question, maybe the tariffs are my understanding is they're supposed to reside with Congress. And there's a lawsuit about

that. Maybe that goes back to the Congress. He has been centralizing. Biden was centralizing. Even Obama was centralizing and consolidating power. Is that necessary for us to compete? Because we're kind of seeing overtone overtures like that, even at our AI. Summit two weeks ago, there was this point that, you know, Sachs has made on this podcast and the president made, which is we have to have federal AI legislation. We cannot allow the state, you know, states have any say in AI, the most important technology in the world. I'm kind of torn about that. So I'm curious what you think of centralization occurring here and then the bigger picture with China. Yeah, I mean, I think that when it comes to sort of

the bigger picture, the temptation in politics is always to look at, again, corporate states, which always get out of the box really, really quickly because they look good. It's like you can mobilize an enormous number of resources on this one target. I mean, what capitalism does, of course, it allows you to mobilize extraordinary resources across a wide range of targets, but corporatism allows the government to basically put you over one target and one target alone. And if you're just looking at that target, it looks great at the very beginning. And this is true for Italy.

When Mussolini took over, this is true actually for Hitler's Germany at the very beginning, economically speaking, when you were seeing extraordinary rates of growth. Corporatism starts to look really good, particularly in a messy democratic system like ours, where the human beings, you know, at the top, don't have full control. I think one of the things that I think is frightening to people like me about AI is because you are seeing such a consolidation of AI. Yes, extraordinary spending, but that extraordinary spending is relegated to a relatively small number of companies, again, and not just that, you're seeing, it's so much spending

going to one thing. And so the race for super intelligence that you're talking about, which China clearly, Gavin is totally correct, sees as adversarial. You know, if they get there first, then corporatism wins. And so the temptation is to sort of imitate that from our side. And maybe you do have to imitate that. Maybe it's more like, maybe it's more like Manhattan Project for AI than it is like a market-driven thing. If you actually do see it as a true existential threat, and we should treat it more like a military program than like anything else.

I think the temptation is to extend that across the rest of the economy to industrial policy, to stealing copper tariffs, to everything else. And as far as sort of the federal AI versus state AI thing, I think that may be slightly a red herring just because what you're really talking about there is not the federal government usurping state authority. What you're talking about is the federal government trying to preempt state authoritarianism. I think that's, I think, what David is pushing is sort of the idea that the federal government ought to prevent the state of California from filling the field with some really bad AI legislation that essentially destroys competition along all the various players.

Good, Phil. Yeah. Get in there. I have a question as an investor, not a policy guy. I don't quite get Democrat versus Republican on the topic of how they give support to the private sector and what counts as picking winners and what doesn't count as picking winners. When I look at this administration of the previous, I'm not sure I see, I think they're both very activist, they both kind of see to pick winners and losers.

And I feel like that distinction's kind of lost a little bit. Is that, does that make any sense to you? Like, one had the IRA, but then the other has like rare earths or this or that. Like, it's very hard. When they switch like that, Ben, it's really hard to know where solid ground is as an investor. I mean, listen, I totally agree with you on that. And I do think that the centralization of power in the federal government and the choosing of the winners and the losers over the course of the last several decades, actually, has been really denigrating for private industry. I mean, I'd prefer that nobody was picking winners and losers.

But I think that, you know, if you basically are now relegated to a choice, between the winners that are picked by the Trump administration and the winners picked by the Biden administration, you know, from a political point of view, I'm going to pick the winners picked by the Trump administration. I think they're doing a better job picking the winners, but just on a principled level and a general market level, I prefer that nobody be doing these sort of subsidies. I don't like industrial, I don't like centralized planning and central industrial policy this way.

So let me just, I think I agree with you almost 80%. And David, that's where I think I disagree with both a little bit. The subsidies, right? have really helped solar, wind, EV, and other industries outside of energy as well. So I think what I would love to see is rational subsidies that consistently last through Republican and Democratic administrations. And we had that a little bit with Bush and Clinton, with some of the renewable stuff, David, like Governor Bush put in wind requirements in Texas that carry through.

But if we keep flipping back and forth, we inhibit. one of our greatest strengths, which is our technology and innovation. And Gavin, I don't be it. Freiber wants to get in this. Go ahead. Great point, Phil, by the way. Here's a counter argument I'd make. The subsidies, while they may have benefited those two particular industries,

created a financial disincentive for investing in nuclear. And so there's always a loser. And the loser isn't always necessarily the target. The target was oil and coal or oil and gas and coal or whatever it was, carbon-based energy systems. That was the target when there were subsidies for solar and wind was let's accelerate these deployments and get this market to start moving. It does two things. One is it doesn't force a natural market dynamic where you have to ultimately get the cost of solar or the cost of wind turbine production low enough that it makes economic sense from an

ROIC basis that investors would natively want to make that investment. They're making the investment because the government's paying half the cost. And the second thing is it then makes nuclear non-competitive. And therefore, the R&D investment dollars that were supposed to go into nuclear that would have allowed us to accelerate to Gen 4 systems, which, by the way, China has now done, went away. And so now we are several decades behind where China is with respect to nuclear, which is ultimately the most scalable energy production system we have. Phil, go ahead. And then Phil, I want to get through a couple of the charts you took the time together to put together here as we wrap energy. Before we go into energy, I do have a politics kind of question. I would love to

opposed to Ben, if that's okay? Yeah, please. So my parents were visiting me for the last week, and we had a lot of lively political debates. And, you know, this trend of the imperial president in America, you know, which I think really accelerated with Biden and now is, you know, further accelerating with Trump, their hypothesis, which I think is correct, but I'm curious for Ben's, is that is a function of the fact that Congress, by and large, can no longer effectively legislate.

late. Every once in a while, they'll do the IRA or the one big beautiful bill. But by and large, Congress is not doing their job. So for 30 or 40 years, a lot of the governance was done actually by the judicial branch. And if we have to choose by being governed between the judicial branch, which is unelected and the executive branch, which is at least elected and accountable, I would rather have an imperial president who we can judge and vote out of office than an imperial judiciary. Just curious for your thoughts, Ben. I mean, I obviously think that's true, but I think the trend goes back, you know, more than a few decades. I think that if you're really going to go to the deep roots of this, you have to go back to the roots of the administrative state in the

early 20th century, because the reality is the reason you have an imperial presidency is because the federal government just does way too much. I mean, the federal government is just way too big. They're way too intrusive. They're way too powerful. And so once that becomes a giant grab bag of cash, then whoever controls the federal government wins, and now if you're a legislator and you can kick all responsibility for your policymaking over to some unelected bureaucrat in the executive branch. That's precisely what you're going to do. The founders game for ambition checking ambition. They never really game for people trying to kick responsibility from one branch to the other. They thought the other way. They thought Congress is

going to defend its own prerogative against imperial overstep by the presidency. And instead, thanks to the administrative state, Congress people and senators started to realize, hey, what if I just pass like this very vague omnibus package and then I kick it over to a bunch of regulators? And the regulators do all the work and take all the heat. And I can go back to my hometown and tell them how much money I brought home. Yeah. It's fascinating. 100%. And when you kick it back to home, I don't know if you guys saw this town hall that went explosive. There's been a number of them, Ben. You must have covered it. While you're pulling it up, I do want to say that I do think we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. That is to say, the government and a number of

government employees and career civil servants are doing God's work, whether it's on safety or defense or intelligence. And what I don't love is a tone of critical, criticizing lifelong government workers when none of us would really do that job at the pay they're taking. And maybe I don't mean to make it, let me not say the people on this call I don't know as well, but many of my friends. and I do think there needs to be a beat for those people that are doing incredible work for a little or no recognition or pay. And we can't pay with too broad a brush. I'm not blaming.

