All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Trump's First 100 Days, Tariffs Impact Trade, AI Agents, Amazon Backs Down

Episode Date: May 2, 2025

(0:00) The Besties welcome Box's Aaron Levie and Flexport's Ryan Petersen! (4:05) Is Sacks back? (8:19) Reflecting on Trump's first 100 days (28:16) Global trade disruption, how businesses are dealing with tariffs (49:14) Amazon flip-flops on its tariff pricing feature, national security issues (1:04:13) AI agents, 1,000,000X'ing AI, and more Follow Aaron Levie: https://x.com/levie Follow Ryan Petersen: https://x.com/typesfast 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/biden-warns-risk-nuclear-armageddon-highest-cuban-missile-crisis-rcna51146 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/30/world/europe/us-ukraine-military-war-takeaways.html https://x.com/Molson_Hart/status/1915248938753392642 https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/1917697018551754802 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/us/politics/trump-amazon-tariffs-prices.html https://x.com/chamath/status/1908239828283777393 https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-plots-charging-20-000-a-month-for-phd-level-agents?rc=pxkrxo https://manus.im https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/benchmark-invests-chinese-startup-behind-manus-ai-agent?rc=pxkrxo https://polymarket.com/event/which-company-has-best-ai-model-end-of-2025?tid=1746130417369

I got to wrap guys. I got to catch a flight to Miami. Let me do a closing here. If you want to keep going. You're welcome to three plane just wait just text the pilot and just tell them you're all right. Listen, I'm not burning all the all in credits, so to speak and all of our tokens. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm not like you're worried about everything and then putting it on the all in budget and the rest of us are flying southwest.

Careman dictator. all in budget and the rest of us are flying Southwest for your chairman dictator, Jermuff Poliakoff. Did I miss a flight? It's a strange concept. Yeah, David Sacks, what does that mean? David, when was the last time you flew commercial? Clinton. I haven't missed a flight in about 15 years. All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world.

We're back. We're back. And what an amazing panel we have today with us. Ryan Peterson, friend of the pod is back on the show. He's the CEO of flexport. How are you doing? Ryan, did you get any skiing in this year? I know you like to ski in the deep powder like I tried, man, but it was a busy year for work and I got two little kids. I did a few days. Okay, so you're Oh, yes, we all forgot. You gave control of your company to somebody. It got a little shaky, got a little contentious, and

then you took the reins back. How's it been being back in the pilot seat? Now that was a year and a half ago. So it's a distant memory for in flexport time. That's like a decade we've Yeah, really had an amazing run. Although this tariffs I mean, I guess that's why you guys invited me on these tariffs have kind of made a lot of created a lot of new uncertainty in the flexports world. Okay, so we'll definitely get into that and of course fan favorite back for his fourth appearance on the pod.

I was so first of all, I saw the comment. I saw the comments last time I was on I'm officially not a fan favorite, but glad to be back on. And I will be representing free markets in this version of the audience. What do the comments say about you? It was like, you know, like loves Biden, totally beta, you know, all the things. Beta, Biden lover. BPL.

Soy boy. Was that when you were filling in for me though? I think so, yes. I was trying to represent, I was trying to represent libertarian values at the time, but I loved it. But the leftists are embracing Milton Friedman. I think it's all worth it if that's what comes out of all these different debates.

This is, AOC is gonna be a complete free market person soon. Really? Free market monster coming soon. Embracing free market values in the stock market, right? Yes, exactly. Because any decline in the stock market is Trump's fault.acing free market values in the stock market, right? Yes, exactly. Because any decline in the stock market is Trump's fault. So now they're embracing the stock market. Well, unfortunately, the one day that he said

it's Biden's market, it was a green day. So that didn't help the case. I mean, gosh. Well, listen, it's started already, Chamath. Looks like another massive green day already. Do you see this? All that matters to me is that Uber is the anti-tariff stock. It just does great.

It's not impacted by tariffs. So here we go. Chamath, it started already. We have TDS on both sides. We've got Trump Derangement Syndrome from Aaron. Wait, no, no, no, no. I want to be, oh, I want to be- Defender Syndrome from Sachs. We've got both. Defender and derangement. Here we go. TDS- How about Trump Bias Syndrome on your part? Who, me? Me? I call balls and strikes. What are you talking about? Let's get started. It's starting already, folks.

It's going to be a great episode. Lots of excitement with us again. Jason has the self-sabotage, find every way to not get rich syndrome. I do? What are you talking about? You guys said you'd buy me out of this thing and I could get the hell out of here.

You know how much my shares are in all inner worth? For the love of God, right? It checks your mouth. Get me the hell out of here. I just may. Oh God. I mean, I'm going to be a tariff. Uber breaks 88.

That's my number. 88 is the number. You're all fucked when that happens and we're getting close. All right, let's get started here. We have so many topics to get through With us again, David sacks. Hey, David, you're doing more episodes now the audience wants to know I don't know if we're allowed to make any initial announcements, but people are asking me on the streets and the airports in the comment threads Is sacks back? Well, the ratings are back. Ever since he came back to the show, that's for sure.

The ratings are back, so, but is Sacks back? Is Sacks back? Well, I'm back as much as I can. And you are a partial employee of the government. You can do 130 days a year or something. Is that still the status? Yeah, it's roughly half, half work days. Got it.

And so what do you do? You have a punch clock there when you get to the White House? You punch in, you punch out like Fred Flinstone or what? Are you keeping track of these days? How do you do it? I know why you don't know this because you have yet to be invited to the White House. No, you're interesting.

I got invited. That's actually not how it works. Normal, people just badge in and badge out like normal. They badge in and badge out. It's a normal. I got excited. That's actually not how it works. Normal. People just, people just badge in and badge out like normal. They badge in and badge out. It's a normal place, Jason. I mean, literally, it's interesting. There's a new private club. It's incredible that you have thoroughly prepared for this week, just like always. I am always prepared. Interestingly, I don't know if you gentlemen know this, Ryan and Aaron,

there's a new private club in DC that Don Jr. is doing, and Sax is a member, Tramont's a member, and I just checked my Gmail. I checked all three of my Gmail accounts, everything. No invite, you must have gotten lost again. Did you send a paper one? Was it like you sent a gold card or something, Sax? How do I get invited to this private club? What is this private club?

Everybody wants to know. Well, we'll be happy to have you as a guest. Okay, do I have to wear a MAGA hat and have the courtesy MAGA hats at the door? If you want to know. Well, we'll be happy to have you as a guest. Okay. Do I have to wear a MAGA hat? Do I have the courtesy MAGA hats at the door? If you want to be a member, obviously there are dues and a membership fee and I just didn't want to waste your time with an offer that I knew you wouldn't be willing to accept. It's only $500,000 is what I read. Is that true? That's true for founding members who have additional benefits, but there's also a lower level. That's the more

reasonable membership level. So I think people are getting a little bit carried away with that number. Got it. Okay. That's why I want to clarify. Yeah. Yeah, there's like 10 founding members who have that level. And then there's a lower level for more average member. Chamath, are you one of those 10? Yes. Do you pay more if you have TDS or how does that work?

TDS premium? Are you talking about J Cal specifically or what are we talking about? TDS surcharge? I'm asking for a friend. It's a TDS surcharge. You put the tariff surcharge and the TDS surcharge. We just, we want a place to hang out in DC.

All of us have been to clubs like the Battery or I don't know if you go to LA, like the best places. There's Malibu Beach House, there's Bird Street clubs. There are places in Palm Beach that are really cool. In any event, we wanted a place to hang out and the clubs that exist in Washington today have been around for decades. They're kind of old and stuffy.

To the extent there are Republican clubs, they tend to be like more Bush era Republicans as opposed to Trump era Republicans. So we wanted to create something new, hipper and Trump aligned. Since I'm in the government, I can't be an owner, but I told him I'd be happy to be member number one. And so I, you know, said, great, let's do it. And so we're creating a place for us to hang out. That's basically it. We want a place to go where you don't have to worry that the next person over at the bar is a fake news reporter or even a lobbyist or something like that who we don't know and we don't trust. Got it. So it's like any private club. You want to go somewhere that's

highly curated. This private club movement is happening all over the country, not just Washington. But we're creating something that didn't exist before in DC, which again is younger, hipper, Trump-aligned Republican. We're, I actually started a Kamala club in the Bay Area. So, so we're, yeah. I don't think anyone would pay to join that though, is the problem, right? I mean, it's an open bar and that's for sure.

