All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Software Stocks Implode, Claude's Hit List, State of the Union Reactions, Trump's Tariff Pivot

Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, everybody, welcome back to your favorite podcast, the All In podcast today. We have a conspiracy corner episode for you. We're going to go over the 9-11 Inside Job. We're going over Flat Earth, JFK assassination. It's going to be all conspiracy all the time after our amazing blockbuster episode during Ski Week. We're going all conspiracy here. Our guest today, Alex Jones.

Starting point is 00:00:25 How many views did it get? Nine views? I mean, it's tough when you have. have one out of four besties. It doesn't. Michael Tracy is on standby. Not true. I can carry an episode for at least 400,000 views. I mean, you might. I like your, hey, for people who don't know, Tramoff has his own YouTube channel. He's got his escape hatch. But when this train wreck burns to the ground, he started his own YouTube channel and's hedging his bets. Freiburg's working on his solo project. Everybody's doing solo project. The band's got a lot of solo projects.

Starting point is 00:00:54 The Beatles are experimenting. The Beatles are experimenting. We got a little Yoko on here. You know what the number one topic for this show was by the all-in AI bot sacks? What's up? The number one was Dario versus Hegset, the Department of War versus Anthropic, was the number one topic selected by our AI bot. As a programming note for folks, that decision will be made end of the day Friday when this podcast comes out, so we will talk about it next week. But let's get to work.

Starting point is 00:01:20 We've got a full docket. The Claude Kill List has expanded, and an AI fan fiction substack tanked your 401K on Monday, let's get into it. Anthropics' generational run continues. They're now three for three in tanking different market sectors in February. Congratulations. This was like they took the mantle from Brad Gersner tanking the market. The Anthropic list. It is. February 3rd, Anthropic announces, hey, we got a legal plug in for Claude, co-work, Thompson Reuters, Lexus, Nexus, legal zoom, all down at least 10% since February 3rd. Then on February 20th, Claudecena. Claude Code security is announced.

Starting point is 00:02:00 In a limited research preview, stocks tank again. Crowd try cloud for octa all down. Then February 23rd, Anthropic announces. Claude can modernize cobald databases. If you don't know cobal, that's the oldest coding language in the world. That's where Sachs learned code when he was in college in the 70s. It's used for banking, payroll, government. Healthcare.

Starting point is 00:02:23 Healthcare. It runs 95% of ATMs in the U.S. and it powers Social Security payments, 85% of all Cold Wall Code runs on IBM machines. So IBM decided they would tank 13% on Monday, their worst day since $213 billion in market cap losses. So let's stop here before I get into the fan fiction piece. What's your take here of what's happening in the market, Shamop?

Starting point is 00:02:51 Is this simply people are looking for an excuse to trim their positions because things have been top ticking, all-time highs, and people are just looking for an excuse? Or is this reality? Is this the go-forward reality that AI is going to compress these kind of stocks because it solves a lot of problems? I'm going to give you two explanations. I don't know what percentage I would allocate across the two, but I think one is tactical and one is much more strategic, but I think both are happening. The tactical one is that we're at a moment in time where a lot of the smart money hedge funds are starting to massively de-gross. And what that means is they're trimming a lot of

Starting point is 00:03:37 positions and they're just taking on a lot less risk. Why, I don't exactly know, it could be motivated by the second thing that I'm going to talk about. But the point is, in a degrossing cycle, you tend to be trimming risk and making your position sizes much smaller. So the longs become less long, the shorts become less short, and you just shrink. And so there's just general downward pressure. That is a clear behavior right now. But I think the structural change is the more important one. And this is sort of what I talked about this morning.

Starting point is 00:04:11 In a normal functioning market, what we are always debating is when a set of cash funds, go from becoming highly confident to less highly confident. It's a when conversation. So when will Coca-Cola's cash flows be impacted? When will Eli-Lili's cash flows be impacted? When will Meta's cash flows be impacted? And the answer to the when gets translated by the public markets into three things. Your price to earnings multiple, where if you invert that number,

Starting point is 00:04:49 What that is equivalent to is the yield on the money that you get. Okay? So if you're 20 times PE, that's a 5% yield. The second is a revenue multiple. And the third is what's called your weighted average cost of capital, which is to say if you look at the next 20 to 30 years of earnings and you want to figure out what that is worth today, you have to discount all of these back and you have to assume a percentage

Starting point is 00:05:18 of interest effectively that it takes to get there. And the basic math of this is that when you have a high whack, it's called, you're massively discounting these cash flows. When you have a low whack, you're assuming that these things are very durable. Okay, so what is happening? We used to debate when. This is no longer a when moment. The market is very much in an if mode.

Starting point is 00:05:43 Are these cash flows durable at all? Could they fall off a cliff in year three? is there some AI model that's going to come around the corner and obliterate this business without me knowing it? And because they've shifted into this if mindset, your risk becomes totally different. You have this event risk that you don't know how to price. And whenever the market shifts into that mode,

Starting point is 00:06:10 what you see are that the holders of those equities want a massive margin of safety. What does that mean? They have to take P.E's way down. If you used to trade at 40, you should trade at 20. If you used to trade at 20, you should trade at 10. They take revenue multiples down. You used to trade a 10 times revenue.

Starting point is 00:06:28 Now you're going to trade it three times. You take the whack way up. You used to be a 6% discounted weighted average cost of capital. You know what? I'm taking you to 12 or 13. That's the market's way of saying, I'm now debating if these things will even exist. and so I need to give myself a huge buffer to own this stuff.

Starting point is 00:06:50 That's what's happening right now. It has a lot of ripple effects that we can talk about. Freebrook and I have talked about this a lot. The most obvious impact is how these tech companies recruit and retain talent because the biggest thing that it starts to eat into are the cash flows of a business, which really directly tied to stock-based comp and all this other stuff. But let me just stop there.

Starting point is 00:07:11 So we have moved away from a when to now and if, And I think that that is a very smart question to be asking. The answer may be from any of these companies that they will survive, but we don't know how long. And until that becomes clearer, you have to give yourself room to be wrong. You said when, then if. Did you mean if? No, no, no, no. To when?

Starting point is 00:07:31 We've always debated when. When will these cash flows disappear? Now it's like, will they even exist? Got it. Okay. So the second part of this story, Friedberg and Sachs, is that a substact post, fan fiction. taking place in the fictional 2028 global intelligence crisis went mega viral, 28 million views on X.

Starting point is 00:07:56 It was posted Sunday night. It made the market tank on Monday. In this fictional substack post, the author said there's going to be essentially a death spiral that happens because of AI. How does that work? Well, first, companies embrace AI. Everything goes right. They're able to cut staff.

Starting point is 00:08:14 Their margins go out. similar to how Amazon has, you know, trimmed their white collar staff. Then they're so successful at this that they lose their customer base because consumers don't have discretionary funding to spend. Then it creates a debt spire where the companies keep deploying AI to try to hit the margins, cutting staff, and the entire economy collapses, Dr. Doom level stuff, unemployment's at 10% S&P goes down from 38% highs. After this piece came out, which speculated that agents would get rid of all the 3% interchange

Starting point is 00:08:45 fees and move everybody to settle transactions on stable coins, all the financial stocks got hit on Monday. Amex down 8% capital one down 8% Massacart, 6% piece of 4% yada, yada. Finally, this piece got a lot of pushback. There was a silly piece in it or a section in it where they said AI agents would vibe code their way to displacing DoorDash. And that's kind of silly if anybody's on a network-based business knows. Sacks, I assume you read this piece or at least saw the fall out from it, what's your take? And then we'll go to you, Freepard. Yeah, well, I know that this Satrini article got passed around like a joint at a Grateful Dead concert. But I'm starting to question how legitimately viral it really was. There's some information that just came out

Starting point is 00:09:34 that the attribution of the article has been amended, meaning the co-authors have been amended to include a short fund that was shorting some of the names mentioned in the article. This is according to another post that just came out. According to this post, the authorship attribution attributed to market moving was changed after publication of the co-author as a managing partner of a $262 million SEC registered hedge fund who confirmed short positions in the companies, the report named. So I think that's point number one is I just wonder, did this? this article truly go viral or did the authors do anything to kind of amplify it? And we just

Starting point is 00:10:16 don't know the answer to that question. But regardless of that, let's just take the arguments on their phase. I think one of the best responses to it was by another writer named Derek Thompson wrote a article called Nobody Knows Anything, which I think is a reference to a famous take by legendary Hollywood writer William Goldman. In any event, what the article says is no one really knows what's going to happen with AI in two years, never mind 20 years. And so they resort to science fiction writing, masquerading as analysis. And the author here, Derek Thompson, says that the conversation about AI is really just a marketplace of competing science fiction narratives. And he says, that's not to say, I think the technology is a parlor trick, but rather that the

Starting point is 00:11:01 level of uncertainty is so high and the quality and supply of real world, real-time information about AI's macroeconomic effects so paltry that very serious conversations about AI are often more literary than genuinely analytical. So in other words, what he's saying is, look, this guy is writing very compelling science fiction, but there's no real analytics behind it to defend it. And yes, this could happen. Here's a prediction market on whether people believe the Citrini report's going to come true. Something like 12 percent believe the Citrini scenario is going to happen.