I'm not going to worry about that. I just say we don't hear enough of that. I'm not blaming the bureaucrats who are there and are given responsibilities to do a thing. I'm blaming Congress for having kicked them the authority in the first place. If you're going to place, you know, blame with somebody, you have to give it to the branch that actually abdicated its duty and decided to construct an entirely different branch and then throw off all all accountability what's a solution there ben is it the american party doing what the tea party did getting you know or the america party i guess is what elon calls it's not american the america

party saying hey you know what forget about the presidency i mean Elon did that work pretty effectively i think we'd all agree he had as significant if not the deciding factor and getting Trump reelected, probably also something to do with the other, who the Democrats ran, putting all that aside if an America, if the America party or another party were able to secure a couple of Senate seats, a couple of House seats, could that reverse this trend where maybe the House takes back a little responsibility in your mind, Ben? Is that a, is that a strategy worth pursuing for moderates? I think that actually this is not going to get solved at the federal level. I think what's actually going to happen is that the federal government is going to lock up and it's

going to be essentially rotating elected quasi-dictators until the end of time, except that the American people are going to be unhappy with that. And you're seeing already more authority now kind of being taken up by state actors, which is why you're seeing a necessity for things like federal legislation on AI to preempt the states. What you've seen over the course, you saw this during the Biden administration a lot. I moved from California, which is obviously a very left-governed state to Florida, which is very right-governance state. But the difference in governance are massive. And you're seeing governors pick up the mantle of saying, okay, well, the federal government is unworkable. They're not doing what we want to do. So we're going to do our own thing down here.

We're going to challenge the federal government a wide variety of ways. And I think that's actually the proper solution. That's actually a reversion to what the founders wanted in the first place when the federal government was essentially so small that you could walk into the White House and just talk to the president. And state governments were the ones with the vast majority of authority. So trying to solve it, what I would love to see for the America Party actually is to instead of try to take over the federal government, try to take over some state legislatures. That's actually an easier lift in some ways. They try to win a governorship. Try to actually do some of these, you know, libertarian-minded policies at the state

level, which is where most of the power resides and then bleed that up into the federal government as an ethos. It seems to me like nobody's happy. If you, if you missed it, there was this like crazy town hall. It occurred in Nebraska. And everybody was upset. Freiburg, I wanted to make sure you saw this. I should have sent it to you earlier. not sure we talked about in the group chat, but you had people who were at once upset in Nebraska about the government spending too much, then not the Medicare cuts, Medicaid cuts. People were universally on both sides absolutely infuriated at the state of affairs. Nobody's happy now. Freeburg, your thoughts on this sort of, you kind of predicted it with the socialist side,

but it does feel like everybody's unhappy. My prediction will ring pruer than any of us hope. Socialism will sweep over this nation, I fear, and I think it's a cancer. And it's going to be worse than what we saw with woke stuff. It's going to be just like I'm losing out on everything. I mean, people are stagnant in wage growth. There is no one in the United States, including wealthy people who haven't taken significant notice of the increased cost of groceries and the increased cost of buying home goods. Jason, I'm assuming

you must have noticed as well how much groceries have gone up in price. Everyone's rent goes up every year. There was this TikTok rant that went viral this week about this woman that's like, why does my rent go up every year? My salary doesn't go up. We're in this really difficult moment because of what Ben pointed out, which is that we've basically funded the government to do everything for us. And by my calculation from last year, I think nearly half of Americans are employed directly or indirectly by the government at this point. And as a result, because of that and the inefficiency of government allocation of capital, everything inflates in cost. And we're entering this era where some people make the joke that the train has left the station. You know, it's

Let's finish up with these two charts here, Phil, on energy and then I want to get into terror. I just want to say one thing, David, I still think when it comes to innovation, rule of law, capitalism, freedom we are the best at it i think that there's still gravity there's still gravity phil at the end of the day arithmetic is arithmetic when jimmy carter lost the presidency there was 12 years of republicans and then there was democrats it may be that socialist right i don't think socialism ever the united states the way left let's say the left side of the democratic party wins for 12 years david maybe i don't see that but if you want to see that you can, but it will swing back. This country is incredibly resilient, and I have complete faith in

that resilience. Love it. Can I just add optimism? Hold on, let me just get these two charts out of the way real quick. Finish up the energy charts here, and then we'll continue the discussion as we pivot over to tariffs, which is obviously related to all this. All right. All right. So David, yes. I want to go back to this because I think I can't, I want to, I can't emphasize enough how much I love you and think how smart you are. And I also think the last argument made was absolute bullshit. Regarding what? The idea that the subsidies that went to wind and solar were at the expense of nuke is nutty.

And let me tell you why. The issue with nukes, and you say this so wonderfully on China, the issue with nukes is regulation and what Ben was saying over, we're stifling innovation there. And we've got to figure out a way. the Secretary of Energy and the President have done a great job of this to rationalize the regulatory framework around nuclear power. That what's bothered, what Hertz Nukes is not their cost per kilowatt subsidy. It's the massive amounts of bureaucracy around them.

So if you were to give the nuclear power industry five or ten cents a kilowatt hour, that doesn't help them with their big problem. So, and wind and solar, that's what you gave them. And the sizes are different as well, and ones are distributed resource and ones are centralized. So I guess what I'd say is, I don't think we have to treat them the same. I'm 100% with you that we should be subsidizing nuclear power. It's clean. It's baseload.

It's reliable. We can do small module reactors. They can be used for data centers, all of the above. We don't have to pit our children against each other. And in this case, they really aren't against each other. And the chart you're showing. Explain the chart you just showed. Sorry, why should we, and then I have a second question for you, which is why should we subsidize nuclear when we have hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by the most powerful Mag 7 companies in the world and sovereign wealth funds who want to invest in it?

Why did the taxpayers have to pay for that? You can get to that in a second, but walk up me through this global electricity generation chart you pulled up here, just real quick. So what this chart shows is how quickly electricity has come on from solar, the growth rate of, of solar. And so, actually, Kevin, there may be a chat GPT chart on the uptick in AI, but what you see is the yellow, the hyperbolic growth of solar. And so this goes to the fact of it really has been a success, cost rate on 80 or 90 percent, and it's beginning to grow.

And I agree with David, eventually you have to have storage with solar. So you can't quite match gas to solar, but we've had incredible success reducing costs of solar and wind and incredible growth. And so that's what the result of those incentives have been. It's been successful that way. And now the second chart here, the OBB chart. The OBB chart, this just goes to show that when you take away incentives, you lose some generation.

And so the point of this chart is if we really need all we can eat on energy for artificial intelligence. And if artificial intelligence, the race is the, you know, race for national security and dominance in the world, this is saying we're taking a step backwards on this supply. And again, it's not either or, David. I would say do as much solar and wind as you can, as much SMRs as you can, do as much energy to make us a dominant player in artificial intelligence as well as other things. Freebro, your response. Sorry, that's what I'd say.