I do. Where do you guys meet up in like Redwood City? We actually meet up at the, at the, at the trade ports. All right, we're a hundred days in to Trump 2.0. It's just a random hundred day thing, but everybody's talking about everybody's hand wringing. What has it been like for this first hundred days? How does it compare to Biden? How does it compare to Trump 1.0? 143 executive orders the most ever in the first hundred days. And they're moving obviously at a different pace to be generous. Major indices are down seven to 10%. Obviously, this trade war and tariffs, the year old on the the yield on the tenure, that's down about 40 basis points. There's a lot

going on. Let's go around the horn. Ryan, Aaron, you're our guests. What's your take on the first 100 days? Is it what you expected? Good, bad and otherwise? wins and fails everything? I'll go first. I think it's a whirlwind. I mean, if you look at the, uh, that John Boyd, the fighter pilot has this concept of the OODA loop, which is observe, orient, decide, and act. And the concept is that if you're in dogfighting,

if you're able to maneuver through those OODA loops at a faster pace than your, than your competition, they get disoriented and don't know what to do. And I think that that's gotta be how Democrats in Washington and maybe mainstream Republicans in Washington, certainly journalists are all feeling this. Like there's the Trump administration takes action. And before anybody can respond to that, they have already done like four more things.

And you're like, wait, I forgot to actually follow up on the other thing that they did that I didn't like. Uh, and so it's, yeah, it's pretty disorienting if you're, if you're trying to, they can't find a line to fall back to and go, Hey, we're going to push back against this policy. Cause they're already moving on to the next one, the next one. Um, so that's like my high level interpretation. Obviously I come at it from a trade angle. I think everybody knew that Trump was going to be, he told us during the

campaign that the most beautiful word in the English language is tariff. Don't tell them it's an Arabic word, but the most beautiful word in the English language. And so we knew that was coming. I think that the, the, the suddenness of it all caught people by surprise. I mean, they told us April 1st, April 2nd would be liberation day. They didn't tell us that it would go live the next week, you know, and the fact ship you've already ordered these goods.

So that's one aspect that people are kind of disoriented about. And we're going to unpack. Yeah, we're going to unpack that. Aaron, your thoughts on the first hundred days. Obviously you are a Democrat and you were pretty vocal, not in support of Trump. So what's your take on the first 100 days? Any bright spots for you, things you support? Actually, Sax's world, I'd say, has been a bright spot.

So especially, I mean, I think we have a very clear message on AI. And that's been, I think, a huge net positive is, if you look at the past few months out of all the AI push from the administration, it's unmistakably pro open source, pro bring as much AI innovation to the US. Obviously, the tariffs add a little bit of a headwind to that. I have some very strong asks around high skilled immigration because I think that AI talent

is going to be super critical to actually win the AI war. So I'd say that directionally has had some positive momentum. From my perspective, this is kind of playing out almost exactly how I thought it would six months ago. And then three months ago, I think there was some signs that maybe it wouldn't play out this way, just based on some of the early groups that were coming to the White House, the deep business centricity

of the White House. I think it was day one or two that Stargate was announced at the White House, we're going to go build massive infrastructure. The case I'd like to make once we talk about tariffs is I think there's an alternative universe where you just lean into acceleration as opposed to adding headwinds. But, but so that would be, that would be the case of what, what maybe could have been, you know,

very different is we just keep doubled down on, doubling down on what's working while fixing the parts that aren't working. But, but that would be, you know, my, my, my judgment so far. Chamath, I mean, you've been talking about it here every week. You and I have been talking about it pretty consistently. So I don't think there'll be many surprises here.

But take a second and maybe assess what you think if you had to pick a singular thing that's gone really well, and a singular thing you think could be improved. What do you got? Let me give you my overall grade. and then I'll tell you how I get to that. I think the first 100 days have been a B plus. And here's how I get to that score. There have been two things where I think Trump has, frankly, hit a home run.

The first is all of the direct investment and specifically the foreign direct investment into the United States. I think it's approaching, if not it has already exceeded a trillion dollars from corporations and organizations and individuals from around the world who have committed to bringing money into the United States. And I think strategically, that's a legacy that will live past him. So I think that's been an A plus. The second is we had a very unsafe border situation, and he ran on shutting it down. I'm not talking about the execution of the deportations. I'm just saying getting the illegal crossings to zero

and he's done that. So that's been an A plus. I think what's going to be more controversial are these next three things though. In my interpretation, I think the tariffs have been an A and I think that the market reaction, the stock market is only down 4% and the interest rate markets are 4.25%. I think those have been an A. Now, the reason I think tariffs have been an A is because it is uncovered, in my opinion, how beholden we are to a brittle supply chain and specifically

to China who is a friend but who's also an enemy. And I think that that's going to really severely complicate our flexibility and optionality in the future as they do what is in their best interests. Okay, so where have they then not done so well? I think the documents have been, frankly, a D. We were supposed to get the Epstein files, we haven't yet. We were supposed to get the Martin Luther King files, we haven't. We did get the redacted JFK files. I don't think that there's been very good communication about why it's taking so long. So I think it's a very small, narrow thing, but I think it had a lot of attention on the way in. I think the communications of the tariffs and the back and forth had been a C. I think the markets were not led in enough of a way where they could absorb the volatility.

in enough of a way where they could absorb the volatility. But if you take it all in its totality, I would give it a B plus. I think it's been a very productive 100 days. And when you look back, I think in, you know, three years, four years, five years, we've made some important progress. Saxon, obviously you're part of the administration, so I'm not sure exactly how to ask you this,

but you heard some nice compliments about AI from Aaron. I happen to agree with those. I actually agree with a good portion of the crypto stuff too. I think actually getting those tightened up, which are your two zones of excellence and your area that you're focused on, I think you've done a great job there. So just bestie to bestie, great job there. Thank you. What's your take overall?

It's kind of hard, I guess, to ask somebody in the administration to criticize the administration. But hearing everybody else's take, what's your response maybe? Well, I would highlight three main areas that I think are big accomplishments for the Trump administration in the first 100 days. So number one has to be the border.

Like Jemah said, I think you have to give the administration an A plus on this. They've completely stopped the border crisis. I think we all knew that Trump would take action on this because it's one of the main issues he campaigned on. But I think if you had asked any of us four months ago, would this problem be completely solved, meaning border apprehensions completely stopped,

border completely sealed within the first 100 days, I don't think we would have believed necessarily that it would get done so quickly, but it has. Recall that for four years during the Biden years, we were told for the first three years that the problem didn't even exist. Whenever the videos were published of caravans coming or throngs of people running across the border, we were told that these were cherry pick videos on Fox News. It wasn't real. Finally, in the last year of the Biden administration, they said, okay, we're finally going to do something about it. They took some limited actions.

They said that doing more than that would require new legislation. Well, all of that was just gaslighting, it turns out. Trump came in, he restored remain in Mexico and other policies, completely stopped it. He had this line at the State of the Union, which I think is exactly right, which is we didn't need a new law, we just needed a new president. So I think that's area number one. Area number two, I would say would be the vibe shift in the culture around wokeism and DEI. You know, how quickly we

forget about this, but wokeism has completely collapsed. I don't know that anyone is endorsing in a full-throated way. Moreover, beyond just sort of the cultural aspect of it, I think we've had significant policy changes on DEI. Trump has basically ended DEI at the government level. He also signed an executive order ending the use of disparate impact for affirmative action. This is the policy that said that even if you have a policy that's applied in a completely neutral and objective way, if it results in a

disparate impact where different groups are represented in a different way in the outcomes, then somehow that must be racist. And that led to essentially engineering the results of various populations to basically fit quotas. And I think all of that now has fallen by the wayside. And I think that meritocracy and colorblindness are back. The only holdout really has been these universities where Trump is now taking action against Harvard. And I think that ultimately we will win that battle.

You see that even in relatively liberal companies, the DEI departments have been canceled and they're moving back towards more of a meritocracy. So I would say that that's like big shift number two. And I think if any of us had tried to predict that a hundred days ago, we would have thought, yes, Trump will do something about it, but I don't think we would have predicted the total collapse of wokeism and DEI so quickly. And then I'd say the third area, which is still in flight, is the reprivatization of the economy. That's a term that Scott Besson used, I think, that the Trump administration

needs to reprivatize the economy. And I like that framing of it. And there's a bunch of different pieces under that. I'd say number one is Doge. Again, ending this hog wild government spending. I do think that Trump has come into office inheriting a very weak Biden economy that was being propped up by massive amounts of government spending that was not only stimulating the public sector,

but it was also goosing the employment numbers as well. We knew that that spending was unsustainable. We have to do something about it. I think for the first time in decades, we've actually started to make real cuts in government, real cuts in the federal workforce. Look, we'd like to do more, but that is a huge shift in the conversation. There's other pieces of it as well. I mean, President Trump has signed a significant number of executive orders on deregulation.

There's also been unleashing energy. He ended Biden's EV mandate and a lot of these like Green New Scam projects, offshore wind, and he's been encouraging oil and gas exploration. So I think there's that. Then I appreciate what Aaron said about tech innovation. We did repeal Biden's exec order on AI, which was 100 pages of unnecessary regulation on AI. We've ended the war on crypto.