Starting point is 00:11:35 But the truth is no one really knows. I mean, there's other dueling science fiction narratives where AI is going to create such a world of abundance that we're not going to need for anything. And just by the way, Derek Thompson is one of the abundance guys with Ezra Klein. This is why the market's getting whacked. I think that you're right, Sachs. Nobody knows. So if you can get 5% for owning government bonds, why are we taking excessive risk here? Yeah, let me just build on your point about SaaS. So the reason why there's so much uncertainty around SaaS is that SaaS used to be such a easily modeled and predictable category. And I saw as a VC, we saw the same story play out across many, many different categories of software.

Starting point is 00:12:17 You'd have this initial period where there'd be this experimentation phase. You have a bunch of different products that come to market. There'd be a battle. And then the market would eventually settle. And there'd be a category leader. And they would capture most of the market share and the vast majority of the market capitalization. And they would have very, very predictable metrics. it was very easy to grade a SaaS business.

Starting point is 00:12:38 You look at ARR, you say annually recurring revenue, you look at the net dollar retention. You want to see, depending on the phase. RPO, RPO, revenue underperformance. Right. And so, you know, these things began to be seen as like an annuity with growth, right? They were rock solid, yeah. Yeah, because a good net dollar retention would be something like 120%, which means that your sort of cohort of existing customers on balance would all renew the next year.

Starting point is 00:13:04 and actually they would renew at 120% of their previous year's contract values. And the reason you got that extra 20% is they would buy more seats or there'd be additional products or features they would upsell. It got to be very, very predictable. And so when people were buying software companies at, I don't know, 13 times ARR, they thought they were buying a growth annuity. And now all of a sudden, you got to factor into that. Well, wait a second.

Starting point is 00:13:30 What if AI disrupts the whole market? What if it doesn't eliminate? I don't think AI is going to get rid of Salesforce, but it could eat into their growth opportunity. We just don't know. What if it changes the pricing model? I mean, it just creates a whole lot of unknowns. And I actually don't believe in the Satrini or the Dumer take on this, but I can see why the market would feel this level of uncertainty. 100%.

Starting point is 00:13:55 Given how predictable a category, SaaS used to be just say a year ago. Well, chaos is a ladder, Freedberg, and this means opportunity. So if we look at this and SaaS has headwinds, then is there a winner? Is open source the winner? Or is this all deflationary in your mind, Friedberg? And we just make less money and the earnings of these companies get compressed, the size of them gets compressed. How do you think about it? I think fundamentally, if you're driving productivity with AI, you're driving leverage on human time. and leverage on capital. The question is, how quickly can you drive that up?

Starting point is 00:14:37 And that's a function of how much consumption there is, how much capacity there is for consumption. So on the one hand, I'll just speak broadly. I think humans have this desire to improve their livelihoods by roughly 10% every year, meaning like your income and your ability to purchase stuff that's new relative to where you were last year, has to go up by 10% for you to be happy.

Starting point is 00:14:58 If it's less than 10%, you're probably unhappy. Is that that your anecdote, or that's like, It's just like an anecdote. Like, I think that's sort of like my rubric for thinking about like, why are people unhappy or happy? So if your earnings are the same, but things are getting more expensive, you're not happy. If your earnings go up by 10% and things stay the same price,

Starting point is 00:15:15 you got 10% more than you had last year. You're going to be happy. I just think like all humans are driven by this need to consume more each year than they did last year. So I think for me, that's like the lower limit on consumptive capacity in the world. the question that we're now facing, which we've never faced in human history before, is there a upper limit on consumptive capacity? Because AI creates such a profound shift in productivity and in leverage that normally you would say, hey, when we get a new tool or we get new leverage in a system, we build a new

Starting point is 00:15:51 technology, we can make more with less, therefore everyone gets access to more things for the same price or the cost of things that they consume come down. down by a certain price. But there may be a situation now where the ability to make stuff exceeds the capacity to consume stuff. And that is something that I don't think we've faced before. And I think that's sort of where a lot of the models start to break, just general economic models, just general productivity models and general social models. And this goes to the point about, like, what is everyone going to do? In the same way that I think we've argued that maybe SaaS was a transitory business phenomenon that existed between the foundation of the internet and the era of

Starting point is 00:16:35 AI, it may be the case that knowledge work in general is also a transitory phenomenon that only existed between the foundation of the computer or computing tools and the existence of AI, generally speaking. And if all of that goes away very quickly and all of those people can be redistributed and recast into doing other higher level, more creative things, their productivity goes up by 100x, is there really a consumer on the other end of all of that productivity? Is there really enough consumptive capacity? And I think that's the profound question that we all face. I don't think that there's any limit to productivity. Is that your way of saying that SaaS goes to zero? Or that's your way of saying these companies go to zero? I'm just saying knowledge work in

Starting point is 00:17:19 general. Like the- What is the implication to these businesses? Is this just another dueling science fiction take? I mean, or what's your evidence for this? I think it's fine to have a sci-fi take about the future. I think it's their data. Because I can show you some data that I think contradicts what you're saying. And I have some firsthand sort of... In the sense that there is more leverage sacks that people are able to actually deliver. Well, Jake, I want to hear what you have to say because I know you're experimenting with this,

Starting point is 00:17:44 but let me just show you a few data points real quick. Because I think this is relevant. So we're really talking about the disruption caused by coding assistance, right? This is like the first big killer app of AI. I mean, I guess after. writing and research for chatbots. And we'll have agents later, but really, it's all about coding assistance, right? And the ability to more easily create code, that's what's creating the disruption to the

Starting point is 00:18:07 SaaS category. Well, so this is focused on the data we see right now around that. And there are a lot of people who are pointing this out that Anthropic right now has a job listing for a software engineer on their website right now for $570,000. And a lot of people are kind of pointing out, okay, so wait. So what Anthropic is saying is they're still trying to hire software engineers at a very high wage, but somehow they think these jobs are going to be eliminated. Jamak might apply for that job, Hughes.

Starting point is 00:18:40 Yeah, austerity measures. Pretty good to me. That's a lot of money. Tomah might take that job and then just have AI do it for them. No, I'm worried. I hope my 80-90 team doesn't see that offer. That's a big number. Our equity is way higher, but our salaries are not that high.

Starting point is 00:18:56 I mean, you put these things together. It's like, that equity is money good. The reality is like those guys are doing $5 to $6 billion structured secondaries every year now, or they're starting, which means that they will. That's like cash compensation. So for me to match that, I need to be 3x higher than that. Right. And I think a lot of people are kind of pointing out, well, this is a contradiction.

Starting point is 00:19:16 Anthropic doesn't really seem to be practicing what they're preaching if they're paying enormous amounts still for software engineers, even as they claim they're obsoleteing the entire category. something doesn't quite add up. Citadel Securities did a new report that rebuts that Citrini report, and they show a couple of stats here, which I think are really interesting. So job postings for software engineers are rapidly rising. They're showing, I think it was roughly a 10% year-over-year increase in the demand for software engineers. On a related note, they also show that company formation is also rapidly expanding.