No problem. Freeberg, your response. Yeah, so again, I think the point I was trying to make, Phil, is by driving the private market capital into solar and wind, because it is now discounted, so you get a high rate of return by applying your capital there, you're not likely to put that capital in the development or the extension of nuclear technology. And the lack of investment in improving nuclear technology, yes, you could argue there's regulatory burdens and so on. but it's largely been inhibited because there have been these other subsidized paths to market with energy. And as a result, we missed a window to catch up to Gen 4, which is just so everyone understands what that means. These are these very clean, meltdown-proof nuclear energy production systems that are being deployed at scale in China now, and the U.S. doesn't have any, and we have no path to getting these deployed. Secretary Wright's going to speak at the Allen Summit. He has said

the development of energy, that in the United States, we are likely going to have a Gen 4 reactor deployed or started production in 18 months. But we'll see. But we are so far behind because no capital went into it. And that's because the capital was redirected into these subsidized markets. And that's the disincentive that arises when the government gets involved in markets. The government creates these financial incentives that, number one, create bubbles in those markets. And number two, take away the incentives for capital to flow to the best path for long-term returns, which is what's happened in energy in the United States. Yeah.

So in the small module reactor, Gen 4 stuff, we as well of others have investments there. A great company we like called X Energy. It's a popular book there, Jason. But I think it's fair to say that the money flowed into those sectors when the hyperscalers committed to them and showed they were serious about the demand side from the private sector. and there's been a catalyst for the administration because it's had four or five executive orders trying to get rid of the bureaucracy.

So I guess I would say, David, in my experience as an investor in space, the dollars flowed when the market spoke and the hypers said they wanted and were behind the SMRs. And second, it was further invigorated when, as Ben says, the government took a step back and stopped being a yoke on the industry. Neither of those have anything to do with subsidies to solar and wind. Can I just say one thing about socialism? Because I thought it was a really important thing that David said. Sure.

But it's inevitable. I would just say to me, so much of it comes down to Mom Donnie. I disagree with every one of his policies. Well, admittedly, they're dumb. They're dumb. But yeah, I mean, they're obviously stupid. But if you have not watched him, he is an incredibly charismatic, effective politician. Yes.

And absence. As has been every socialist revolutionary leader. For sure. But just, I think the key question will be one, you know, unless Adams or Cuomo pulls out, he's almost certainly going to win. And then if he wins, you know, does he go through with these policies? Because if he goes through with them, they're going to be epic failures. We know what happens when you defund the police.

You know, there is a government run grocery store somewhere in Kansas. And it's a disaster. So they won't work. And I think that'll be a quick. that'll be like a quick end to socialism. I disagree with this. I mean, sorry, I'll finish. No, no, no.

Yeah, yeah. Please go. Here's the problem. It'll take a year, two years for those policies to actually hit and destroy all of New York and it'll be like the end of planet of the apes and we'll all be wandering on the beach

looking up at the Statue of Liberty asking why we blew it up. But, you know, I, but the problem is... You did it, you madmen, you did it. You finally did it. Oh, crazy bastards. You did social. in New York City, the financial capital of the world.

But the bigger problem right now, and this is why this does go to tariffs. It also goes to crypto policy. It goes to the, it goes to AI. Right now, the kind of normie in America, who doesn't know that much about AI, doesn't understand how crypto works, doesn't understand even how financial markets work. Right now, they're all willing to kind of stand back and say, okay, well, I trust President Trump, I trust the administration, I don't want full-scale redistributionism and government control because, you know, things are kind of okay.

They're kind of okay. If things take a downturn, then the backlash is going to be a lot stronger than anything that any of us can say about the failures of Zorn Mamdani. Because what it's going to be is, look, the rich got richer and we got poorer, and it's going to be a redux of 2007, 2008, but with a much even further to the left than Obama ever was. And that I'm deeply afraid of because. So if the market crashes, if unemployment goes up, then this exacerbates and makes the

point. And for a socialist, all you have to do is say, don't you want free X, Y, and Z, whatever the popular thing is a free phone, less rent, free buses. It's the easiest pitch in the world. Yeah. Cheaper food, free food. I mean, and if you fall for it. But it takes a while the self-correct from socialism, too, right? I mean, like this idea that we kind of immediately flip back after you see Zornbaum, Don, fail or something. I mean, San Francisco has yet to have a Republican governor. They've been trying this crap for several decades. I'm from L.A. I spent my entire life in L.A. The last Republican mayor of L.A. was Richard Reardon. in. I mean, like, you can always blame those crazy, those financiers who got rich and they

all moved down to Florida to avoid our tax rates. And that's just really cleaning out the base of New York and all the rest of it. To follow up on Ben, I'm sorry to interrupt, but like something that's really important about what you just said is it's not a binary switch that gets flipped, you're socialist or you're not. What happens is these policies where you have big government policies that provide greater and greater economic, financial, and social support to the population, are slow-burning policies. The big policies in the federal government started 50 years ago,

and they've gotten bigger and bigger. It's a snowball effect because when they're not working, if I'm not getting enough money in the food stamp program, for example, the solution isn't, hey, let's cut the food stamp program. The solution is, let's make the food stamp program bigger. When rent control didn't work in San Francisco

to bring housing prices down, the solution was, let's get the government to start building housing. The solution is never, let's reduce the government's role, the solution is unidirectional, which is to get the government to do more to solve the failings of the policies. So whatever policies he doesn't act, if they don't work, the answer and the response from that socialist-type movement will be, let's do more, let's have the government do more. And then you increase the burden on the people because you

end up increasing taxation, increasing regulatory burdens. And as he said in one of his interviews, ultimately you seize the means of production. And that's the end. goal of his government. It's so simple to solve this problem. I hate to make it too difficult here, but if we had the super funds like in Australia and people had the directional ownership and Social Security gets retired for people actually having, you know, being in the market and we just crack the regulations on housing and build much more housing, this will change everything. The housing issue is so oppressive to this generation and the cost of their education is so oppressive. Now, they have opted out of education. They're starting to look at and go, I'm going to

UT. I'm going to be in a state where I can pay, you know, 50K in total for my degree. So young people are getting smart about this. Thank goodness. And they're going for trade degrees where plumbers and electricians are making 100, 150K a year. But you have to solve housing. I have watched this so, so acutely in my move to Austin, I suppose, Ben, when you moved to Nashville in Florida, you saw the same thing with your teams. When people don't have to spend 60% of their nut on their housing, their anxiety level goes down massively. And when they feel they have ownership in a home, it goes down massively.