I think we're trying to stop the regulatory capture that benefits large incumbents. You have all these things, and there's been other things that have been done on the economy as well. But I do think that this sets us up for a Trump boom in the future. It's just that a lot of these changes take time to play out. Okay, great. Well done. Well, I think when you actually be very pro, Chamath seems really pro other than he wants

like the alien conspiracy files released, which we'll get soon. What is the what is the view from a J Cal a Wendy where you're the the left leaning guy and the in the room? I'm kind of independent, but yeah, social liberal, you know, I, I look at what all Americans believe and try to build some consensus here. It's one of the things I've been trying to do on the pod is look for where we agree. Americans universally want the border secured. They don't want illegal immigration and they don't want fentanyl. So this is the biggest win, I think, for Trump, which I think everybody on the panel pointed out. And, Sax, you were dead right. Like when we were seeing those videos, some of them were five years old, some of them

were recent. Biden really covered up what was going on in the border. And it took years to figure out what was exactly going on there. So that's the biggest win possible. I give overall, just to be brief, a B for this first 100 days, and I give you know, Biden like a C minus. The second thing that everybody agrees on is they want to downsize the government, they don't want waste and fraud. So I think Doge is the other huge win. The second thing that everybody agrees on is they want to downsize the government, they don't want waste and fraud. So I think Doge is the other huge win. The things I think that

could be improved, really just three simple things. The economic uncertainty is really terrible for running a business. I'm seeing a lot of folks in my circle on my podcasts, this week in startups in here, telling me, oh, I don't know how to plan for the future. And we're going to get into that with this tariff stuff and the trade war. And so I think economic uncertainty, we have to sort of slow down and maybe make it easier

for people to understand what the administration is trying to do. I think rule of law really matters to people. People didn't like Biden's pardons. They didn't like covering up his mental acuity. And I don't think people like the deportations without due process. We talked about that on a previous episode. Overwhelmingly, people want Trump and the

administration to obey what the Supreme Court says they really want rule of law. The third term talk, like eight out of 10 Americans don't like that kind of talk. And then conflicts of interest, obviously people hated the Hunter Biden stuff. They hate the meme coin stuff. And so that's where it could improve CRISPR communications, more thoughtful execution, maybe less trolling. I don't like the White House Twitter account trolling. And then focus on what got Trump here. You all said the same thing. What got Trump in here was the economy. And one thing that wasn't mentioned by everybody is the peace dividend. economy. And one thing that wasn't mentioned by everybody is the peace dividend. And Trump is making massive progress in Ukraine, apparently, I don't know if it's on the doctor today or not. But stopping the wars and making the economy. Those are the two most important things that you could build on that. I totally missed that. You're absolutely right. That's

another one where I would give Trump an A plus. Nat and I had dinner with POTUS two weeks ago. And you had dinner with Trump is breaking news. Well and I had dinner with POTUS two weeks ago. And- Wait, you had dinner with Trump, this is breaking news. Well, okay, whatever, yes. Well, I think it's remarkable how much of a Putin apologist J. Cal's become. I mean, you wanna end the war in Ukraine now? Well, you're gonna just give it,

you're just gonna give it to Putin? No, no, no. You're not gonna stop Putin? I'm totally in favor of what Trump's doing in negotiating a deal to get our money back. Oh, you want to talk to Putin now? I've always wanted to talk to Putin. I just don't trust him, but you can trust him. Let me tell you what Trump said.

So there was a handful of us at dinner, and then he got up to say a few words at the end. And he reminded me why I was so inclined to vote for him, which was he talked about his uncle, and he talked about how his uncle taught him about the severity of nuclear war and how people don't understand how intense and how destructive it is and the power of these weapons. And he left that speech at the end saying,

and this is why I'm so fundamentally against this thing. And it reminded me to your point, Jason, it is so easy to forget that there's only one existential risk, save like aliens coming from the heavens, right? There's only one existential risk where all these issues become fringe issues. You know, you mentioned rule of law, border security,

foreign direct investment, tariffs. It all goes out the window in a nuclear war. And I was like, I am so glad this guy's in charge because this one issue, he never waivers. And I think there's all kinds of complicated moments that could make this an issue. And this was where my biggest issue with Biden was, was I did not know who was in control. And I think that Trump in the first hundred days, to your point, I think has completely reinforced that there are no conditions under which he'll go to war. He is time and time again

showed, find the off-ramp. And I think that that's really healthy for Americans to see. Yeah. Let me build on that point with respect to Ukraine is we were on a glide path before the Trump presidency that Biden had put us on a certain path. Kamala Harris gave every indication

she would have continued it. What was that path? It was a path of continued escalation and doubling down in Ukraine. Recall that it was Biden himself at the beginning of the war who said that if we give Ukraine Abrams tanks and F-16s or Atacams or High Mars, or if we allow them to hit targets inside of Russia, it would lead to World War III. He actually used the word Armageddon. So at the beginning of that administration, they were very concerned about how an escalatory path could lead us into direct conflict with Russia

and World War III. And yet, despite that, at every fork in the road where they had a choice, they ended up doubling down. They gave the Abrams tanks, they gave the F-16s, they gave the High Mars, they gave the Atacams. And finally, when Biden was a lame duck in his last couple months in office, they did the most reckless and irresponsible thing, which is allow American weapons to be used to strike targets on Russian soil, not just fighting in Ukraine, but on Russian soil.

Moreover, we now know from a New York Times article that just came out in the last few weeks that it was American generals and American intelligence who were planning this war. So when you're talking about striking Russian targets on Russian soil, it's not just the Ukrainians using our weapons. They're using our targeting, they're using our guidance, they're using our satellites. I mean, we are deeply integrated in the kill chain. This is the United States being a co-billiger in the war, hitting Russian soil. That is incredibly

reckless and dangerous. I have no doubt that if the Democrats were still in office, we would be in an escalatory spiral right now with the destination being World War III. And I do think that Trump has pulled us back from the brink there. There's obviously still more work to do, but I really appreciate the efforts that Steve Wittkopf has undertaken where for the first time in three years, we've at least had direct diplomacy with the Russians. We weren't even talking before. We weren't even talking before. Yeah.

Talking is a great thing, and apparently we're going to keep supplying with them with weapons as long as they pay for them. So it's going to be very interesting to see how this all hashes out over the next hundred days or so. Let's keep moving. I don't think we know that yet. Let's let's wait and see on that. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think that's yeah. What was reported but you're right. We should wait and see. Okay, downstream tariff impacts. We

gotta talk about this and this is why we have you here. Ryan, since you're in the thick of it. You tweeted a thread last week about the lag time of shipments from China. And when you were on, I guess during COVID, you really educated us to how the supply chain how the supply chain works. And according to the thread that you shared, somewhere around early June, we're going to expect warehouses trucking the entire supply chain, maybe to start to seize up or layoffs. I don't

know how you would frame it, Ryan, but are we past the point of no return with regard to the supply chain? Is there an off ramp for this tariff conflict war negotiation with China in your mind? What are you seeing on the streets and in the purchase orders and the invoices at Flexport? Definitely not past the point of no return. I think we're still right in the middle of the don't judge the cook while he's cooking is one, you know, like, let's see what the, let's see what it tastes like at the end is I think a starting point here and we're still, they're still in the active negotiations. So I don't think today's it's not static. Now the world does want a lot more certainty and that's a big cause of

what's happened here and what has happened is a 60% decline in bookings of ocean freight from China to the U S. I mean, so that's really, really pretty dramatic, like probably exceeding what was expected. I don't think, you know, when they issued, when they rolled out the initial reciprocal tariff plans on, on April 2nd, it was meant to be a 54% tariff on China, then you know, there's multiple cycles of escalation, we ended up at what's now 154% tariff. So this is just a lot higher than anybody planned

for. And so therefore, I don't think anyone's planning for a 60% decline in ocean freight. Ryan, let me ask you a question about that. Are people actually paying that 154%? There's been this discussion online and it's sort of unclear from the administration and from retailers, stuff that's landing that people ordered before April 2nd. Are they actually paying the 154% on top of what's landing? It's live now. It was based on departure date. So goods that departed China after midnight

Eastern time on April 9th are subject to the tariffs upon arrival. And so now enough time has passed that pretty much all the ships that are arriving now left China after April 9th when that started. So what happens? People are paying it or people saying, I won't take delivery because it's too much. Jason, you have to pay it, Ryan, correct it or are people saying, I won't take delivery because it's too much? Jason, you have to pay it, Ryan, correct me if I'm wrong, but you have to pay it at the dock in order to get the goods released. More or less, that's true.

They allow you to, you have a bond in place so you can pull the goods out before you pay, but the money's owed at that time. And then you get like a two week timeframe to actually make the payment. But there are strategies here, a lot of people are doing that you can use what's called a bonded warehouse

and move cargo into this warehouse. And then you only owe the duties when the cargo leaves. That's what I was asking, like, is there a hack here to- It's not that, that lets you defer things. And it's very, very common right now. People are searching everywhere for bonded warehouse capacity, because in a bonded warehouse,

not only you defer payment to when the cargo leaves the warehouse, but you only owe the duty amount based on at that date. So if the duties come back down, which a lot of people are betting they will on the China specific duties, you'll actually lower your tariff burden. And then there's another hack for this, which is effective use of Mexican or Canadian bonded warehouse. So you move the goods into Mexico, and then you actually only technically import them into the US at a future date when tariffs are lower.