Starting point is 00:19:54 and that may have something to do with AI making it easier to start a business or to get leverage. To your point, Freberg, so look, there's a couple of competing effects going on here. And I think Aaron Levy had a really good explanation of why you might see something very counterintuitive happening. And again, it all goes back to Jevin's paradox. But what Aaron says is that when you lower the cost of something that was previously supply constraint, demand for that thing goes up. Software engineering is just one of the easiest examples. to contemplate, but there are going to be many other jobs like that. But think about software

Starting point is 00:20:29 engineering, even among startups in Silicon Valley, which I think are probably some of the most attractive places for software engineers to work. There's always been a chronic shortage of them. Then you've got the Fortune 500 companies, non-tech companies, which have always had an even harder time hiring technical talent. So you have this massive, unfilled need for software engineers across the entire economy. Now you're going to be able to get a lot more leverage out of software engineers. It doesn't mean they're going to get fired. It just means that now maybe you can have a lot more 10x software engineers, and they're

Starting point is 00:21:05 getting those jobs are not being spread throughout the whole economy. I also think, just to put some numbers on this, I think the cost structure of the average Fortune 500 business is something like 5% IT. And that includes all of their IT, not just their software. you know, what should it be? What should the percentage of software be in an enterprise cost structure? Elon describes companies as cybernetic organisms that are part software, part human. If you think about the current Fortune 500 company being one or two percent software, maybe they should be 50 percent software. I think what Aaron is saying here is the market for

Starting point is 00:21:43 software and software engineers was so constrained by the lack of availability that even if we 10x or 100x, the productivity of software engineers, the demand will be there to absorb this new supply. And so it could lead to this explosion and productivity without the massive job loss. I think you're right. I think the thing that I would look at is I would expect OPEX as a percentage of revenue to fall off of a cliff. But within that, OPEX, the percentage of it that you allocate to technology and technology-related things probably goes way, way up than what it is today. Okay, Jason, the batch of people that are applying for launch, has SaaS stopped? Has software stopped? It's AI first companies, obviously, and people are- Are they rebuilding traditional SaaS tools,

Starting point is 00:22:32 just cheap? Basically, everybody's building the great, you know, as we talked about at the All-In Summit, like some of these companies are trying to build the best pilot in the world, or Ramos trying to build the best driver in the world. People are now trying to build the best SDR in the world, the best salesperson, the best executive coach. And so we have been, like, obsessed with Claude Co-work, but mainly OpenClaw. And so what we did was, and I think it's not developers that are going to do all this work, it's knowledge workers. So we had, we have 20 people in our firm. We had 15 of them come in this weekend, and they all got trained over like six or seven hours, had to have their own OpenClaw agent, and we started building it. Every piece of software that we

Starting point is 00:23:15 wanted to buy or build over the last 10 years that we never got to, my people are building in the last 30 days. As an example, you know, when you're selling ads for a podcast, you want to check all the other podcasts and what advertisers they have. We trained an agent to go, take the top 100 podcasts, look through the transcripts, figure out who the advertisers are, check those advertisers in pipe drive, tell us when the last time we contacted them and put it into the salesroom. That was an SDR job that we wanted to fill and software we wanted to build. Then we wanted people to have, That was a human that you were paying money

Starting point is 00:23:50 and now you've replaced with software? Or that human still exists and now they just do it in a better way? Re-deploying that human. We have a human doing it. We're going to redeploy them to do other things. And the consistency of this Chema and the accuracy, and then it's doing it all night long. So we have like seven of these agents in these kind of roles.

Starting point is 00:24:07 The next piece we did was we gave my agent, which was like the Ultron, root access to Gmail, calendar, Zoom, notion, slack. And what it's doing is it's giving each person, here's what you got done this week, with their manager, here's the emails you sent, here's the meetings you took, here's the contacts, here, the threads you were involved in. And then it's helping manage those people. And so we are getting- But all that, all that to me says you, Jason, despite all your dumerism, seems like you're growing and you're going to be hiring more people and you're more productive. Am I getting this wrong?

Starting point is 00:24:41 No, no, I'm not dumerous. What I think's going to happen in this position is- But you're growing. and you're going to be hiring more people. We're not going to add more people. Definitely not adding people. The people we have are becoming 10 or 20% more efficient every week because the software we would have paid for or built from another vendor if we had the time or we wanted to build custom software. We had 10 engineers.

Starting point is 00:25:02 It's being built by our OpenClawe agents. As an example, when we make clips for this podcast, other podcasts, we have a go and look at like a This Week in Startups episode from 10 years. Tell us the three best moments. and it makes the clip, it puts the subtitles on it, and then it puts the clip into the Slack room. That was something that was going to be a full-time job. So we're getting 10, 20% more efficient.

Starting point is 00:25:25 Then I started doing it at home. So I had to take our Instacart, pull out the last 10 orders we did, and then tell us what we order most of time, and then it's going to automatically build a car for us. Every single knowledge where job is being automated right now, and you can take it, and if you're a business process head, well, you know how to like do a business process and you can structure it and write it with an agent, it'll just run it every day, every week. We did another agent. How do you make better thumbnails?

Starting point is 00:25:54 And we said every Saturday in your skills. So when you build an open claw, it has like a sole file and it has a skills file. In the skills file, we told it, Sacks, every week go out and look for people discussing how to make better thumbnails on YouTube, how to make better titles. It found this week, Chimoth, somebody at Mr. Beast company talk about how they're using heat maps. It was an article I would have never known. It added it to its skill. And now whenever we post the thumbnail, it tells us based on its skill that it refines every week how to make that thumbnail better. And it's starting to make the thumbnails. This is becoming recursive.

Starting point is 00:26:33 So you keep the same number of people, but they get 10 or 20 percent more efficient. I don't know what this means for the larger economy. All I know is it's the most exciting time I've had. had online since the web came out, since the internet came out. It is so much fun to automate all this stuff. The big question that I am thinking about, that I haven't gotten a good answer about, so I don't know what you guys think is. All these businesses are going to need to batten down the hatches and give themselves room to figure this all out, right? Like if you take SACS's point, like, if you take your point, JCal, which is the young, nimble companies like yours are going to be

Starting point is 00:27:09 rapidly experimenting. The bigger, larger companies are going to slowly onboard themselves to start experimenting. All of that means we're going to get much clear answers to all of this. But what it also means is that you're going to have to have time so that you can figure this all out. And if you want to buy yourself time, you're going to need a ton of cash. And if you're going to think about saving cash, the one place tech companies literally incinerate cash is how they do compensation.

Starting point is 00:27:43 And so I kind of think like at some point the next shoe will drop and all of these tech companies have to really look at stock-based comp because they literally incinerate most, if not all of their free cash flow fighting the dilution from stock-based compensation. So if you want five or six years to just be in the arena on the field figuring this out, you're going to want to kind of be very cash flow generative and really conservative in how you spend your money. Yeah, Sacks, the people who embrace this, I think, become five or ten times more valuable than the people who are not. That's where I think the opportunity in the economy is. So unless you'd think humanity's going to run out of problems to solve, I think it's going to be

Starting point is 00:28:20 boom. It's going to be boomtown. And I think people are going to start more companies because the Barry to start a company is no longer $3 or $4 million. You can just have two or three or three people and you start setting up these agents and man, you can make software, you can do sales, you can do PR, everything is getting faster and faster and faster. So the time between like conceiving of a product and publishing it and finding a developer, you don't even need a developer. You can just publish software. The wake up moment for me was we were talking to our agent about, hey, we want to get

Starting point is 00:28:53 this functionality out of Slack. And it's like, yeah, Slack doesn't have that, but have you considered Matterpost? What's Matterpost? Oh, it's an open source project. I can spin it up this weekend, export your Slack instance and put it there. And I was like, oh, don't do that. We're only spending $6K a year on Slack or 10K a year. But the software is building CRM systems for us.

Starting point is 00:29:13 It's building agents for us. And it wants to just build all the software stack. So you could, when you renegotiate with Slack or HubSpot or whatever company you're working with, you're going to be able to say to them, hey, we could roll our own. and when you want to upsell us on this latest thing, like you talked about sacks, upselling is such a big part of SaaS. You're like, I can actually build that software myself internally.

Starting point is 00:29:38 I don't need you to do it. Ryan Peterson just posts on X. Claude for legal seems to work just as well as Harvey, by the way. Now the SaaS populous is going after private companies now, too. Well, I think for a while now, there has been a question of which layer of the stack is going to capture all the value. So is it going to be the market? model companies or could it be the applications that are built on top of the models or, you know,

Starting point is 00:30:04 if there's a lot of competition at both those layers of the stack, do the chip companies get it all? I think it's an unclear question. Totally. Yeah, I think, you know, for any given vertical application, you do have to defend why you think your value prop will be sustainable as the underlying foundation models just get better of themselves. And it's open source. Like this week, we put up Kimmy 2.5.