Why we cannot fix this problem, why neither president just says, I am going to make housing, when I run for president, president jason.com, I am going to just make housing my thing. We're building 10 million homes and the government's going to build two new cities and we're going to make housing affordable. Although I got to tell you, you know, one of the things, I think, this goes to a deeper malaise actually, and this is maybe just a human problem. One of my kind of favorite charts, it's a sad chart, but one of my favorite charts with regard to the American populace is geographic mobility over time. How much people move? Because what you actually see is that that has

wildly decreased in the United States. There's this impression that everybody, you know, now, because you can get on a plane, you can go somewhere and you can get a truck and no one moves now. People basically, I mean, I think one reason is because originally people were moving from, you know, rural to cities, and now they're in the cities, and so they're to stay in the cities. But I think part of it is also, again, because of those government dependency programs, once you feel like the government is going to step in and solve your problem in New York, as opposed to you having to, you know, go cross a mountain and live in a, you know, live in a cabin somewhere, then you tend to stay. And you do that enough, broadly speaking, on a federal level. And what you end up with is people who really believe. And I think that the vice president has grown a lot of things, but he made a statement in his RNC address that they really kind of forcibly struck me, which he suggested that the American dream was to live and die where your grandparents lived and died. And I thought to myself, that actually is not traditionally kind of the American dream.

The American dream, that's kind of a European dream, actually. The traditional American dream for most people was cross an ocean, go to a place you don't know. Yeah, go west. Right, cross a mountain. build, I mean, De Tocqueville talks about this in democracy in America, that Americans were famous for basically building these kind of ramshackle huts, trying to set up shop. And if it didn't work, they would just abandon it in the forest and then move on to the next place where they could build a ramshackle hut and try it and try it again. And so that's sort of innovation and entrepreneurship and this idea

that you have to move in order to succeed and that you might actually have to, you know, move from the city that you grew up in and go find a job somewhere in North Dakota. I was asked a question by one of my listeners recently. And they said, well, you know, you're always talking about this stat that they're more open jobs and there are people applying for the open jobs. But what about me in my industry? And I was saying, well, yeah, but it doesn't apply to every single industry. That's an aggregate statistic. And so when you talk about job mobility and people being able to stick and move and change what they're doing in the marketplace, if the American people don't keep up with that, and if they're unwilling to move to places

where the real estate is cheaper, then you are going to get more expensive real estate. Maybe you can build your way out of that, or maybe you can't. But it used to be that if you had a problem with the housing prices in New York, you moved somewhere else. Yeah, you went to San Diego or something. You pioneered, you know, a new area. And, well, I'm seeing that amongst a lot of young people and they're getting the benefit. Let's talk about tariffs. And so we'll get into the more specific granular ones that we've been dealing with over the last 10 days, but just big picture, here's what's happened. It seems to be the Trump administration has done what they said they were going to do. And we'll talk about the ramifications of this, but tariff revenue was up to 30 billion in July, 127 billion

so far in 2025. And obviously, this is three months of data, basically. Here's your chart. In June, the trade deficit shrank to 60 billion or so. And that's the lowest since June of 2023. Now, by doing this, of course, inflation, which is a trailing indicator, could pop up at any time. We've seen a small tick, like 10% up in inflation. And if we cut rates, in September, October, November time period, and maybe 50 bibs comes off this. Inflation is definitely going to go up. People have more money. More investment goes around.

We'll probably see a three handle again. So we're going to trade one for the other thoughts. And then here's your polymarket. We made a polymarket here on the pod. And polymarket is the official marketplace of the all-in podcast. Shout out to my guy, Shane. Let's go next. How much revenue will the U.S. raise from tariffs in 2025?

Here's a polymarket. And right now it's looking like. like the number is 200 to 500 billion, 86% of people are believing that will be the case. And then here's ours. I had said, will tariffs generate greater than 250 billion in 2025? We're sitting around 15%. Maybe this is free money in this polymarket. And that was one I created.

Gentlemen, who has an opinion on the tariff policy and the revenue it's bringing in? It's going to be hard to get to that number just because the tariffs only really kicked in. middle of the year. You know, 30 billion, that's $360 billion annualized, right, bang in the middle of the estimate, but you didn't have a lot for the first six months. Yeah. Maybe you hit the low end of that with 30 or 40 billion for the last six months, but we'll see. But for 2026, that does seem reasonable. 250, we're halfway there. We're at 125, so we'll see if they can keep it up. And then what the impact is, Phil, what are your thoughts on this tariff policy and the revenue it's bringing in, is the juice worth the squeeze?

I assume the president, wouldn't the president say he already hit it because he got 500 from the Japanese? Reports have come out that that might, the Japanese perceive that as a loan, maybe, or they're going to invest in it? So maybe, and none of that has been officially papered. That was both sides in the EU deal were also handshakes. So let's keep that in mind. These things still have to be papered.

And then there's this potential that tariff. powers could reside in the house, and Trump will not be able to do any of this, and it all gets reversed in our very polarizing time. So I'm just going to speak about the part of this that I have a little bit of understanding on. Let's say you tariff solar panels coming from the Chinese. You could do that for a variety of legitimate reasons, equalizing playing fields, et cetera, but you are, at the end of the day, increasing your energy costs.

So to me, what I struggle with is globalization and throughout my lifetime has been a net plus to the world in the United States. We've now increasingly focused on supply chain security and at the expense of globalization. I don't know, and I'm not smart enough to know whether that's a long term or good trend. And so that's what I can't quite play out of my guess. In fairness, nobody knows this is a complete reversal of what we're done. Ben, your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a lot of triumphalism a little bit early on this policy. Give it six months and see where we're at.

I think one of the indicators that's sort of fascinating is the lack of inflation because obviously a lot of people were expecting that inflation was going to pop as soon as the tariffs kind of hit. And it hasn't been a lot of time, but one of the kind of problematic indicators is maybe inflation didn't pop because demand dropped. And so what you're actually watching is a temporary spike in the kinds of revenue that are coming in via the tariffs because it's almost a one-time expenditure and then the demand is going to drop. And so what you will see is the tariff revenue coming into the country go down, demand dropping, inflation coming down, and that's when you will

see the Federal Reserve step in and lower those interest rates in order to sort of artificially juice the economy. I'm, I do not, I understand, I think, kind of what they're trying to do sort of. I mean, and I think they're trying to do multiple things that once I'm in conflict with one another, because you can, you can champion the amount of revenue that we're raising off of tariffs, but you can't do that at the same time that you're championing reshoring, because if you reshore, then that revenue is going to go away, presumably, right? You're not going to be buying product from overseas. You're going to be buying product domestically, and then no one is going to be shipping anything here in the first place. Those

two things are eventually mutually exclusive. And then if you're doing all of that while attempting to also, you know, either box in China simultaneously, but kind of not in China, it seems very confounding. And the thing that I'm getting from most of the investors that I'm talking to is just confusion at this point. It's just a feeling as though we're kind of riding in choppy waters and there's no sort of stability or stasis. And so I'd like to see something, something, anything, kind of sit for a few months so we know what the hell is going on. Why is Trump so sure this is going to work then in your mind? What's the most charitable interpretation of this? Or is this, you know, he's living in a different paradigm. One might

say, an older paradigm of manufacturing in the U.S. When it comes to President Trump in the economy, he's always been more of a zero-sum thinker than a sort of, you know, grow-the-pie thinker. And so when he looks at tariffs, he says somebody's winning, somebody's losing. This is why his tariff rates are based on trade deficits as opposed to actual tariff rates, right? He was saying, we're going to do reciprocal tariffs. And then we looked at that big board he was holding up and it had literally nothing to do with the tariff rates that Vietnam had on the United States.