So I understand a lot of companies are doing that right now too. We're helping some people with that type of strategy. But yeah. Sorry, Ryan, do you think that the government, will they view that okay? That kind of hack? And you know, like if you look at the GDP numbers,

one of the craziest things was the inventory pull forward that people did to your point, like trying to get as much stuff into the United States before April 9th as an example. Yeah, I mean, it's not a hack. It's a bonded warehouses are been around for decades, and they're very commonly used. I don't know that it'll be that material in the scheme of things that it would cause a change in the law around bonded warehouse. So you don't think, for example, the Department of Commerce will have an issue with the strategy of sending inventory into Mexico that essentially you're essentially like, isn't it an art though?

It's a work around, right? It's a work around. Like instead of paying the China tariff, now you pay a Mexico tariff, which should be less. Is that the idea? Well, you can move it into a bonded warehouse in Mexico even, and not pay Mexican tariffs either. And you just wait until it imports.

But I mean, what's the department of commerce or the customs to do? It's sort of, you just delayed importing the goods. You imported them in the future and you know, it doesn't, I wouldn't even call it a hack is just sort of like people people are gonna get creative here, you know what I mean? Like that's the job actually, the government should set the rules and the rest of us gotta figure out,

all right, how are we gonna compete and make money in this environment that they've created? Ryan, in that tweet you redid, which was a pretty dramatic tweet painting, a very like, I don't know, like a pretty dire situation. Where are we at in terms of how dire this will get or resolvable?

Paint us the best case scenario and what you expect could happen in that case. Or if this gets extended, are we going to see, as you know, people are hand wringing empty store shelves, Christmas gets ruined, and all of these layoffs start happening in the supply chain. Take us through the two scenarios that people are debating.

Yeah, I mean, the bleak scenario, which is I don't really think it's gonna happen. I think that the administration doesn't want this to be their legacy, that they created a policy that just kind of tanked small business and supply chain. So I don't actually think this is gonna happen. But the bleak scenario is tariffs stay at this level for 145% on China.

The 10% goes way back up to what it was originally announced in reciprocal tariffs. So there's no safe haven for tariffs. And trade just falls off a cliff and a lot of companies go bankrupt. In our, especially small companies are the ones that are importing from China. Reality is like, tariffs have been high on China

for a long time. Labor costs in China are not there for cheap labor. You're there for quality manufacturing at this point. Like there's much cheaper labor in Southeast Asia, other parts of the world than there is in China. So you're in China because of the manufacturing capabilities, the ecosystem, not just for cheap labor. And if you could have moved, you would have already,

with the 25% tariffs from the Trump's first terms were pretty high enough incentive. And so that's the bleak scenarios that small business starts getting wiped out. The ones that are buying from China. And it's a lot of brands. Like it's not just Amazon seller selling stuff that you don't need. It's like all the brands that you know, or like, you know, fashion brands, apparel brands. I had cuts clothing on this week in startups last week.

And he said, there's going to be like, if this doesn't get resolved in like, let's say, two to four weeks, in his group chats, people are going to start layoffs. They can't physically restart the supply chain in Vietnam or wherever to make t-shirts. So Aaron, what's your thought on this as well, just bringing you in?

Sure. Well, first of all, I mean, Ryan has supplied me with a high degree of doom scrolling and it's just like a horror show reading his tweets. First of all, I would feel better if the messages out of the administration were either more kind of consistent or that there was a logical connection between

do we either want to raise the kind of, you know, tariff revenue stream or do we want free trade? Like those things are working against each other because like depending on who you talk to, they say this is a mechanism to bring down income tax, which obviously then by definition means that they expect the tariffs to sort of persist, which is totally different from let's go negotiate deals

that just allow for the free trade to actually increase. And so are we worried about the reciprocity or are we worried about kind of revenue streams? So that's a whole issue. You also have this issue, which is the messaging from the government. And this is the meta point I'll make in a second is about how we could have actually accelerated into the transformation of the economy. But you have folks like Lutnick, et cetera,

going on TV talking about the end state of our economy, which are actually probably fine messages, but we haven't seen what that vision looks like. So everybody is kind of confused. Does this mean that we literally go into manufacturing plants and we're like the ones literally doing the screws on an iPhone, or is it a bunch of jobs which are next generation jobs,

which is like we're managing robots and shipping and logistics grows as a result of this and all of the surrounding supply chains start to grow? So like, there's underlying, I mean, most people on this call have managed teams. You do change management. You lead people to the end state that you want them to sort of see the potential in. And I think something that kind of gets missed

is and the part that kind of confused me is like, I don't know if, exactly to Ryan's point, people are in China because of the ecosystem of manufacturing, yet the messages you get out of the administration are like, oh, we're going to have fewer toys at Christmas time. It's like, no, that's not the big picture. Like, the big picture is like, like, you know, this is supplying the parts that go into building a manufacturing plant and building a car that allows us to actually, you know, be even remotely competitive in car manufacturing. So where should in your mind this all lead? Because you have some thoughts on American exceptionalism

and maybe skating to where the puck is going. So if you were to become an advisor on this as a technology expert and somebody who spent their whole career in it, what would you advise them to do? I'd get rid of Navarro immediately. And you would basically say, you know, mea culpa, like oops, and like obviously you need to like land that

with some really cool trade deals that make everybody kind of feel happy. And you basically say, you know what? Like, let's go back to the first two days of Trump, which is let's announce massive deals. We're bringing manufacturing here with Stargate. We're doing TSMC. We're building Nvidia chips. We're going to do a deal, which is you get like five percent tax rate if you build in America. And so you just stimulate a manufacturing boom

in the country. We incentivize automation across the manufacturing. We use that as a competitive weapon to then go and compete with the sort of lower cost labor that happens internationally. We find every incentive and tool we can, we deregulate. You allow people to build these plants and so you don't have to go through the three-year EPA process. You just accelerate from this position and you see

it all as upside. And so then business leaders, if you go talk to the Fortune 500 company that actually has to build anything right now, you give them a path to say, listen, we're going to help you transition away from your current supply chain and we're going to make it even more competitive and more compelling in America to do that. You know, there's a reason that Elon builds in America. Like, like he is, he's actually made it be more effective to be able to, you know, bring automation to manufacturing, to be able to build locally. But he wasn't forced to do that. And so, so I would just, I would would argue you use as many carrots as possible. In some surgical areas, and Chamath,

I've heard your points about the chips, pharma, AI. In those surgical areas, we get tough where necessary. And if we have to do a couple very surgical tariffs to make people move the direction that we want, that's totally fine. But even arguing the premise is hard, tariffs, you know, to kind of make people move the direction that we want, that's totally fine. But I mean, it's like even arguing the premise is hard because we act like it's like countries that are screwing us.

But actually, businesses are independently making decisions about where they want their supply chain to exist. In a free market, they've made that decision. They don't need the government to tell them where are they supposed to or where are they allowed to have their supply chain operate. That ends up with just lots of economic distortions that everybody on the right would have called the left socialists for trying to kind of implement central planning around supply chains. So that's my piece.

Well, no, what do you think, Chamath, here of this sort of reframing slash off ramp and sort of maybe the positive spin on it? Hey, if you want to make t shirts, you know, you want to make commodity items have added free trade, you know, reciprocal tariffs, great checkbox there. But here's a series of incentives and a path forward to do the advanced stuff to do robotics, etc. Let me answer this in a different way. Okay. A lot of those things he's actually doing. I think this is where we are is we're beyond TDS. There's something that comes after it. And I think that the mainstream media has just lost their mind to a degree that they hadn't even lost their mind

in Trump one. I'll give you a couple of examples. Well, one example, by the way, just a shout out to our friend, completely brazen, ridiculous, shitty reporting by the Wall Street Journal last night when they were told that this, you know, this whole Tesla thing was a total farce, they continued to publish it. Okay, fine. They're referring to Elon, the board, starting a search to replace Elon, and then the board said, well, wait, we told you we weren't doing that,

and they didn't even mention that. They communicated that directly to the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal said, I don't care, I have an ax to grind. Correct, yeah. I think that Trump has a strength, which is he shapes these potholes for the mainstream media to fall into. The downside of that though is that the mainstream media then doesn't do the other part of the job,

which is to tell the things that are important. So for example, we spent a lot of time breathlessly talking about the MS-13 knuckles of the guy, right? Or then we spent a bunch of time talking about how MSNBC blurred out the names of the placards on the lawn. Okay, but here's the other part where then they get so tilted, here's what they don't report. They didn't report that, for example, when Trump took a shot at Harvard, he also reinforced and strengthened historically black colleges and universities. Totally did not get ridden. I'll give you another example. This past week, Besant said that the tax bill will allow you to fully deduct all the PPE and all of the incidental costs of building a factory. I heard that. I immediately

went to my wife. She runs a pharma business. This is exactly what she's trying to figure out. And we now are like, how do you build a business case if this actually gets effectuated? The point is that thing would create an absolute economic bonanza if it were to get passed. Other than people hearing it on this pod or randomly maybe finding it on a direct clip that Besant puts out on X, there has been zero coverage by the mainstream media. Yeah, but like the first of all, yeah, OK, MSM and whatever we want to call it aside, like the that is that is still on the administration for driving a change management process that causes people to build on momentum and not causes boards to basically say, oh, are we going to pivot our entire supply chain this week because because Trump didn't get

a call back from from she like, like that that is like, it's this is really not a TDS MSM issue. This if you talk to Fortune 500 CEO, did you know about the PPE thing? No, but that's not but like, I don't need to like the thing that I know, but there are many other CEOs that do they they're controlling trillions of dollars of capital allocation. It's an important thing. If we had Mary Barra on this call and we said, Mary, has Trump increased your ability to execute and operate and accelerate the transition to the US or has he had headwinds that make it tougher to navigate right now? Which way do you think she'd go? I think that she would give you a calculated answer that neither is pro or con. I think that answer changes by the day.