Starting point is 00:30:29 can do about 80, 85% of the jobs. So we lowered our token bills massively when we stood that up. All right, listen, this is TBD. We got a lot more to think about on this topic. Just on this point of a lot of these debates about AI are dueling science fiction narratives, I just think that the Dumer narratives are inherently more appealing to people. I mean, I think it's partly just you look at most sci-fi movies are dystopian, not utopian. And in addition to that, I think we have a bunch of heuristic biases in favor of the Dumeran

Starting point is 00:31:01 narrative. So one of them is the scene versus the unseen. It's a lot easier to see the jobs that already exist that could be obsoleted than it is to imagine the new jobs and the new business models that haven't been created yet. And that will likely take some great innovator or a genius to think of in order to create. So we have that huge heuristic bias of not being able to see the creation that's coming. It takes way less creativity to think about the potential destruction. And then finally, I think, you know, the other heuristic is just the whole fix pie fallacy.

Starting point is 00:31:35 Most people do tend to think of the economy as a fixed pie. This is why you see so much anger against, you know, millionaires and billionaires is because of this idea that if someone's getting rich, it must be at the expense of someone else. That's not actually the case. The economy itself could be growing larger as a result of someone inventing something new that increases production. A really good line from another article that was written a couple of weeks ago was the economy is not a pie. It's a garden and technology is rain.

Starting point is 00:32:04 So again, you know, all of this technological innovation is going to increase the growth rate of the garden. It's not a fixed pie. And just because you see an expansion and productivity in one part of the economy does not mean that you're going to see job loss in another part of the economy. Yeah, I think the job people are not seeing, but I'm seeing right now. is the person who creates agents, manages them, and is the maestro of the agents, the person who can take the business process, explain it, and train the agent to do it.

Starting point is 00:32:37 And there are certain people in business who are just really good at operations. You were one of them, SACs running companies. And that person who can fire up an agent, train the agent, and figure out how to manage them and figure out how to increase their skills. It's a great job. And it's not a developer.

Starting point is 00:32:52 Look, with any new technology, there's always a huge change management aspect with enterprises because it's hard for them to adapt and change. And the people in the organization who can lead that change management are the ones who are going to create an amazing career opportunity for themselves. But it's hard to do. And that's going to slow down the rate of change, just the amount of inertia in the economy. And also, one other constraint is going to be that at some point here, we may be token constrained, right? I mean, we may not have enough energy like we've talked about, even though the chips are getting so much better that tokens per second, tokens per watt, and tokens per dollar are all increasing very fast, but we're still going to

Starting point is 00:33:31 probably be constrained in the next couple of years on some dimension, whether it's land power shell or just energy production or maybe chip production. There are real world constraints on just how fast we can scale the infrastructure. And that will mean that these like hyper-utopian or hyper-dispopia and narratives will be wrong. I don't think there's time in the next few years for the whole economy to change in the way that the extremes would present. I think you're right. I think you're going to see a 10xing in the demand for tokens, but I also think you're going to see a 90% price reduction in the cost of an output token, probably by the end of this year. So I think that to your point, like, it's going to just create an enormous upswell of demand

Starting point is 00:34:18 because we're going to be able to cut the prices of an output token so dramatically. And I think that's going to- By the way, that discussion we had, Chimov last week when we talked about the tokens outpacing the employee salary and just where are these tokens all going to come from, that was our most viewed clip or one of the most few clips in the history of this podcast. So people are actually really focused on this. I had my team at 89. We redid our cost model.

Starting point is 00:34:41 And now we have that as a line item. when we think about fully burdened cost of employees, we now factor that in because we're at a place where some of our engineers are just racking up ginormous bills. And then separately, just general runs that we do for general purpose stuff that we need to just run our product is it's so expensive. So I am waiting with baited breath for what Sack said, which is like we need an explosion in the capacity that's available because I do think that the silicon solutions are coming that will cut the cost, but we need a large block of land power shell ready to then turn all of this stuff on so that we can actually take advantage of it.

Starting point is 00:35:23 Rumors, the new Mac Studio is coming. We'll have an M5 chip in it and will be language model ready. So that's the rumors that they're building it for models. So that could be an incredible turn of events. Everybody's desktop running the local model. Sacks, you want to have the final word here, or Freeberg, before we... Just to go back to what Jamath was saying there. I mean, you've got political forces that want to stop the construction of all data centers in the United States.

Starting point is 00:35:48 So if that gains steam, then that's going to be a huge constraint on any change whatsoever. Can I tee this up for you, J-Cal? So I went back this weekend and I looked at the number of data centers that have faced local opposition and whether there were patterns. And I posted it on X, so Nick, maybe you can put this up. but it was really a very small behavior, which was pushing back on data centers and getting them canceled. We had about 25 projects total, of which 20 were just in Q2 alone.

Starting point is 00:36:24 There are 100 data center projects right now that are facing some form of local opposition. So interesting. If you take that 40% number and you apply this, and then you multiply it by the number of megawatts that they have announced, last year we lost almost five gigawatts in terms of cancel projects. This year coming in 26, we have about seven that could be canceled if you use this map. If then you flow that through, OpenAI, Sarah Fryer said this, that every gigawatt for her

Starting point is 00:36:59 for OpenAI is about 10 billion of revenue. So if you assume that that's roughly accurate, plus or minus a billion here or there, What that means is that 2025, the industry as a whole lost 50 billion of revenue. And this year, if 7 gigawatts gets canceled, it's about 70 billion. Now you're talking about 130 billion of lost revenue over these two years that'll go forward in time that we miss out on. I think that that's really bad. We need to figure out a way to nip this in the bud.

Starting point is 00:37:30 So confounding because we were sitting here five years ago, 10 years ago, local municipalities were fighting and giving discounts to try to get these data centers open to get the jobs and get the revenue. And now we've got people trying to stop them. This is a perfect transition for the state of the union. Before we get there, two important programming notes. Paulin is going to host two events in 26. One of them liquidity made 31st to June 3rd in Yonfell up in wine country Chimath has taken control of the event. And he has set a standard for who gets on stage. None of you Mids can control the programming. I just...

Starting point is 00:38:06 That's it. Shemov came in. He dropped the hammer. Who do you got so far? You want to tease a couple of people who you invited to come speak? I'll tease two. The first is an incredibly dear friend of mine.

Starting point is 00:38:18 The Axe of Axes. Dan Loeb, who found a third point, who was an unbelievable investor in literally every domain. Private credit, public equities, private tech. He's just a beast. He's a beast.

Starting point is 00:38:40 So he'll be doing a really important keynote. He has not done one of these public speaking slots in a very long time. And then the second is the CFO of OpenAI, Sarah Fryer. Oh, wow. Unbelievable star. And we're going to double click into the entire business model of OpenAI on stage in front of everybody. So go to all in.com. And then for those of you who plan ahead for travel.

Starting point is 00:39:01 More coming, more great names coming. If you are an All In Summit fan, I can't believe it, Friedberg. We're going to be in our fifth year, September 13th to 15. Only gets better. It gets better every year. I'm going to have some good parties too. I mean, that back to the future and the Blade Runner parties, those were epic. Allin.com slash events.

Starting point is 00:39:20 Hey, can I give a plug to Friend of the Pod, Bill Gurley? He's got an amazing new book. Funeral book. Running down a dream. Please. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, before you start. There it is, running down a dream. I just want everybody to stop, pause the podcast. I want you to buy three copies.

Starting point is 00:39:34 Give it to two young people and a parent, you know. This book is incredible. It's a great book. It's a great book. It really is inspiring for kids and Bill Gurley, friend of the pot, he always shows up for us. J-Kal, do an impression for us of what it would be like if you and Bill Gurley started a podcast together. All right, everybody. Welcome to the J-C-B-G podcast.

Starting point is 00:39:52 I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. And I'm Bill Gurley, and we're here in Texas, that Terry Blacks, where we're getting some beef ribs. and we're going to discuss investing in marketplaces, as well as my new book, Running Down a Dream, which will teach your kids how to not be f***-ups. And if your kids are f***-ups, you can hit them in the back of the head with the book. Texas style.