It had to do with the trade deficit that we had with Vietnam. It's why we just hit the Swiss with a 39% tariff, and all they produce, as Orson Welles famously says in the third man, is cuckoo clocks. Like, what exactly are we doing here? It has nothing to do with the actual tariff rates. I think to have some chocolate. I've never had. Chocolate, Swiss watches and cuckoo clocks, right?

I think Swiss is made here. If you have that cocoa, you're watched. Yes. So, Phil, you're in the targets. You're the target. Yeah, exactly. Not just nailing the Swiss here. But is it, but, you know, I think one of the things that he thinks is,

okay, we're getting back what's fairly ours. We're forcing other countries, and you can see how other countries have picked up on this, which is why you're getting Japan saying, at least titularly, we're going to put a bunch of money into the United States so he can get a headline and a win. But it's not a sort of systems approach to the economy. It's more of kind of an ad hoc approach to winning individual battles. And I think that that's maybe conducive to short-term headlines. I think there are basically three systemic changes that he's making. Two of them are good and one of them I have a problem with. One of them is insuring low taxes, which of course I'm very much a fan of. The second is deregulation. Again, big fan. And I think both of those

are pushing investors to feel some sense of solidity with regards to his approach to business. And then the third is the tariff war, which I think is actually creating a pretty significant dampening effect on economic growth right now. And we'll say things like the stock market is at record highs. I mean, effectively the S&P 500 right now, or the Dow Jones Industrial average anyway, is currently riding at almost precisely what it was when he took off. I mean, we're essentially flat since January. And so one way to look at that is look at all of the insanity or, you know, heterodoxy, to put it kind of like, that's been inflicted on the economy and we're still sort of flat.

The other way to look at that is, what if he hadn't done that? Where would we be if we weren't in the middle of a gigantic trade war? And he had to regulated and he had done differential tax policy. The economy would be ripping even more, more jobs. I mean, he's just even more do this, right? Stephen more got up in that presser yesterday. And he held up a chart showing how President Trump's economy did in the first term versus Biden during his term. And he was saying that, you know, the median wages were exploding under you and they weren't doing anything under Biden.

I mean, I think there's a reason why it was not a chart for what's going on in this term so much. That's the big difference between term one and term two. We did lower tax and deregulation. We did not do a gigantic historic trade war. Additionally, India was hit with a combined 50% tariff that's going to take effect later this month. If it does, a lot of this is fluid. As Ben says on his podcast a lot, Trump says a lot of things. That's kind of Ben's rule number one.

Mine is always wait 72 hours and see if it's still something he cares about. 25% of that 50% tariff is for what Trump called unfair trade practices. I'm trying to figure out what those unfair trade practices are. It's not exactly specifically noted. And then 25%, this is super notable. And as you know, Trump, Ben and I, both the three of us all are insane. that, hey, maybe Russia shouldn't invade democracies. And so that is a punishment for India buying Russian oil, which is interesting that he's now, you know, basically taking the Biden playbook,

which is, hey, we're going to provide arms on a loan lease. They're going to have to buy them to Ukraine. And we're going to start penalizing people for buying oil from Russia. I'm curious, Phil or Gavin, what you think of the tariffs overall. all confounding to you, you're in favor of them, you're willing to see what happens a year from now? And what happens, Phil, if it doesn't work? What will this do to Trump's second term legacy if we're seeing here a year from now and it doesn't work? Or if we're sitting here, conversely, a year from now, and hey, he's printing money and we're getting all this incredible investment end, maybe some of this money goes to pay down the deficit or we're neutral,

which is kind of their overall plan. They think these tariffs can help us become neutral in our deficit accumulation. I'm clearly not a tariff expert, but I would say he does, I think one thing about these tariffs, this goes to David's point on government and socialism, seeing a president take action in a way that's never been done before, whether it's Doge or tariffs or tweeting, I think does, even for a diehard Democrat like me, it's refreshing. And David, maybe it goes to show that the inevitable creep of government doesn't have to happen. And so even from a Republican, I find that part refreshing.

It's a refreshing thing to say. The flip side of it is, he does seem to sometimes it seems like there's spaghetti being thrown against the wall or positions or averse very quickly. And we don't know what the long-term effects. You say, Jason, of course we don't know, but there are a lot of people, some of your co-hosts, who aren't willing to concede, we don't know. And if he's wrong, and if the economy is in terrible shape in the latter part of his term, the whole world is going to be upside down.

I mean, Gavin, I almost think of it as like, you know, an out of consensus view on where this stock would end. I mean, if we have low stock market, high unemployment, high inflation, then things don't look is good for J.D. or Rubio, and we'll be in a different world. I hope, David, not in a world of socialism, but that's what's at stake here, I think, Jason. If it doesn't work out, then handicap it. Chances it works out, you know, chances it doesn't. Give me a percentage, Phil. And then, Gavin, you're giving the percentage. I mean, I guess I'm going to say 50-50, which sounds wimpy, but it's pretty damn scary that it's 50-50 on such big things. I just don't know what the

attending consequences are. I'm just not smart enough to see it. Well, Gavin, your thoughts? I mean, we are in uncharted territory. We haven't had a tariff war like this in, I don't know, 50, 100 years. When was the last one? Well, I'm sure Ben knows, but Gavin, it's actually a higher average tariff right than Smoot-Hawley now. So more than 100 years. Yeah. A hundred years. So to say we're in uncharted territory, there's nobody on the planet who was an adult when that happened. So we are, literally, we have nobody with first-hand experience here. Gavin, chances this blows up, chances it is brilliant, handicap it on a percentage basis. You're being forced. You're on all in. You got a state of specific. I'm not letting you off the hook. Predicting the economy is a really

hard thing to do. I would just say he showed his hand in April. You know, he looked into the abyss. And if it is clearly not working, he showed that he will change it. And then I think he also kind of learned, you know, just that other countries, you know, specifically China, they do have leverage, especially with these rare earths. I just worry that, you know, business, capitalism, economic growth, it does best with stable policy. And I think he really enjoys headlines. And, you know, something is definitely not a headline unless it's a change. And so I do think for this to be a success, you know, his presidency to be a success, at some point, we, We do need stability.

And this goes to, you know, what Philosa says goes to my point about it, it's better to have an imperial president than imperial judiciary. If his policies work, great. They'll be continued. If they don't work, well, we'll try something else. So what do you think? 50-50. Are you in the 50-50 camp?

This is going to work, not work, coin toss for you? I think he's, I am inclined to think that he is much more sensitive to the market. then he lets on. I mean, I don't want to use that. I don't want to do the taco then because I think that's used to provoke him. Yeah, for sure. And that's not smart to do with him. For sure.

I think just to say he is thoughtful, I'm going to say, he's flexible. He's flexible. He's flexible. Thank you. He's thoughtful about the market reaction. He's responsive. If it's not working, he'll change. Just the question is, if it's not working, does he change quickly enough?

Got it. So you're speeding down this highway. Can you not go off? the cliff. Is there enough room to break? Freiburg, your thoughts on this? I'm going to wrap there, and then we'll go on to our next topic. I'll give you final word of Freeberg. I've spoken a lot on tariffs. I'm good. You're good? So what is your general sense of the state of it now? It feels like we're in the end game and then there was one thing actually I'll bring up Freeberg, get your reaction to.