I think that if you talked to her last week, she would say, this has been a major headwinds. And then yesterday, to Chimash's point, they did this thing where you can depreciate or fully expense in your one capital improvements or building out factories. But also earlier this week, they made it so that auto parts are not subject to the tariffs. They

created a huge exemption. Yeah. It wasn't there at the start. It's great. By the way, if this was a better plan, it should have been there in the beginning because these auto companies were saying, hey, this is going to bankrupt us if we have to pay taxes on the way in. Where I would take your side. We keep circling back to communication and making a crisper and cleaner. Yeah, you're right. Aaron, where you are right is my expectation is it's my job to stay informed, okay? As a CEO of my company, I try to stay informed. And you're right, it is hard because sometimes I find myself hunting and pecking to find the things that matter. But I do put a bunch

of that responsibility into the lap of the people that are supposed to actually report the facts. They can choose. They didn't have to run that article about Elon, which turned out to be total bullsh** and horse sh** on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. They could have talked about what Ryan just mentioned as the first article and said, here completely changes your ROIC and ROE calculations for 90% of the S&P 500. That was not the article they chose to write and to publish. But I also think it comes back to my original point around the UDOT loops, that the administration is running these very tight, hey, let's take an action, let's see what happens, let's see the reaction, and then take another action. Washington's used to doing all these committees that plan everything for five years or something

or whatever, 18 months, and then roll it out slowly. And they're going, hey, let's roll it out. Oh, crap, we're about to cause this huge problem in the auto manufacturers. And they're all telling us they're going to go bankrupt. OK. Three days later, they push an update to that. It feels chaotic.

Yeah, to summarize Ryan and Aaron, your position, so we can keep going through the docket. Hey, a little less shock and awe, maybe a little more predictability, a little crisper communication. Chamath, I think your position is, hey, maybe the mainstream media can play a better role here in focusing us on what matters. That wouldn't be my takeaway. So, yeah. OK. My what's your takeaway?

I mean, like like zero shock and awe. Like, OK, like not a little less. Like like I like my strategy would be 100% different. Actually, Scott Beston has an incredible podcast from like September of last year. And he basically said, you know, Biden, Bidenomics got it all wrong. And I was like listening to it. I was like, Oh, OK, actually, this is kind of cool. Like, he basically says, deregulate the US, make it easier to build manufacturing

the US increase the GDP, and then you'll be able to take in less tax revenue, spend less in the government. And it was like, oh, this is actually like a glide path. We could take the fact that we did a soft landing relative to the rest of the globe. We're winning in AI, we're winning in a number of categories. We obviously need more energy. We need to bring in manufacturing into the US.

And so you have this great momentum, which is where we are the tech leader in the world. Let's just pour fuel on that. And so to pour fuel on that, you do you just do a series of carrots and the wins that build a flywheel of positive energy. Like the reason why I take I take a little bit

of exception to to Chimass's MSM point is that I think to some extent Fortune 500 CEOs are not the ones like, oh my gosh, like, like Rachel Maddow said this, like, I'm going to go and you know, worry about this topic now. Like, like, like the information coming at them is, is talking about the information that's presented, I'm talking about the information that's excluded. How do you get the information that's not published in shared broads? No, no, but come on, like, like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan are not writing reports on the fact that we might enter a recession because of MSNBC's reporting on this topic. Like, like-

But again, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm saying like glad handing some high level prognostication, which nobody ever gets right, is in my opinion, worthless. What I'm talking about is the details. So when you talk about something as narrow and specific as excluding PPE or allowing you to double or triple depreciate something in a given calendar year. That is narrow, it's precise, it's specific, it's actionable.

And what I'm saying is if I surveyed the 500 CEO of the S&P 500 dollars to doughnuts The overwhelming majority would not have known and had they brushed up against that somehow in their normal media consumption to then ask their teams The odds of that would have been zero as well And all I'm saying is who do we who do we blame for this chamoff? Is it the administration's job or me sure media? But I bet you everybody knows about the blurring out of the stupid, you know, pictures on the lawn and the MS-13 knuckle tattoos. Yeah. Okay. So let's wrap up on this,

just really lightning round here. Amazon flip-flopped on a new tariff notification on their websites. Trump said he had a great discussion with Bezos. He solved the problem very quickly. He did the right thing, good guy, etc. If you haven't seen this, it's something that Tmoo is doing. Here's what Tmoo does. Currently today, Nick, you have that image, if you could pull it up of just when there is a tariff, they explain the tariff coming into the country. They put it as like a line item. I thought this was actually kind of cool. I don't know why people take offense with. Brian, this is pretty standard stuff.

So Amazon's competitor, Tmoo, is putting in the import charges. They don't say tariffs. They don't say taxes. Import charges. This is like a standard thing. And this happens in other countries too. What is this?

What is Tmoo? Is this like a dollar store? It's basically like a dollar. Is this the last place you would ever buy anything? You never bought some $5 jeans? Yeah, you can buy $12 jeans. Basically your left sock from Lora Piana cost less than

Tmoo's entire inventory of jeans. The point being, I thought this was actually a plus for... I think that Amazon totally misplayed this. They did it. They rolled it out. Then they got criticized. I think they were called a treasonous company from the white house press, uh, you

know, by the press secretary. Uh, they totally misplayed this because they should have gone and lean into it and said, yeah, we're showing you all these tariffs. When you buy from China, if you buy from America, you don't have to pay any tariff. No guys, guys, come on, come on. That would have lasted three and a half seconds. This is exactly consistent with the other issue, which is they're playing whack-a-mole. OK, we're going to do something with the automakers. We're going to we're going to try and solve some problem with Amazon. Like, like this is a sign that that it's like it's not a good strategy.

If you have to do this much whack-a-mole, like like they're not like they can't cover up what Amazon is going to end up dealing with, because there's going to be 500 other retailers that don't get the call with Trump. So, so this is like that, like to me, that's evidence of clearly this they didn't think through the entire downstream set of of conditions that are going to change as a result of this. Sure. Yeah, I thought this was a big win, Chamath, because they could then have Amazon here's a mock up somebody made, I'll pull

it up here is interesting. They could to Aaron's point, just show, hey, here's a bunch of American companies buy American when you do a search Ryan's point, I'm sorry, Ryan's point, hey, here's what it might look like. Pull out the oral B toothbrush one up Nick, if you got it right there. So somebody mocked this up. I think this could be the hugest win. You could have the retailers do buy American buy it once by a high quality product from America. If you look here, we don't have the products. We wouldn't work. We don't have the products. Well, I mean, we do have for some products, you know, American

made products. You know, I buy my boots from Danner and those are all American. Yeah, so we should just go back to communism and we're all going to make our shoes like it's like that's like we're in a global market like we buy from everywhere. Chamath, any thoughts on this? I mean, obviously there's the whack-a-mole angle there's buy American and be proud of it. Here's the communication. Here's the narrow question. I got a bunch of emails from people. And a bunch of them were Amazon sellers. And I don't know, Nick, if you can find it,

but I posted their comments and I reshared them just to kind of highlight the issues that they were going through. And at the core of it was a feeling by them that Amazon had abandoned them as American purveyors and sellers of goods. And that Amazon on the margins had a tendency to help competitors from abroad come stand themselves up and compete and essentially cannibalize on price and margin. This is my view completely and that this is the biggest opportunity that I think the Trump administration administration is flying at 40,000 feet doing macro level negotiations and look and failing to see some of these micro

optimizations that are really really real. So you in the United States you can import goods as a foreign company You don't not you do not have to create an LLC or any sort of registered entity in the United States to import goods. Sometimes they say, oh, Americans pay the tariff. Like that is not true. In many, many cases, the foreign companies imports the stuff and they sell on Amazon. And when they get caught cheating, they can lie about the valuation and pay a lower tariff. They can change the classification and pay a lower tariff. They can import stuff that is harmful to children,

has lead paint, whatever else. There's no enforcement at all. You can't go after these people. So you're saying Amazon third party is like a bit of a back door to abuse the system, right? I mean, Amazon is sort of just playing the game that's on the field, but this is legal in the United States is these companies import stuff.