Starting point is 00:40:19 One of the big topics, and I think something you're working on with President Trump's acts, is this energy pledge. I've been seeing rumblings about, about this. Explain what's going on in terms of getting the country in sync around these data centers and energy. Well, the president announced in the state of the union last night that he supports a rate payer protection pledge, which requires the major tech companies to provide

Starting point is 00:40:47 for their own power needs for AI data centers so that residential consumers do not see their rates going up. I think this makes total sense. I think, to your point, this is the reason behind a lot of the opposition to new data centers is that the local residents fear that their electricity prices are going to go up. And that shouldn't be the case. And so the president has said that he's committed to not allowing residential rates to go up as a result of data centers. It's pretty straightforward. You get the big tech companies, the hyperscalers to pay for the increase in the electricity costs, or you let them set up their own power behind the meter. The president's been talking about this for over a year that our biggest AI companies would

Starting point is 00:41:28 also become big power companies because we had let them stand up their own power generation behind the meter. So these data centers don't even have to connect to the grid. They could just do co-location themselves. But also, I think that with this rate payer protection pledge, what you're going to see is that it could actually bring down consumer prices. Because what happens is that when these data centers then set up their own power and connect to the grid, they can give back the excess to the grid. Also, they will make investments in scaling the infrastructure. So although electricity is priced at a metered rate, the cost to generate it are not all variable. There's a lot of huge fixed costs in there. So when you increase scale, then you can actually reduce the metered rate.

Starting point is 00:42:15 So again, you know, this is really, I think, the rebuttal to Bernie Sanders, who just wants to stop all progress whatsoever. I saw a funny post calling it bananas, which is build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. So this is the... It sounds sustainable. It's replacing the new NIMBY. So you just can build absolutely nothing. I think the president's approach finds a very good balance here, which is, look, we can

Starting point is 00:42:38 have progress just don't make residential consumers pay for it. Let the big tech companies pay for it themselves. And I think you'll see more coming out about this from the White House next week. Quite a deft move. Freeberg, how should America be thinking about this great data center build out energy usage, you know, if you expand it out over the coming decade. And how do you sell that to the backdrop that you talk about, the socialist movement, you got a great interview coming out with Ray Dalio on the All In interview program next week. How do you think about those competing forces?

Starting point is 00:43:11 You've got the socialists saying bananas, nimbie, slow down, desal, and then you've got this incredible race we're in for efficiency and this opportunity and abundance. How would you sell it? to kind of bring these two sides together, or is it just impossible? The data coming in and out of data centers moves at roughly the speed of light, so you could put them anywhere. And I think that our policymakers

Starting point is 00:43:40 need to be very cognizant of that fact. You have, and we do, connect the Internet using high-speed cable, high-speed fiber optic throughout the world. And so theoretically, if we don't embrace and allow the economic development of the data center industry, and it will fundamentally be an industry, because it is almost like the new sort of oil, where the oil rig's going to go, where the railroad's going to go, where the telegraph line's going to go, where the factory's going to go. If we don't put them here, someone else will put them on their shores,

Starting point is 00:44:17 someone else will put them in their country, someone also put them in their jurisdiction, and a lot of the economic value that arises from the people that will build those facilities, the energy that will be installed to produce power for those facilities, and then all of the second and third order industries that emerge as a result of those installations, that value will accrue elsewhere. Such a good point. So it's not going to just go away. The demand is there.

Starting point is 00:44:45 The economy is moving forward. AI is moving forward. we live in a world with 196 countries, and data centers do not take up a lot of space. They're very small relative to the economic value that they produce. If you zoom out on the map of the world, all the data centers in the world fit under the tip of a pin. And so this is a very small footprint. And if we're going to give up hundreds of thousands of jobs and many billions of dollars of economic value creation, we're being pretty silly and pretty obtuse in our view of the

Starting point is 00:45:17 world. I would just like encourage the system that I think is the right system, and we talked about this last time, where provided data centers are producing their own electricity, that means that you're taking electricity consumption off the grid because they otherwise are not being used on the grid, and that will reduce the cost of electricity for other residential and industrial users. So it's silly to think that we need to put a moratorium on data centers. As soon as you do that, the companies that use data centers are not going to slow down. They're going to go put them somewhere else, and we're going to miss out. And it's such a good point, Chamoth, because you were recently in the Middle East,

Starting point is 00:45:51 and I've been there a bunch in Saudi, UAE. These are the folks who built a large portion of those oil refineries, and they are savvy to this. And what are they doing in Saudi, UAE, Qatar, all of these regions? They're doubling down. They're 10xing. Their data center builds. So to your point, Friedberg, either we build them or they're going to go somewhere else, and there are people who are willing to underwrite these,

Starting point is 00:46:16 and they're willing to take out the red tape from the process here and move quicker than us. So I think this is a pretty deaf move by President Trump to say, hey, you guys should all just guarantee that consumers don't get impacted. The water thing is a total hoax. Like, the water is recirculated. That's a hoax.

Starting point is 00:46:35 I think this is really smart. I think that what the president's doing and what Sachs is doing is really smart. The thing to keep in mind is that there's still a risk that prices go up and it has nothing to do with these data. centers, and it has everything to do with the business model of being a utility. Because what happens is, in order to get a license, a monopoly license in an area to provide energy, to generate energy for a community, the exchange works in the following way. You go and you present a CAPEX plan

Starting point is 00:47:07 to the Public Utilities Commission. That's effectively your budget. That says, here are the lines I'm going to upgrade. Here are the generators I'm going to upgrade. independent of data centers, the reality is the draw the electricity consumption of individual Americans is going up because we have more devices, we have cars, we have all of these other things. So what we also have to do is we have to look at how utilities' business model actually incentivizes them to increase prices by making all kinds of investments. So we have to do a good job of making sure we hold everybody accountable. Because otherwise, what you could see is at the data centers taking on the burden for themselves, but price is still continuing to

Starting point is 00:47:48 escalate because a utility says, I need to spend a billion dollars this year to upgrade my infrastructure. And what that allows them to do is take that billion dollars and essentially invest it for a return. That's the business model of utility. And this is really happening in blue states. Micron has a hundred billion dollar megafab in New York. And there's a lawsuit by six, one, two, three, four, five. This is six concerned citizens. That's shameful. And the project has taken 12,200 days, 1,200 days between their announcement and the groundbreaking. And they spent 612 days on the environmental impact study. People wake up, just go to Texas.

Starting point is 00:48:30 Elon built his factory here, the gigafactory, in under like 18 months. This is the great state of Texas. Come here. We'll build it for you and you'll be done. Yeah, I don't know why anyone bothers with the blue states anymore. They make it too hard to build. It's retarded. It's so dumb.

Starting point is 00:48:46 It's such a self-owned, too. Don't you want to be part of the future? You're literally anchoring the entire country. Disgratziad. By the way, there are a lot of people in New York who want to work. This is not a case, actually, of this new fab being unpopular. The majority of people in the area actually want this plant being built. They want the jobs.

Starting point is 00:49:07 They're going to come there. A lot of people say data centers don't create a lot of jobs. This is actually a chip fab. So we'll create a lot of jobs, a lot of good high-paying jobs. People want it. But six people can stop it with a lawsuit after it's already been through a two-year environmental review. It's not blue and red states.

Starting point is 00:49:22 These are nonprofits that get organized to create this kind of chaos. I remember looking at a massive lithium investment in Nevada. And the whole point was to domesticate lithium production. And what was interesting is this enormous deposit that's just sitting there ripe for development, right before they were about to get environmental approvals or right after, there was a lawsuit by people who wanted to protect the upper land grouse. It's seared in my mind that the upper landgrouse of Nevada is the reason why we do not have domestic national security around lithium. And you have to ask yourself, why is this possible? And it's possible because you

Starting point is 00:50:03 have these environmental nonprofits that can go and create this chaos with absolutely no risk to them. Zero. They can fundraise around it and they can create this chaos. I mean, Nick, to this point, this is an example of Greenpeace. And specifically here, they were pushing back on an oil pipeline to such a degree and they created so much chaos that they were sued. And a North Dakota judge just said that he's going to order Greenpeace to pay damages that should total almost $350 million in connection to those protests. And it should not be the case that six people can slow down a hundred billion dollar investment package. That's not right. Well, I think there's, and I just want to highlight this important point, there's not a lot of logic and reason. You guys are right,

Starting point is 00:50:48 but I do think there's a lot of emotion and there's a huge aversion to big tech, a huge aversion to wealth creation by select individuals, select companies, a huge aversion to economic growth that doesn't benefit everyone. There's a fundamental kind of underlying left behind emotion that drives a lot of this. And I've said it before, but I think unless there's systems or mechanisms that get folks to come along with the value creation ahead and help them connect their own lives to the value creation that's being realized, they're not going to be supportive because there is this kind of diametric opposition towards big tech, to boards the wealth gap, towards value accrual to a select few companies or select few individuals. And this fuels and feeds

Starting point is 00:51:31 that. So I think fundamentally, maybe it's not just about giving the data centers their own capacity, but there's got to be mechanisms and tools that helps the broader population understand or recognize or get some benefit from it as well, where they're an owner in it or participant in it because they have the power, as we're seeing, they have the power to stop it, therefore they want to have some benefit for providing authority to do it. And these six people are concerned about housing costs, worker exposure to toxic chemicals, pollution, air and water, greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption. flooding of the wetlands, all these things that obviously could be mitigated.