He did say when he was giving his keynote two weeks ago, you know, I don't know if you guys saw the one where he thanked me. I don't know if you saw the one where he thanked me in this Thank you. By name, by name, Jason? Even, and even Jason Calcanus, a good guy, a good guy, meant a lot to my parents. So I'll give him credit there. He knows how to work the room. Can I say one last thing on tariffs?

Sure. I think it's actually good as a country that we are trying them. Whether they work or not, it will just be nice to know, you know, and it's a nice experiment. Tariffs were traditionally a democratic policy position. You know, Clinton ran on them, Obama ran on them to be a slightly lesser degree. They're generally talked out of them by kind of, you know, their Treasury Secretary who generally came from Wall Street. But, you know, they've been an animating feature of political discourse for 30 or 40 years. Now we're trying them.

We're going to see if they work. We're going to see if they don't work. I would say thus far, probably they have been less damaging than a lot of people expected. You know, the core of kind of why you don't want to do tariffs is, you know, that retaliation was expected. We have not seen retaliation, which I think in some ways, you know, validates some of the points of views, just that we do have a lot of leverage and we are using it. And other countries are charging America, much higher tariffs that we're charging them. Maybe that made sense 50 years ago. So maybe we're hitting reciprocity, which we could all agree on, but he's not abusing

them, which shows that the American consumer in the American market is worth, you know, maybe getting to reciprocity. The funny thing about reciprocity, it sounds good to everyone, but the whole principle of comparative advantages, maybe you don't want reciprocal tariffs. But nonetheless, we're trying them. We're going to see. The early returns have been, I think, less damaging that people would have expected because maybe he backed off some of the more extreme things because he is flexible. So we'll see. Come back in a year. Come back at 18 months. And one way or another, we'll have run this experiment. Freiburg, did you notice in that speech he gave? He said, I don't need to know the 108th country. Maybe we just, you know, it's the top companies we need to worry about.

I kind of felt like, I don't know if you caught that in his talk day, where he said, I don't even know the name of the country. Maybe I don't even know the name of it. Okay, so maybe we don't need to worry about the tariff. That, to me, seemed like he was signaling an end game. Like, maybe he's, I don't know, I don't want to say bored, but he's, you know, he's milked this one as far as he needs to. What do you think? Did you notice that quote he did? Like I've said in the past, he's proven, which is his game theory optimal way of negotiating to be unpredictable. So I'm not going to sit here and predict. Okay.

Okay. I think there's a lot of gamesmanship going on that we're not privy to. And again, let's see what happens. I do like running the experiment. I like running experiments in general. I would love to reduce taxation, direct taxation on the American people, but I would also like to reduce the size of government. The thing I most worry about with respect to tariffs is if it does create a new revenue

source for the federal government, it gives the federal government another crutch to keep spending up. Yeah, sovereign wealth fund. Here we come. A little slush fun there. All right, speaking of trade, Nvidia GPUs are getting smuggled into China at an alarming haste according to reports on Tuesday.

The DOJ arrested two Chinese nationals in California, accusing them of illegally sending tens of millions of dollars worth of GPUs to China, which actually isn't that many. The press release didn't name an H-100s from Nvidia, but they mentioned they were shipping the most powerful GPU chip on the market. it, so fill in the blank. The two were charged with violating the Export Control Reform Act a felony with a max penalty of 20 years in jail. One was a legal permanent resident. The other was an illegal immigrant who overstayed their visa. Here's how the scheme worked. They operated a U.S.-based

company called ALX Solutions. They would buy GPUs in the U.S., shipped them to Singapore. I think Chamath pointed this out back in the day. On this podcast, got a little pushback on it in Malaysia. They were shipped to Malaysia as well, where they would be rerouted quite easily. to China, according to the DOJ, the rerouting through countries is common when smuggling chips to China, despite setting the chips to Singapore, ALX was getting paid from Hong Kong and Chinese-based companies. These guys aren't the sharpest knives in the draw. Financial Times reported at least $1 billion worth of VINIA chips have been smuggled into

China in the past three months after President Trump tightened the U.S. export controls. FT says there's a rampant black market for these GPUs in China. And they go for a 50% premium. Gavin, you're in the chip business. Your take. So a couple of things. One, I think it's going to be hard to stop it. We can't keep illegal drugs out of America and we're trying really, really hard to keep

them out. China is doing everything they can to bring these chips in. Yeah. So it's when something is so valuable and so important, it's hard to stop it completely. But secondarily, I would just say a billion dollars worth of GPUs, it's not enough to really move the needle, even if they are Blackwell's the latest and greatest. It's better than having none if you're China. But I mean, it's just, you know, it's not like a 10, $20 billion blackwell cluster like are being stood up all over America by hyperscalers. So I think it's going to be hard

to stop. I think it's happening at a scale that is, you know, not comparable to Colossus. Yeah, it's not comparable to Colossus. So it's just, it's not going to be decisive in this, you know, AI, you know, race that certainly China believes we were in. And then, you know, like I said, the last time I was on, I do think it was very smart to resume, you know, the H20s and whatever they're going to call the kind of despect Blackwell, letting them be sold into China. And hopefully that, you know, the theory is if you legalize drugs, it, you know, reduces, you know, the illegal drug trade.

Exactly. What we're doing here. We're not sending them our best. they're saying that's actually the high potency stuff it's actually a hilarious analogy it is literally like the h20 or the b 50 or what it was we called it's like the it's like legalizing marijuana yes exactly here's a five milligram gummy gummy have at it yeah so i just think it is what it is i think you'll see these articles and it's going to be hard to stop but i don't i don't think it's all that dispositive yeah and not not a critic anybody else have thoughts on it seems like a

minor story all right we'll end on this apple has bought back Let this sink in. $700 billion worth of shares over the past decade. And the most innovative product in my mind that they've released in that time are AirPods. Maybe they're M4 chips. This user on Twitter, Charlie Bill. Bello. Belello.

Oh, you know him. He tweeted this crazy chart here. We'll pull it up. Here it is. Apple buyback start. Apple shares outstanding. You get the picture. They've bought back almost a trillion dollars. Let that sink in a trillion dollars. It's at 700 billion now and it's not stopping. That's larger than the market cap of all but 12 companies in the S&P 500. I famously or notably said maybe 10 years ago, Apple should buy Tesla for 50, 75 billion back when Tesla was

in kind of dire straits. And that was three times more than the next close. This company, Google, bought back $190 billion. For that money, they could have bought Disney for $150 billion, Netflix, $150 billion, Tesla for $100 billion in 2020, Uber for $100 billion in 2021, Robin Hood for under $10 billion in 2022, and BMW. Steve Jobs' favorite car company for $70 billion in 2020. They're still at $120 billion left over. What would have been the better move there to do all these buybacks,

Gavin as a public market investor, or to invest in R&D and actually release a car? They had Project Titan. Gavin, what do you think of this Apple strategy? Well, I mean, as an investor, buybacks are great. And I think there's often a false dichotomy made between buybacks and R&D. I mean, Apple certainly could have afforded to do both. And, you know, maybe it would have been better. You know, what was the stat?