And I think it's 60% of all of all the sellers on Amazon are these Chinese registered. They're not registered in the United States at all. Just Chinese companies sell it. Which sounds profoundly unfair in terms of a level playing field. Can we just take a step back and also acknowledge that we are talking about a level of detailed issues

that we would never have talked about six months ago, that there was no interest in even bringing this up. Like if Ryan wanted to bring up the sort of hollowing out of American salesmanship, let's say if you will, because of like this arbitrage that Amazon does for GMV, that would have been a snooze fest. Except today, it can actually get a lot of awareness. Aaron mentioned this and I've mentioned this before,

but I think that there are four things that really matter. Batteries, AI, pharma API, and rare earths. That now is on the agenda. I think the positive way to look at this is the American economy is too complicated. If you had waited, Aaron, for a study for all of the implications, we would have been waiting forever, and nothing would have happened. And I think that we've made macro level moves, you're right, and now we are finding what the implications are in course correcting in real time. And I hope what happens though, is when we find these big thorny issues,

I think the Amazon thing is a pretty interesting issue actually about like American competitiveness. Now the question is, do we follow through and get to the root cause of it and fix it? And those feedback loops are there. I mean, the Trump administration is gonna act on this and if there's an act that's coming out of Congress as well to shut down the foreign import of records. So those feedback loops are there in ways that I don't know if they were there in the past. Go ahead, Aaron. We can totally chaos monkey the economy and just see

what breaks. I think that the, you know, you sort of phrase the, we could do the research paper and we could do Aspen Institute as a bad thing, but also it can be a bad thing if you're the small business owner right now who has 30 employees and you just literally don't know what you're going to do next month. And so that's sort of the argument to not. It's a good counterbalance.

That's like why you do have some bureaucracy and you don't chaos monkey the economy and why Rand Paul is literally saying, maybe we shouldn't actually let, have unilateral control over tariffs. So, interesting that like dynamic there. All right, Sachs, you want to wrap this up here or you want to pass?

Am I still on the pod? Yeah, well, you turned your camera off. So look, I spent 80 minutes debating this topic with Larry Summers three weeks ago. The point I made then is that we had in this city for 25 years, a globalist consensus on trade that distorted a lot of outcomes. I don't need to rehash that debate, but I'll just recall that Larry Summers main argument

for why this would not work out is that the market was down. Do you remember that? That was his evidence that this wasn't going to work. And it was all about the market now pricing in lower expectations. Well, guess what? The market is actually up since Liberation Day on April 2nd. So what happened three weeks ago was basically a panic in the market over this policy and the media has been trying to fuel that panic. Now, what I said as well

is we do have to stick the landing on this. I mean, President Trump shifted the conversation away from this globalist consensus, and he's now redefined the debate, but it is now up to Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary, Howard Letnick, the Commerce Secretary, Jameson Greer, the US Trade Rep, and so on, the Trump trade team to now negotiate these deals, stick the landing. And I agree with you to the extent that the sooner that is done, the better because it is good to provide business certainty. But the idea that so far this hasn't worked,

I think, again, the main argument against that was the market reaction that now the market's now positive. So I think my point is just we need to give this time to work. I think it's too soon to be judging this policy as if it hasn't worked yet. It needs to be executed properly. And quite frankly, Ryan, I mean, I remember the last time you were on this pod,

you were coming on about, wasn't there like some union deal that was supposed to shut down all the ports and all the shelves to be empty? That never happened either. It did happen. It did. They shut down for three days. OK, I don't remember the shelves being empty,

which is now the new panic the media is trying to create. So look, there's a lot of pants sweating that's occurring here that's being fueled by the media. Well, I do want to I just want to bookmark one thing. The only thing I actually I was more frustrated listening to the Larry Summers and you a conversation because I was like, Larry, make this point. Like, come on, like, don't go down the WTO rat hole. Like, that's that's not relevant. So here's the only thing that. Of course, it's relevant.

How we got here. No, no, it's like as in like that's 25 years ago. Like, let's worry about literally today. And like, what do we do? We're going to today is great. And the only thing I just want to say, because I because I do think that that, you know, I appreciate your point about, hey, there's like, you know, everybody's freaking out or whatever.

But to be totally fair, that some of that freak out, everybody's freaking out, whatever. But to be totally fair, some of that freak out, whether we can decide how emotional it needs to be, is the reason that then Trump walks back the things that then caused the market to correct. So we can't just say the market's back and like, see, we didn't need to freak out because it was literally- I said we have to make the deals,

we have to stick the landing. But look, China over the last 25 years has been able to strategically annihilate our rare earth processing capability and our ability to cast rare earth magnets. We just sat back and watched as the market basically went to the lowest bidder, which was being subsidized by the Chinese government, which the WTO allowed them to do.

Which you totally tell us. And now we have a critical dependency in our supply chain on China for basically every electric motor in every product, including cars. That was crazy. We should not have allowed that to happen. Yeah, I think we can. So we needed to shift the political conversation to recognize the ways in which it's free trade and led to unfair trade and created an acceptable dependencies on the American economy. Wait, wait, wait, just I just want to make one point. It's more than that. Okay, final point and then I'll... This is the national security of the United States that's at stake. Let's go take your favorite pet issue. China invades Taiwan. Okay? And we have to take a side, Jason.

My pet issue? Hold on. Let me just finish. Okay, and we have to take a side, Jason. My pleasure. Hold on, let me just finish. Oh, okay. And the Chinese say, here are the implications of supporting Taiwan on this. A, B, C, and D. You don't get any pharma APIs, you don't get any rare earths, you don't get any batteries. Okay, it'll send life back 50 years. Or let's say China and India get into a fight,

and we're forced to pick a side, same situation. The point is, there's all these scenarios that we never even considered us being able to have strategic optionality to make the decision that's morally and ethically right for the United States. And I think that we have learned through this lens, that these are huge issues. The thing that the Chinese did that was so brilliant, which we still don't have an answer for is they have these national champions. And being a national champion allows you, and we'll talk about this in AI, it allows you to blur the lines between the public and private partnership.

It allows you to blur the law. It allows you to blur capital. And I'm not saying we have to do that. But what I am saying is we need to have our own answer to it. And that was never on the table until April 9th. Hmm. All right. So yeah, but like 100% like do that strategy and then and then and then don't have a mad rush. Is the strategy. No, no, no. Because because that's if you have a you know, Ryan, what is the number? I don't know, trillion of imports or whatever, like you don't need everybody then, then jamming the system to build their supply chain, you know, in the US to solve that problem immediately.

If we're sitting here in nine months, and you're saying this, and there are no deals, I would say that you're right. What Howard Lutnick said last week, and again, we may have all gotten caught up in the knuckle tattoos and we missed this, but he was very clear. We have a country, a deal is already done, we're convening parliament, it's gonna be the first of many. So for all we know, there's like 30 deals

that are waiting in the wings and the first one will set the tone. And I think that Sachs is right here, which is it's way too early to declare defeat and that it was quote unquote chaos. I think if we're sitting here in nine months and foreign direct investment has shriveled up and domestic investment has shriveled up because there is just no continuity, you have a claim.

But that's not where we are now. No, no, because I don't think that'll happen. I don't think that'll happen. I think we will end up in, like I'm with Ryan, like we will end up in a good spot because we'll iterate through this. My only point is there's an alternative path that could have occurred. It could have been done in a more thoughtful,

well-communicated pattern instead of, hey, let's do barrel rolls with the airplane. I don't disagree with you, Aaron. And I can tell you we've already started to see layoffs. And nobody wanted to even initiate the barrel roll guys. Yeah, listen, we get it. It's like, hey, I don't want anything to change. I think we'll agree to disagree on this.

Aaron, where were you with this? Hold on, hold on. This one last point. We're going to move on to the next topic. Excuse me. You didn't call me for 40 minutes. I just want to make one final point. Aaron.

Here he goes. Aaron, where were you with this perfect plan? Where were you with this perfect plan before Liberation Day? I was telling Kamala about it. You were telling Kamala? OK, great. He was. They were having a.

Nobody. Nobody. All the people. They were having mind ties, and they were talking about this specific issue. All the people who suddenly know what the perfect plan is and how to perfectly execute it, no barrel rolls, had nothing to say about this topic for 25 years.

And all of a sudden, they've come forward with their perfect plans. I would say that's victory for Trump. Look at this. The best thing of all of this is you've got the liberals embracing Milton Friedman and their backgrounds on their... I love it. Yes. All right.

Listen, we're going to agree to disagree. We're going to agree to disagree on this one. All the liberals now, the liberals love the stock market. Listen, Sachs, Kamala is coming on next week. We're going to make some cocktails. It's going to be wonderful. We're gonna make some cocktails. It's gonna be wonderful. We'll ask her some direct questions about it, but I wanna talk about AI agents.