Starting point is 00:52:10 All right, let's keep moving here. We got a lot more docket to get through. State of the Union came in at 108 minutes. And it's the longest in 60 years, actually the longest since they started tracking this. The theme of President Trump's State of the Union this year, America at 250, strong, prosperous, and respected. Trump took a bunch of victory laps, inflation jobs, closing the border. All those have gone really well. But this comes to the backdrop of Trump's approval rating being super challenged.

Starting point is 00:52:41 He started his first year at plus 11.7%. Now he's negative 14.14.3%, 26 point swing. Economy started plus 3.4, down to 18.2. And trade started at 5.9%. And we'll talk about the tariff stuff later and went down to 22.7. So let's call balls and strikes here. Gentlemen, favorite moments? What were your favorite moments from the State of the Union and just general impressions of one hour and 45 minutes of Trump going to town? I thought it was great. Favorite moment? Favorite moment or two? Well, I had a couple. One was the Elon Omar Rashida Tlai death stare and them just like losing their minds. and screaming.

Starting point is 00:53:35 I just thought it was so un-American. The second was when he was calling for law and order where I'm focusing and prioritizing on American citizens and none of the- Illegal aliens. And none of the Democrats stood up. I thought that was kind of foolish. It was like obvious things and the Democrats wouldn't applaud,

Starting point is 00:53:56 but this time they did, like they did for the hockey team, which I thought was like the right thing to do. And then the fourth thing is just a shout-out to our friend Brad Gersner, who got a big shout out from the president. I don't know, Sacks, if you engineered that or not, but that was fantastic. That was incredible. He got like a double shot out. It was like a double tap.

Starting point is 00:54:11 Yeah. That was really cool. That was surreal. Our group chat, our group chat went crazy. It was really cool. Those are my four highlights. Great. Here's your, here's your clip of, yeah, Democrats not standing for Americans over illegal aliens, 20 seconds.

Starting point is 00:54:31 If you agree with this statement. Then stand up and show your support. The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not a legal alien. Why wouldn't you stand for that? That's an easy one to stand for it. It doesn't make any sense. Do you stand for it, Chico? Yeah, I mean, I'm pro, I can be anti-ice, but I'm pro-American and I'm pro-reasonable immigration.

Starting point is 00:55:07 Like 90% of the country is. So it just doesn't make any sense. But do you think American citizens should be prioritized over legal? Of course. Of course. Yes. Of course. Yes.

Starting point is 00:55:19 And then I also think there should be a path to citizenship for people who have been for a while. And I think that's what the majority of the country thinks as well. Your point is I can hold two thoughts in my head. So I would have stood if he asked me. Yes. Obviously, we should take care of American citizens first. Yes.

Starting point is 00:55:34 And we should deport violent criminals. We've been over this like a million times here. This is like consensus in the country. What do you think is going on and everybody else has said when they're like, we cannot stand for this? These two sides, I mean, I think it's like the tariff thing. It's like the ice thing. These two sides cannot work together. It's just the most polarized it's ever been. Trump is not like the kind of guy to reach across the aisle. The Democrats are now digging in. So we just have a dysfunctional government where, you know, in a more functional time period, like under Clinton, let's say, or Bush, people would have gotten together. I'm jumping ahead to the time. tariff discussion and they would have said, yeah, of course tariffs are done in Congress. That's the law, whatever. What are your thoughts, Mr. President? How can we support your tariff program? But now it's like, oh, well, we don't work together. We don't actually have discussions anymore.

Starting point is 00:56:22 There's no bipartisan, you know, collaboration. All these politicians are disgraceful. The Scraziata across the board, they should be working together for the American people. If the president wants to do tariffs, they should be reasonable about it and give him the power to do reasonable tariffs. And he should be reasonable and say, hey, I understand that. your power. Let's get together and we'll chop it up and let's have dinner together. But they're just too polarized. It's just disgrace where this country has gotten to. I blame both parties. Whenever the Democrats get smoked out as being radicals and extremists, you always want to basically say a pox on both your houses and blaming the Republicans and Democrats equally. The fact

Starting point is 00:57:00 that matter is the president said to the audience, to the members of Congress, hey, if you agree with the statement, stand up. And of course, every single single, Democrats sat there stone face and refused to applaud or acknowledge what he was saying. This was a very easy test for the Democrats to pass. In fact, it was a- In fact, it was a political risk for the president because it was so easy for the Democrats to demonstrate that they're operating in good faith and they're willing to be bipartisan and they're not extremists and they're actually commonsensical and logical. And they completely failed the test. And by the way, it wasn't just on that one. I mean, let me just tell you some of the other ones where they refuse to

Starting point is 00:57:43 applaud. So they refused to applaud the grieving families of innocent American women and children murdered by criminal illegal aliens, including the mother of Irene Zeritskaya. That was very sad. That was unbelievable. They refused to applaud for securing our homeland and ending the invasion of criminal illegal aliens, killers, rapists, gang members, and traffickers. They refused to applaud for unifying against political violence. So the president mentioned the assassination of Charlie Kirk. They would not even do a polite clap for Erica Kirk and unifying against political violence. They refused to applaud for keeping violent criminals locked up.

Starting point is 00:58:27 They even refused to applaud for lower prescription drug prices for millions of Americans because it was President Trump who orchestrated that policy. And there were so many other examples like that. And, you know, I think the reason why this speech was so. effective. And by the way, it's not just me saying it, something like two-thirds of the people that CNN polled. So two-thirds of CNN watchers said it was highly effective. And something like three-quarters of CBS News viewers said it was highly effective is because the president laid out 80-20 issue one after another, right? Or even 90-10 issues or 95-5 issues. I mean, these were all issues

Starting point is 00:59:03 where the overwhelming number of Americans, I think, agree with the policy the president laid out. And in every single case, the Democrats opposed to wouldn't even give it a polite applause. And that is different than in the past. And you can say that's because of hyperpartisanship and polarization, but it's also because of another thing. It's because the Democrats have become a party of radicalism and extremism. And the viewpoints that they expressed through their aesthetics the other night, they do express those things in policy and in speeches all the time. So it's not just like a one-off. or, you know, somehow, like, we have a misconception of who these guys are. I think, you know, the big line of the night was when Trump just sort of said these people

Starting point is 00:59:47 are crazy. I mean, he said it in like almost mournful and regretful way. He doesn't want them to be crazy. He wants them to be rational so he can work with them. I mean, but I think that point resonant. I'll still point the other side, which is, this has been going on for a couple of, you know, state of the unions here across this. The Republicans didn't stand for the Democrats often. And it's a bit of showmanship. But the truth. truth is, Trump is the divider in chief. He always is attacking people. He's always mocking people. So they don't want to play ball with him. So I do think you can both sides. You have no choice in politics. You got a counterpunch. No, I don't think so. That's actually the, that's actually the problem with

Starting point is 01:00:24 that philosophy, Trump's philosophy of we have to counterpunch, we have to attack, we never have to apologize, we never have to be reasonable. That's part of what's broken down in our politics. And these two sides should work together. We should go back to a bipartisan. How are you going to work with Elon Omar. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but she is the mirror. Hold on. I'll finish my statement. You asked a question.

Starting point is 01:00:44 I think Trump is the mirror of that. He has been hostile towards these Democrats. He doesn't give them an inch. They should be more collaborative. That's what the balance of power between the executive branch and these, you know, and these, you know, congressmen and the Congress and the Senate, like this is how it's supposed to work. And these two sides need to learn how to get back to listening to each other.