It was a trillion dollars. You know, maybe they should have bought $700 billion instead of a trillion. Well, $700 billion. It's trending towards a million. Okay. Okay. So maybe they should have spent $200 billion. billion less and spit that on data centers and been like a real competitor in AI. And I just

continue to be baffled by Apple's, you know, and I think they're very comfortable being late to markets, you know, the iPhone was not the first smartphone. You know, the, you know, the iPad was not the first, you know, it was the first tablet. Yeah. But, you know, there was the, you know, there's the Palm Pilot. There are all those devices from kind of the, you know, the bubble. But I'm just shocked at their inaction and inaptitude and AI, how bad the products are from a user perspective. I mean, they're terrible. They're getting worse.

Siri's worse. Siri is worse. And it's just... How is that possible? Yeah, I mean, it almost, you know, I guess at the limit, and, you know, malice is, incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. But I mean, it almost feels like they're trying to lose. Literally, if you said, here's a playbook on how to lose, they would have written it.

Yeah, people would have thought it was a joke, right? Yeah. So it's astonishing to me their lack of execution on AI. Well, this is what happens. I mean, if you put Tim Cook in charge and he's a supply chain guy, he's going to do the optimal thing for that. Ben, your thoughts on it? Yeah, I mean, I'm with you guys. I'm waiting to see, you know, when are they going to make something cool again?

I'm just an ignoramus on this stuff, and it's like the last time I saw something that came out from Apple that was exciting. It's been many years since they brought out anything that excites me as a consumer. Yeah. And so I'm looking at that. And then the only headlines I see are Tim Cook trying to cut a deal with the president to, again, sort of shore up his own supply chain. So if he's a supply chain guy, then I guess that that's his mandate is to shore up the supply chain with the president in the United States vis-a-vis the iPhone. But if that's the best you're going to do, then I don't know. Things don't look great over there from the outside. Phil, any thoughts on Apple and their ineptitude time for Tim Cook

to start thinking about hanging it up maybe and put a product person in charge? Not by area, Jason. I'm going to pass on that one. I would say, I do think in fairness, it would shock me if they do not have the best augmented reality glasses on the market in three or four years.

It's so placed to their strengths. And maybe they feel like that is what they're focused on. And eventually, you know, they'll cut a partnership. When's the last time you heard them to bring it up? though, Freedberg. When's the last time Apple Vision was even brought up in a keynote? Or you saw a demo? They seem to... Well, those are VR, not AR. Like, I think VR is never going to... Their eventuality is to be AR, right? You can turn them on to see through them, I guess. But... Yeah. I mean, and that's actually an interesting point, Gavin, is you and I are sitting here, like, is it AR or VR?

Because, you know, they're just not talking about it. Where's the version two for developers? Go ahead. Rumors of Apple's demise are 30 years old. Okay. This is every year, the same story, lack of innovation, copycatting. Where is it? The iPad came out. Wait, so you're saying somebody said that under Steve Jobs, that there was a lack of innovation when Steve Jobs was running the show?

Even during the No Jobs era, when the iPad came out, I don't know if you remember how controversial it was. They were making fun of jobs. He's lost his luster. What is going on with this guy? Total flop. They made fun of the iPad. They called it like the MaxiPad or something.

You know, remember all that stuff? It was like this thing, like who the hell's going to use this thing? It's a total disaster. All of a sudden, they sold 10 million units, then 100 million units. And everyone's like, holy shit. I would not count Apple out. There's a system there that's built,

unlike any other in corporate history. Let's see what happens. Yeah, I think that's right. They have every right and ability to win. They just, they need to start trying. I mean, the fact that you're not even in the running, and they're losing talent. They're losing talent.

I tried the Apple Vision in February 2020. And that's literally the last time that I've tried it. Like, there was that hot moment where everybody's like, let's try this thing out. And it's like, this is pretty cool. And then you're like, yeah, but I'm also wearing a medieval helmet on my head. It's got to be, and we all agree, it's got to be sunglasses. I got the, I bought the ray bands from meta. And I used them on my recent trip to New York.

And it was quite compelling to wear them in live stream or to wear them and take pictures of the kids. And video, we took the ferries. It's a really nice ferry system in New York now that they've kind of brought back. And, you know, we took the ferry. around the island and did a couple of things. And it was just really nice to not have people, you know, pose when you're doing a video. If you have kids, I think it's the must-have product because it's so elegant to just boop.

And then if you look at something, it will tell you what it is. So the AI plus these glasses is going to be phenomenal for when you're looking at a monument and you say, hey, tell me about Ellis Island, tell me about Governor's Island, it just starts reading you facts. I think it could be magical, but. Jason, Jason, one thing, one thing is like if you take your ranch, you may have like a backup generator, solar, power wall, EV, grid, everything. Eventually, someone's going to want to control all that, make it easy for you to control, aggregate it. There's going to be a whole infrastructure in the U.S. on this.

And that's something you could see Apple coming to. Absolutely. Apple home. Yeah. That's actually a brilliant one. I don't know if you saw this. You must have failed. There are smart panels, circuit breakers.

Have you seen these? Where you put it in and you take out an app and each of your breakers is in the app and you can see breaker by breaker, your energy consumption. You could turn them on and off. I mean, it felt to me like something that should be in the Apple wheelhouse as well as Sonos, but they just don't like to buy stuff. Well, one thing is, like when you take the number of cars that are going to be in the country, the electric EVs, and then you multiple.

by them, you say there's going to be, let's say, I think the estimate is in 20, 30 million electric vehicles, let's say. Yeah. And they're 80 to 200 KWH in them, Freedberg. That is something like 2,400 to 3,300 gigawatts of storage that's moving. And if you add autonomy to that, that is a lot of flexible distributed power. And so whoever controls and thinks about that is going to make a ton of money. So you're saying you could take a fleet of 1,000 cyber trucks and send them to a natural disaster, plug them in and power a city or power some homes, which is how that is constructed currently. You can use your actual cyber truck to feed into your home and keep it awake for a couple of hours.

Right. Or maybe in the short term, just think about the parking lot of meta. Like, you know, having all those cars there when you charge, you discharge, the control of that, the management of it, the operating system, if you will, of that will be very valuable. All right, we're going to end on this summer reading. Everybody likes to read a book in the summer, I'm assuming, and one of us likes to write a book this summer, anybody got a book they read over the summer or a series they consumed for our dear audience? Ben, you got a show or a book that you're obsessed with? We can do a show. I'm trying to remember what's the...

Or a Broadway musical for Ben. I know you love your musicals. I do, although no good ones have come out recently, which is unfortunate. But shows, have you guys seen this Department Q show on Netflix? No. Gavin's not enjoying it. It's a fun one. It's called Department Q?

Like, 007? No. it's like a sort of cold cases detective yeah cold cases exactly and it's well written and it's a fun show i'm i'm enjoying that one i like that one any books gavin on your shelf that you uh decided to break open at the beach while you're working or you're just too busy no i am uh enjoying i like post apocalyptic fantasy um okay empire of the east by fred saberhagen but uh but a new a relatively new series is called moonfall um by james rollins and i'm enjoying it i will just say it's a slow start like a lot of great fantasy and science fiction

where you have to do a lot of world building but I've enjoyed it. You ever think about writing your own sci-fi fantasy? You ever dabble? Idily, but I have yet to dabble. Freeberg, anything on your plate other than running O'Halo and doing these incredible all-in events?