2025 shaping up to be the year of AI agents. Tons to talk about here. Open AI is planning to charge between two and 20K a month for different levels of AI agencies. These would be basically Cron jobs. They would run in the background and do things for your company that humans are doing right now. You may have heard of this agentic tool again, agentic is just a fancy

word for agent, which is a fancy role for word for like a cron job that just runs no, perpetually. Yep. And Manus is the company in China that started this weirdly benchmark invested in it, that's created a whole fluff on the side. Mattis's website has a really good visualization of what these agents would look like so first of all I think you're giving a little too much credit to man us they didn't come up with the agents but I do think that they have a very good demo and it's hard to know exactly how real it is because our ones used it but it's from China it's from China I'll get that in a second if you go to their website, you can

see a bunch of their demos. And I do think that what they deserve credit for is advancing the ball on the UI paradigm. And it's not that other people weren't doing this. I mean, I think notably Anthropic was doing this with its operator product. But the basic idea is that you've got this two pane view. And in one window, you've got

the standard chatbot interface. And then in the other view, you can see what the agent is doing. And that agent has the ability to toggle between the currently four apps, their search, browser, code terminal, and document editor. And so when you give Manus a task, the first thing it does is create a to-do list in the document editor. You can kind of see it there. And then it works sequentially to achieve each of those tasks and then puts an X on them there.

And you can kind of see it working. And I think what's cool about the demo is just the way that it seamlessly toggles between those four apps and you can see what the AI agent is doing. And it's browsing the internet, it's searching for things, it's writing documents, it's crossing things off its to-do list. Now, I think it's pretty easy to imagine where this goes, which is you'll be able to connect an agent to all of your SaaS apps. It won't just be four applications, it'll now be connected to dozens of applications, including ones that already have your data, and it's going to know what actions it's possible to take in those apps. So when it creates its to-do list, there's a much wider range of things that it can accomplish. And in fact, there's a new standard called MCP, which is taking off like wildfire, which

is built specifically to enable agents to connect with applications and understand the data and understand the actions that are possible in those SaaS applications. So look, Manus is just typically iceberg here. I think this will become a very standard UI paradigm. That's the reason why I mention it, not because I am pre-declaring them to be the winner in the space, but just because I think there's a lot of talk about agents,

and I think it's hard to conceptualize what that means without just seeing it visually. Great summary there, Sax. And Aaron, I want to get your thoughts on it, because obviously you're running Box, and you have your finger on the pulse of this. We actually started building one of these in our venture firm. We have 20,000 applications a year,

and we have updates coming in from Investments. We are now taking those, Sax, Aaron, and we are having an agent sort them and then look for competitors and compare them to the last update. we're looking into our notion our coda and saying what else have were the communications have we had what questions should we ask about the startup and about their strategy and then we're presenting that in slack to our team so this is coming fast and furious. And we spend, I don't know, probably 15 minutes on each of those incoming applications to start doing the math on that. We're talking about 5,000 hours of work. Aaron, what are you seeing on the street? What are you doing at Box in terms of agents landing right now in Q2 of 2025?

Yeah, I mean, I think Sachs represented it well, which is, you know, you have to now think about AI as effectively being able to do anything on a computer or another piece of software as a human can do. And the little distraction that I think happened two years ago after the chat to BT moment was we sort of thought about that as, oh, we're just going to do like typing, information retrieval, and that's a new paradigm for user interfaces, let's say.

So you just talk to your software, and you search Zillow via chat. That was sort of a little bit of a distraction. That's super helpful when you want basic information, lookup, or whatnot. The big breakthrough is starting to think through these things as full, effectively, agentic systems that operate on any amount of data, any amount of tools

for as long as you want to complete any task that you want. This is sort of a big year where agents are starting to enter the vocabulary of enterprises, of IT people, of larger and certainly small organizations. It kind of requires you to have a little bit of a reset moment on how you think about AI, which is it's not just now a kind of a co-pilot that you talk back and forth with. It's actually something running behind the scenes that's now actually starting to deliver real automated

kind of work for you. And so lots of implications, massive implications to what the software business model is in the future. I would argue strongly that it's a massive TAM increase because now software starts to go after labor spend. It completely changes the dynamics of then how do you build a moat in a world of AI agents? But I think- Unpack that piece there, Aaron.

You said something very interesting. How software then is going to go over human spend. Explain that concept. I'll pack it for a second. Yeah. So, David and I, you know, we go back way back in SaaS land, but like you used to basically just, you know, you built a piece of software and you sell it for the number of people in the organization. And so, you know, company has 500 employees and you sell that thing for let's say $10,

you know, a user a month, you know,120 a year, and you make $60,000. So that's kind of the business model. Now, when your software actually brings the underlying workflow to the customer or the underlying outcome to the customer, so that company might have 10 lawyers. Previously, if you were selling software for lawyers, you had a maximum amount of 10 seats that you could sell. Now, all of a sudden, if your AI agents are doing the equivalent of, let's say, paralegal work or some form of professional services, all of a sudden, you might be able to sell a multiple of the initial 10 seats that you would have sold previously.

So you say that's a huge opportunity because now you're not enabling a human to be 5% more productive. You're replacing a human or you're replacing one out of 10. Yeah. And actually, I'm going to take a massive, I'm going to do an underscore on this point, though. I don't like the word replace, because I think actually most of the upside is actually going to be for companies that now deploy labor at things that they wouldn't have deployed labor

at before. And maybe I'm biased from the view we have, but most of our conversations with customers are when they have AI agents, they can actually now go and actually deliver work in areas that would have been unaffordable previously. So they weren't doing the work. Is that true in logistics?

So we're making thousands of phone calls a day using AI, calling truck drivers. And if we have a load, we've got 400,000 truck drivers using the mobile app, Flexport mobile app. I don't have enough loads to keep them all checking it every day to see if there's a load that matches them. And if they don't check it, they're useless to me.

Now, and it was too expensive to call the truck driver and have a human call and talk to them, even if it's a human in the call center in the Philippines. Whereas with AI, it's almost free. I'm calling thousands of them a day going, hey, this load looks like it's a good match for you. Are you interested? And then we activate them on the platform.

That's new work that wasn't going to happen before, not just a replacement. Yeah, I think probably, I think like we have, you know, in the Valley, unfortunately, we've been co-opted a little bit somewhat with a little bit of a Doomer mindset in some areas. And we think of then AI as, okay, like, it's all fixed pie, it's gonna replace things.

And on the ground with large enterprises, the vast majority of the use cases are, it's the ability to finally review the contracts that we never got around to reviewing. It's the ability to finally automate an invoice process that we never did. It's the ability to go in and just create marketing campaigns in every language

that we never got around to. And so, so I think that'll probably be actually like 90% of the usage of AI in the future will be things that if we look back and we snap the line right now, we said this is what knowledge work is today. 90% of AI usage will be things that we don't do today. 10% will replace, you know, what we're, what we're doing in some areas. That's the right take because Chamath, I can tell you in our firm, we would never have associates or researchers or analysts, Sachs, you also were in this line of work as well,

venture capital, you'd never have them review legal documents. That's something lawyers would do in the legal department. But now because of AI, we have them say, here's the safe, here's the term sheet, here's the edited version, dump it all in, find out what the changes are, what are the deltas here. And then it all in, find out what the changes are, what are the deltas here, and then let's have a discussion about what the founder changed in a standard document. And we don't have to bother with an attorney. And maybe you wouldn't have even checked those documents. If you were, you know, a seed fund or an angel fund, you would just go along for the ride because you're the 10th person signing the documents. So what do you

think, Trimoth here in terms of the premise that maybe it's 10% replacing work that's happening, but this is blue ocean and we're going to do 90% of like new stuff that we just never got to? Yeah, I tend to believe that's true. I think the customers that we sell into at 80, 90 are largely large enterprises as well, so not dissimilar to Aaron's customer base. What I would say is that what they are encountering is the trough of disillusionment.

And I don't know if Aaron, you're seeing this as well, but every single, you know, CIO ran around signing up some sort of AI product, in large part because their CEO would say to them, hey, what's your AI strategy? And the reason the CEO asked them that is that at some point, somebody on the board said, what are we doing about AI? So that's the, the bullcrap cascade that, that we went through in the last two years. And I think what has happened now is people have spent billions and billions of dollars. I think you can see it in the revenue traction of the AI companies. But I think where we are today is that there are some real technical complexities that

have not been solved. I'll give you an example. We have a lot of customers in regulated industries, which is to say that if you make a mistake, you will get fined or you will get shut down. Life sciences, healthcare, financial services are three examples. People still don't seem to appreciate that when you replace software that is deterministic with software that is probabilistic,

meaning software that somebody wrote for you, do A, then do B, then do C. With an LLM that can hallucinate, you'll have errors. So what used to be a throwaway thing, which is quality assurance and QA, right, unit testing, integration testing, is now the only thing that matters. Why? Because if you're a financial services institution, and you're supposed to do KYC, and it borks and now all of a sudden you send a wire somewhere in Syria, guess what? You're in trouble. If you're a healthcare company, and you're supposed to do some clinical diagnosis to send out a drug on time, and you don't do that because the model hallucinates, that's a real problem.