Starting point is 01:01:07 understanding each other's positions and then finding a middle ground. And that's why the Democrats lost last time because they didn't have the common sense to say, hey, everybody wants the border close. To your point, it's a 90% issue. And Kamala Harris was too dumb to just say, yeah, we should have closed the border. It's closed now. And we've got it. Anyway, the whole thing is a mess.

Starting point is 01:01:27 I understand you've got to fight for your team. I don't like the counterpunches. I like collaboration. You just actually made the key point, which is underlying the optics and the polarization. You have issues. and on those issues, President Trump is on the side of the American people. The issues where 80% of the American people agree, some huge percentage, I don't know exactly what it is, thinks that the Somali daycare fraud in Minnesota was an outrage.

Starting point is 01:01:52 And the president is right to point that out. And what's the Democrats' reaction? You've got Illinois Omar screaming from the audience at him. Yeah, she's a loon. I mean, at the end of the day, they did stand. You did have Elizabeth Warren. stand for stopping Nancy Pelosi from trading stocks, and that gave Trump his best one-liner of the night. That was his best one-liner, clearly. And they stood for Iran, too, and stopping Iran

Starting point is 01:02:18 from being a nuclear. I give Elizabeth Warren credit for that. There you go. You don't have to punch our back. There's a stop insider trading act without delay. Yeah. See, that's something bipartisan. Look at that, Zach. That's what you need to get the country back to. Okay. Hold on, but this just proves the point you were making before. You said that it was polarization. They stood up for that, I can't believe. Can't believe? Did Nancy Pelosi stand up if she's here?

Starting point is 01:02:45 Zing, sing, pal, good job. That's why he's so good is he's in the moment and he's reacting to what's happening in the chamber. He's not just reading from a telephopter and he nailed it. But look, that moment disproves what you're saying, J. Cal, because this is not just about polarization. On that issue, Elizabeth Warren was willing to stand because she actually, to her credit,

Starting point is 01:03:04 wants to ban insider trading by members of the Congress. But on the rest of those issues, like securing the border, she did not stand. Why? Because she does not agree with the president on that issue. We just have to get back to these sides working together. That's my personal feeling. Freiburg, any thoughts on the theatrics and Trump's first year writ large and, you know, the sort of back and forth? And is there any hope that these two teams could collaborate at some point on something like, say, the ballooning deficit, which Trump has not gotten under control in his first year, and it's going to be $2.5 trillion added. What are your thoughts here on them

Starting point is 01:03:42 collaborating on anything important, Friedberg? It's probably one thing they can agree on is just keep the money flowing. Got it. They'll both give a standing ovation for burn more capital and put us more in debt. Well, said my guy, David Friedberg. Sultan of science, it is your time to shine. The world's greatest moderator has decided we're going directly to Science Corner. This is your time to shine. And it's Sax is time to drop a deuce. Sacks wouldn't immediately. Yeah, he has to drop a dues.

Starting point is 01:04:13 Let's go. What do you need me for? This is very important for you. Freeburg's going to talk. Lightning Round for Science Corner. Go, Freeburg. Wait, wait, wait, wait, are we doing any more topics after this or can I just leave? Yes, tariffs.

Starting point is 01:04:25 Yes, we're doing tariffs. Wait, why would we do that? Because I want to get paid. You're going to put the audience to sleep. I'm not saying Science Corner. doesn't have its audience. Listen, you can go take. Why when we do, yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:04:36 Go take and do, you're like screaming, let him do his work. Let him, two? Let him cook. Let him cook. Freeburg, tell us about this Harvard thing. Speaking of science, I think that there's a very important moment happening right now. We've talked a number of times on the show about Yamanaka factors. These are these four proteins that were discovered by Shinnya Yamanaka that we found later

Starting point is 01:04:55 that when applied to cells, mammalian cells, can actually reverse the age of those cells. reset the epigenetic clock, reset the epigenome, which is the little markers on top of the DNA that turn genes on and off, back to a youthful state. Extraordinary groundbreaking work that was done that won the Nobel Prize led to the foundation of several companies. There's a Harvard scientist named David Sinclair. He's a bit of a controversial character. Do you guys know him? I think you guys, one or two of you may have met him. Chmach, you ever met him? I followed him. I've seen his stuff. So Sinclair is kind of bemoaned, a little bit by the scientific and academic community for being a little too over-hyhy snake oil salesman, as some of folks have claimed because years ago, he sold a company to GSK saying Resveratrol would reverse aging. And, you know, he made $720 million on that. It didn't end up

Starting point is 01:05:47 working. And he's promoted certain supplement companies and so on. So I want to preface with that before I kind of underwrite what he's saying with this next thing. But he's a co-founder of a company called Life Biosciences. And they've reached a major agreement with the FDA. to be the first company to treat humans with Yamanaka factors. Specifically what they're doing is they're going to be delivering these Yamanaka factors. These are these proteins that rejuvenate cells and make them youthful again into the eye. And so their first indication is to actually inject them into the vitrial fluid in the eyeball. And they'll affect the retina in the eye to address people that have gotten blind from glaucoma

Starting point is 01:06:30 or one of these kind of stroke-like diseases that happen in the eye. And the expectation with this phase one clinical trial is that the delivery of these Yamanaka factors into the eye will rejuvenate the retina, make it youthful again, and restore vision. If it works, which it's expected to, because we see this result happen in animal models, it could be an extraordinary breakthrough, not just in terms of blindness, but in terms of the first human application of Yamanaka factors to reverse aging. The way they're doing it is they're actually packaging up DNA that will make these proteins into viruses, an A-A-V virus that is delivered into the eye.

Starting point is 01:07:13 The virus will then go into the retinal cells and then will deliver this payload for this DNA to make these proteins in the eye cells. And it can be turned on and off. Amazingly, they've created a switch mechanism in it where the protein production, the production of these Yamanaka factors can be turned. Aminoff by taking an antibiotic called doxycycline. So the person that gets the delivery of this drug takes the antibiotic, turns on the production of these Yamanaka factors, and then theoretically, their eye cells will de-age, will get youthful, and their vision will be restored. So phase one

Starting point is 01:07:48 clinical trials underway, first time in human history, we're seeing Yamanaka factors being delivered into humans. Literally the tip of the iceberg, there are now over a dozen startups that are trying to deliver Yamanaka factors, which are these proteins or some other sort of protein that can actually reverse aging by restoring the epigenome and cells and make them young again. So this is the beginning of a wave of what I think will be the most extraordinary revolution in human therapeutics and ultimately could lead to, you know, some people would argue the fountain of youth.

Starting point is 01:08:21 Is this just a talk study? So is it mechanism? 1A? Yeah, well, they'll see results. They'll see results, but they're going to keep dosing low, but you will see results. God, that's going to be incredible. It's going to be incredible. By the way, the number of other folks that are gearing up for phase one using, if not the Yamanaka

Starting point is 01:08:40 factors, other factors that they've identified or designed as an alternative to Yamanaka factors, again, to rejuvenate themselves. And just to remind folks, the way this works is it was discovered that these proteins, when they go into a cell, they take all of those little markers that sit on top of your DNA that turn genes on and off, and they create a system that causes them all to move to the right place. So it resets the markers so that those cells will start to operate like they're supposed to when they were young again. It's going to be incredible.

Starting point is 01:09:09 Yeah. Do you think like, in all seriousness, people's knees or joints or where do you think it could flow to next? Arthritis. Yep. And by the way, when applied and if it's distributed in the skin, they've seen some results in monkeys where like wrinkles go away. It like literally makes these cells all work.

Starting point is 01:09:26 youthful again. And so a lot of the damage that happens over time is not damage to DNA. It's damaged to the epigenome. It's the parts that sit on top of the DNA that turn genes on and off. And they get moved to the wrong place as you get older. And by resetting them and getting them back to the right place, boom, the cell is young again, the organ is young again, and suddenly you look and act and feel young again. It's an incredible technology. We're just at the early stage of the early innings of turning it into therapeutics. Again, the discovery goes back to 2006, and now we're starting to see it get into clinic. All right. Let's rejuvenate. Let's rejuvenate some hairlines on this podcast. That would be

Starting point is 01:10:03 next up, speak for yourself. I don't know. You got a little, you got a little peaks going there, my brother, a little peaks here. What are you talking about? My hairline's incredible. I'm 50. I mean, it's not bad for 50. I'll give you credit. You're holding your own. All right. Let's talk about our final topic. Scotis struck down Trump's emergency powers tariffs. Last Friday, Scoti's voted six, three, against President Trump's IEPA tariff. Six judges voted against three conservatives, Roberts, Barrett, Gorsuch, and three liberals via Bloomberg. This is the biggest rebuke of existing executive policy in 91 years since Scoti struck down FDR's first New Deal in 1935. UPenn, Wharton analysis, says the tariffs collected about 175 billion to date, 50% of all tariff duties might wind up being refunded.