You look exhausted, my brother, and babies. You got a lot on your plate. I wonder if you had the time to read a book or watch a series. I've been reading because I never read it the Andy Ware Project Hail Mary book. Oh, right, yeah. It's awesome. So good.

I am disappointed. I like Andy Ware. I interviewed Andy Weir. Yeah. Yeah, halfway through I got disappointed with one of the core assumptions. We'll discuss another day. I give you permission. Yeah.

To just go with it. Well, I think this whole idea that this alien race all died in the spaceship from radiation sickness when they're so advanced, they have spaces, but they don't understand that there's radiation in space. But they took it right out of the story, huh? It just blew the whole, the whole story. line up for me and I'm like, what? That doesn't make, like, and then it traces back to all these other things that they do understand, which inherent in all of them would have been an

understanding of photons and electromagnetic energy. So that kind of blew me up a little bit, Gavin. I don't know if you agree, but Phil. I was happy to suspend disbelief. Yeah. Because I do like Andy Ware. Yeah, I like Andy Ware. Is it a cool cat. I literally, when he was doing The Martian, I asked him to be on This Week in startups like years ago. And he's like, yeah, if you come down to my condo in like San Diego in like San Jose or somewhere in the South Bay and uh literally got this like a little modest thing and then he's like I just sold it and uh you know it's going to be like a major actor is going to be in the Martian but he was broke but everybody in our industry was talking about it was really really charming and he's like I think I'm going to

move to LA I was like oh you totally should move to LA you'll they'll be buying everything you do they love sci-fi your shit's brilliant and sure enough here we are Phil Deutsch your thoughts And by the way, Phil Deutsch, when I go on a plane where I would fill, he's got six newspapers with them. You got to read the paper every day, every day, I mean, four papers. He gets through five minimum a day. He's like the Charlie Rose of news consumption. Gavin says, I'm in Truro, which is the middle of nowhere. And there's so few papers out here, I have to get up at five to go to the Cumberland Farms to get the FD, the Journal of the Times before anyone else does.

So I love reading newspapers. I was a newspaper boy, read papers. I late to, but just finished the Musk book, which was phenomenal. I thought really good. Yeah, I know I'm late, but it was great. I'm reading a book on the making of the King James Bible, which is a tough slog, but well worth it to sound pretentious and smart. I watch Superman, which I highly. recommend Ben Shapiro's review of

because he's got it dead on. What did you say, Ben? Give us a teaser. People look it up later. You didn't like it. Why didn't you like it? Too woke? You didn't like the Gaza or Ukraine kind of references.

I didn't think any of that stuff was there. Honestly, I just thought it was super meh. The whole thing is just it's James Gunn being very, very James gun. And as somebody who likes sort of the legend of Superman, you know, the sort of grandeur of Superman as part of the American iconic landscape, that kind of reduction. of Superman to slapstick comedy

surrounded by a bunch of other characters who I don't care about. And then just kind of, there's a part where it just turns into James Gunn doing Guardians of the Galaxy, but with iconic characters. It was a little derivative, I will say. My kids loved it, though,

which I was happy about. Continue film. Then, this is a tough one because it was a fun date night, but F1, I thought, was a little B-plus-ish. Could have been better. And then my winners, I thought the penguin was fantastic,

the series. And Dope Thief. And Dope Thief is very good, too. Ah, I would just add second season of 1923, I think also very good. I will give you... Oh, interesting. I used to be in the magazine business. I haven't subscribed to a magazine in well over a decade, you know, and I just subscribed

to Monocle.com, which is a bunch of, like, designers, and they, you know, it's like literally they have a print newspaper they put out once over the summer. They actually have a bound magazine, but it's an incredibly curated look at the world of design, hotels, restaurants, art, fashion, and it's kind of uncompromising. They're just like, hey, we just like things that are incredibly well thought out. And I have started taking some of the recommendations, and they don't miss. Monocle.com. And you guys know I love biographies, and I went biography crazy this summer.

All About Me by Melbrook. amazing and he reads it so a great audio book i'm i'm almost finished with who knew by barry diller who at like 24 years old yeah that's great it's incredible did you read it yet or you know it's a little skim plus i heard him talk about it yeah you know i've met him one time his career is unlike anybody else's at like 24 or 25 he's running paramount pictures and then the bench he has there is like he hires eisner katsenberg as his assistant It's the most amazing story of young people running amok, running these media businesses. We have to do a Barry Diller interview for All In.

That'd be awesome. That'd be incredible. Comedy Samurai. Did he do Godfather too, Jason? Wasn't he? He did Godfather too, yes. And he basically took over for Bob Evans. And if you ever see the documentary, the kid stays in the picture or that book, that's great.

That's great. Both of them are incredible. Comedy Samurai by Larry Charles, I just finished a couple weeks ago. And that was the guy who did Barrow. Barat, and what was the gay character that Sasha Baron Cohen did? Bruno. Thank you, Bruno. And he also collaborated with Larry David.

And then finally, my fourth pick for Bios of the Summer, I regret almost everything by Keith McNally, who is the restaurateur. He had a stroke. He has an Instagram where he's like pretty spicy. and he did Balthazar, Pastis, Odeon, all these incredibly iconic places that in my youth I hung out in and to hear him do, it's a most self-deprecating, you know, sort of British tradition, biography ever. So I love biography, so many lessons in there.

If you're young entrepreneur, I highly recommend all those. We'd love to have all those people on the pod. It's been an amazing summer episode. I really appreciate y'all taking the time out of your schedule better. Are you going to come to All In Summit in September? You're our guest. We've got to have you there. Come out.

Yeah, I'd love to see if you can make it. That'd be awesome. Seven, eighth, or ninth, bring the wife. I don't know. I don't know how old the kids are, but we'll get you backstage. We'll give you the VIP pass the whole treatment, okay? I don't think you want my 11-9-5 and two-year-old there, but yes. No, they can't come.

No, but actually, I take it back. We have a surprise for one of the parties that they would love to come to, but I'm going to leave it at that because Dave hasn't given up. Dave loves doing the parties, and he has a blowout spectacular. party that will be unrivalled. The scholarships are open. If you're young and a fan of all in, or young in your career, I should say, and you can't afford the normal ticket, we let a select group of up-incomeers buy a discounted ticket so we keep the vibes really fresh and we like to have as many people as possible. So go to the website and you can apply. Don't

apply if you can afford the ticket because we would like to give it to people who really can't. and those scholarships are there. You'll hear in a week, typically, because we had so many scholarship requests. It takes us a little while to get through them. Shout out to the team, Kimber and John Hal and the whole team over there. Nick, for putting so much into the amazing, amazing, all-in summit. And, yeah, thanks to my friend for sending me my new app.

Dave is freaked out right now. Just bleep that shot, Nick. It's not even funny anymore. Just bleep it out. We'll see you next time on the number one podcast in the world after Ben Shapiro's. Love you, Bessies. Thanks, everybody. Bye, guys.

We'll let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sack. And it said, we open source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, West. I'm queen of Kinwa. I'm going all in. What, your winners lie? I'm going to winters lie.

Besties are bad. Gold 13. That's my dog taking it. It's your driveway. We should all just get a room and just have one big you, Georgie, because they're all just like this sexual tension, but they just need to release them out. Wet your beat, wet your beat. We need to get merches are fast. I'm doing all in.

Thank you.