Starting point is 01:10:56 This is going to take some time to sort out on the courts. 2,000 importers have already filed for refunds. We talked about it here. I think the majority of people felt like this is the way the decision would go. And we talked about here that there were other options for President Trump to pursue. He immediately said he was not deterred and invoked a 15% global tariff across the board via Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act. Here's your Polly Market.

Starting point is 01:11:25 Will the court force Trump to refund tariffs? 18% chance but spiked to 40% after the SCOTIS decision. How are Congress reacts? Polymarket says 3% chance. Congress passes any tariffs by March 31st. So again, as I referenced earlier, these two sides just can't seem to work together. And that would have resolved the whole.

Starting point is 01:11:49 Sacks, you want to give us your take here? First of all, I don't think that the tariffs are going away. What the court basically indicated, especially the 70-page Kavanaugh dissent, is that there's multiple alternative bases in law for the tariffs in existing law. So, for example, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 enables temporary 150-day tariffs of up to 15% to address balance of payments issues. And the president has already invoked this. So we are now operating under that.

Starting point is 01:12:23 What the 150 days is going to do is by the administration time to substantiate bias studies and agency reviews what it needs to prove in order to invoke more sweeping tariff authority under Section 301 of the Trade Act and under Section 338 of the Tariff Act. Section 301 authorizes tariffs responding to unfair foreign trade practices.

Starting point is 01:12:50 Section 338 of the Tariff Act allows tariffs against countries discriminating against U.S. Commerce. The Kavanaugh Descent actually provided a roadmap for the administration to put in place tariffs using one of these alternate bases. So I think that one way or another, the tariff policies of this administration and the favorable trade deals that they allow us to strike with many nations. they will continue. And I think the court seems to know that because the majority's opinion and as concurrence has collectively said nothing about how the administration should go about refunding

Starting point is 01:13:25 the tariff revenue already collected. I think that if they expected this decision to end the tariff policies altogether, they probably would have said something about that. And I think that brings up a really important point just on the merits here, which is why would we want to give back hundreds of billions of dollars to a bunch of importers when we're trillions of dollars in debt. And I'll just say that the people who originally predicted that somehow these tariffs would be catastrophic for the economy, those predictions all prove not to be true. So I think that this is ultimately, I think, going to be a popular policy. The administration will figure out a different way to do it.

Starting point is 01:14:01 And I predict that future administrations, whether the Republican or Democrat, will keep some version of the tariffs in place, because I think that they will be ultimately popular on a long-standing basis. Tomath, your thoughts? I think we've proven the experiment has been successful. What was the experiment? We needed to smoke out what the right balance of trade should be between the United States and all of its partner countries.

Starting point is 01:14:30 I think that what we uncovered is that for the most part, they were structural imbalances that were made not because they made economic sense for America, but it was just part of a hodgepodge of globalist drivel that people just bought into. And if you strip all that stuff away, we had a hollowed out manufacturing class and we have a hollowed out middle class and the tariffs will create more equality for the American worker in the end. So now I think the debate should be about how to implement these in a structural and permanent way. I think we talked about this before, Jason, that this was sort of expected. And there are many other mechanisms, I think, I think the president activated one of them immediately.

Starting point is 01:15:13 I don't think this is going away, and I don't think it should go away. So I think now the point is Congress really should ratify these things because it is clear that it was the right thing to do. And if they don't, then, you know, the president still has a lot of room to get these done. But these make smart economic sense, in my opinion. Freeberg, any thoughts on the ruling? Does it give you some, I don't know, respect for the course? courts that they made a judgment not along party lines for once? Yes.

Starting point is 01:15:45 Is it, yeah, okay. I think that all, I think all Americans should feel assured and comforted in the fact that I think a lot of people view the Supreme Court as having a high degree of partisanship. The fact that the president, despite having a majority of what others would think were kind of politically aligned, appointees on the court, had a ruling that he did not want. I think should give everyone good faith that the system that the founder's set up is working, that there is a judicial branch that adjudicates the law against the executive branch when they think that it doesn't map. And I think that that was very important to see. So, you know, I clearly,

Starting point is 01:16:26 the debate about tariffs, the economic effective tariffs, the security, structural, trade relationship, effective tariffs and the importance of that is a separate conversation. But I do think that the read of the law being what I would say is nonpartisan, with respect of the court's action is important and probably very valuable. I'll reiterate that. This is a great moment, I think, for the Supreme Court to make a thoughtful decision. And I think we need to think about executive power, a whole bunch, whether it's Biden with student loans or Trump with tariffs. We have this beautiful system set up by the founding fathers. I know it's frustrating. Gridlock's frustrating. Having to work together is frustrating.

Starting point is 01:17:04 Trust me, we all come to this podcast every Thursday. We have to be. work together. It's hard to work together. It's got to learn to work together, and we don't want an executive branch that can unilaterally just roll over the other branches. And that's going to end. I think Trump's going to lose the midterms, and we're going to get to more chaos again. And we might as well start this reconciliation process of these two sides, stopping their law for against each other, and working together for the American people on the important issues. the tariffs, there are some fundamentally important things that Trump was doing there. And they were working.

Starting point is 01:17:41 They could have been chaotic. That's a reasonable, you know, criticism of them because business owners didn't know what to do. So Trump did it in a chaotic way. That's just the fact. He should have done it in a more thoughtful way. And the Congress should have been alongside him saying, hey, what tools do you need? How can we help support this? We know that there's trade imbalances.

Starting point is 01:18:01 We know that people are being unfair. Let's work together as one America to negotiate these things. So both sides, start having dinner together, start playing cards together, and do what we do here on this podcast, which is you fight it out, you argue. But then you come together and try to find some resolutions for this stuff. So they should go and tell Trump, hey, we'll approve all the tariffs you did. We will not force you to get refunds. The Congress should come out and just say that. And then they should say, hey, and when you want to do them in 2026, just run them by us or ask us for some parameters that you want.

Starting point is 01:18:33 And let's just be thoughtful about it. These are our concerns. That's it. Thank you for coming to my tat talk. Can I just do one response. Absolutely. I'm sure you have some debate club points that you want to point that. Well, I just want to make one.

Starting point is 01:18:43 I mean, do you think Susan Rice is going to respect your call for comedy and basically working together, kumbaya? I want the spree to corpse. No, I don't. I think both sides. She just had a diatribe where she basically said that Republicans, and actually not just like partisan and Republicans, but even tech companies that merely were working with the administration should expect to get prosecuted. I mean, she was basically outright saying she and the Democrats are

Starting point is 01:19:13 going to pursue lawfare as soon as they get back in charge. They're absolutely going to do that. Just like when Trump got in, he went after Comey, he went after Jerome Powell. The lawfare is happening on both sides. Both sides need to drop the lawfare. We need to get rid of these pardons. They're ridiculous. And we have to be a team. So let's just get some espreed a corpse and teamwork going in Washington, D.C. And that's what we should vote for in the midterms. We should vote for moderates who want to work together.

Starting point is 01:19:38 And in 2008, we should have some kind of moderates and tickets that want to work together. That would be better for all Americans. This kind of chaos is not good, folks. All right. Listen, it's been another amazing episode of the All In podcast,

Starting point is 01:19:53 your favorite podcast. Like, subscribe, whatever the hell you want to do on your own time. Four, David Sacks, David Freiburg, Chamalpali Hopatia. Love you, boys. I am the world's greatest minority, Jok.

Starting point is 01:20:06 See you next time. Bye bye. Bye, bye. Rain Man, David Sack. Gorset to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, West. The queen of kin, we'll just get a room and just have one big huge origin because they're all just like this sexual tension, but they just need to release them out. They need to get merchies are back.

Starting point is 01:20:55 I'm doing all in.

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Software Stocks Implode, Claude's Hit List, State of the Union Reactions, Trump's Tariff Pivot

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