And I am guaranteeing you, we have not seen the class action lawsuits that will come when those errors will eventually be made. They're guaranteed to be made. We just don't know the scope and the scale of them. So that's why I am sort of of this posture where I think we've sold in a ton of promise. I think the reality is much more tactical. It's a little bit more banal. I think we're sorting through the

exact use cases where you can put guardrails around these error rates where it's okay and tolerable. Like Ryan will probably tell you there's some number of phone calls that just sound totally fecocke, but he's okay with that because the broader thing is okay. And Aaron will probably... So I don't know. So what I... I won't let him talk to my customers though. I have a calling truck drivers to offer them, you know, offer them loads, but I'm not having to talk to my customer. Sorry, I meant your truck drivers. But my point just is that I think agents are real, drivers. But my point just is that I think agents are real. But I think that we are far away from that because we're still at the phase of how do you build reliable software in production for an enterprise versus the toy apps that you see on the internet, which is like, let me vibe code

something. I think these things are worlds apart still. Okay. So let me get Saxon on here. And just to inform the audience, you heard trial of dissolutionment. This comes from the hype cycle. This is something Gartner has been talked about for a long time. So in case you're taking it for granted, and if you're watching,

you have some sort of technology trigger like agents. You have this like peak of inflated expectations. Now we're in the trial of dissolutionment. Hey, this stuff doesn't work. It's hallucinating, but we're kind of going up that slope. No, it works. It just doesn't work. It doesn't. We say we're on of going up. No, it works. It just doesn't work. Well, we say we're on the slope of enlightenment.

I don't see the disillusionment. I don't know where this is coming from. I don't even think we're at the peak yet. Oh, okay. So you think we're still going up? Because a lot of people, to Shomat's point, were buying stuff and saying, hey, it doesn't work, you know, and now we're in the messy middle. Let me say it differently, Sax. I think we have not yet figured out how to move the budgets from experimentation to mainline production, meaning where large chunks of the US economy are comfortable enough with the ways in which hallucinations are managed such that they will replace

legacy deterministic code with this new probabilistic model generated code, meaning model-enabled code. Let's just put it that way. Saksher, though, where are we on the slope here? Yeah. Look, I would separate change management issues, which are always going to be important, and there's always going to be big ones whenever there's a big disruption, especially enterprise, and especially around compliance and legal and all that kind of stuff. I would separate

that from the impact of the underlying technology trend. I don't think the impact has come anywhere close to peaking yet. In fact, I would say the rate of progress is exponential right now on at least three key dimensions. Number one is the algorithms themselves. The models are improving at a rate of, I don't know, three to four times a year. They're not just getting faster and better, but qualitatively they're different. Remember, we started with Purell, chatbots, then we went to Reasoning models. The difference there is with a chatbot, it's like kind of a smart PhD or college student

giving you an answer off the top of their heads. The Reasoning models, it's more like the PhD saying, okay, let me go off and think about that. Let me do a project on that. And it could work for 30 seconds or a couple of minutes. I mean, as much compute as you want to throw at it. And it will break down your complicated question into a bunch of some questions and then it'll try different approaches. And it can validate some of those approaches and come back to you with a much more impressive answer. And if you've been using like the Grok 3 deep research or the new Chad GPT-03 to do these types of new reasoning models,

it's pretty mind blowing what they're capable of. Have we even come close to figuring out how to tap the potential there, especially in an enterprise context? No, but my point is that the rate of progress on the algorithms is again, three or four times. Let me just pull up here. Okay, go finish your box sacks and then I'll take it and pass it. Go ahead.

Well, I was trying to lay out the dimensions of which progress is proceeding exponentially. Okay, so one is the algorithms, okay, which is not just quantitative, it's also qualitative. We didn't even get to the agents part of it yet. But that's the next big leap after reasoning models. We're just starting to scratch the surface there. Then you've got the chips. I mean, the chips are getting better at, I don't know, three to four X a year. We've gone from, you know, the H100 to the H200. Now we're on the GB200. We'll be at GB300 soon. We'll be on to Rubin. Three times better per year or they get better three times per year?

No, no, no, they're getting the chips themselves, depending on how you measure it. Each generation of chips is probably three or four times better than the last, okay? And Nvidia is back to rolling out new chip, new generation of products, roughly annually. And I'm just using them as one example. Obviously there are other companies as well.

So basically the leap from Hopper to Blackwell to Rubin, I guess, will be in next year. And then I think five minutes coming after that, I mean, really an astounding rate of progress. It's not just the individual chips are getting better. They're figuring out how to network them together. Like with NVL72, it's like a rack system to create much better performance

at the data center level. And that would be like the third area where you're seeing basically exponential progress. Just look at the number of GPUs are being deployed in data centers. So when Elon first started training Grok, I think that maybe 100,000 GPUs. Colossus was 100,000 correct.

Right, now they're up to 300,000. They're on the way to a million. Same thing with OpenAI's data center, Stargate. And within a couple years they'll be at, I don't know, five million GPUs, ten million GPUs. So I mean and you see that on the power side, right? You're going from 100 megawatt data centers to 300 megawatts to we're just starting to now see the first gigawatt power data centers. I don't even think they're live yet, but this is where they're trying to

get to. And I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that we could be at five or ten gigawatt data centers in the next several years. So my point is just look, the algorithms, the chips, and the data centers are all improving or scaling at a rate of, I don't know, three to four X a year. That's 10 X every two years, okay? Where people don't understand exponential progress

is that if you're getting better at 10x every two years That doesn't mean you'll be at 20x in four years It means you'll be at a hundred X a hundred X So the models the chips in the data centers will all be a hundred times more powerful in four years Let's say at the end of this presidential term. So you multiply those things together The algorithms the chips and then the raw compute that's available. You're talking about a million X increase, some of which will be captured in price reductions. Some of it will be in the performance ceiling, and then some of it will just be in the overall amount of AI compute that's available to the economy.

But the impact of this thing is going to be absolutely massive. And I think people still don't even appreciate that fact because they don't understand exponential progress. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think maybe just to square the circle, because everything that you just said, Zach, is what I think is propelling the industry.

And then the reality on Chamath's side, just to connect the dots, so we have an eval test that we do where we run enterprise data through every model to kind of figure out its accuracy rate and how much, it's not even hallucination, but just literally how much data does it miss when we ask for facts. The best model in the world, actually, interestingly, we was Grok 3 on this particular test. We send it 500 documents and we ask for 40 data fields back from the documents. And so it has to get every single data field correct.

and we ask for 40 data fields back from the documents. And so it has to get every single data field correct. And we only do a single pass. So we send the document to the model. We get a single pass back. Right now, the best score is about 90%. And so you can imagine a number of industries where you can't have 90% accuracy if you give something, you know, a question on 40 data fields.

Now, there's ways to solve it is you rerun it multiple times, or you chunk up the document into smaller parts. And so it doesn't get confused by the large context window. But a lot of the people that were deploying AI a year ago, or a year and a half ago, weren't doing that. And so they, they, you know, they did have a kind of a pilot run of something and it kind of worked okay. And what they have to realize back to your point, Saks, is like, this space is literally exponentially, you know, changing. And so if you don't use the latest methods of, okay, you have to actually like run the data through the model multiple times, and you have to chunk up the data into smaller parts, and you have to use a reasoning model, and you have to make sure that your prompt is like hyper-tuned for the particular use case,

if you haven't done those four things, then you probably will actually end up with a project that fails. And even so, even when you do all those things for even harder problems, you're still going to run into issues. So I think the challenge is that everybody's running a million miles an hour right now, and they're trying a lot of things. Some work, some don't work, at the same time that the space is actually changing at a pretty crazy rate. And let's take a look at our partner, Polymarket, and which company they think will have the best AI model by the end of 2025 and get feedback from our panel on. If you think this is accurate and who you would pick here, looks like Google is in the lead here. 41% of people believe that they will have the best AI model by the end of 2025.

I think the question was, what is the dimension? Like, you know, we use Gemini. So for many tasks at 8090, we use Gemini. It's incredible. But for most of our co-gen, we use Anthropic, and Claude kicks ass. It's exceptional. This is based on the best scores in the chatbot arena, which just became a for-profit company. So that is slightly different because people have gamed those tests. So that is a rub there. People are now building their A model for the eval unit, right? All the models are way overfitted for these evals.

So if you had to pick who's your, I mean, so I guess Chamath, you're saying you have to take a task by task. It's what, what's that? I agree. What Zach said is right. So it's kind of like, what problem are you trying to solve? And then you have to ride this technology wave

that is compounding very quickly. All I was just trying to get across is that the error rates have been diminishing, but not nearly as fast as you need for some sectors of the economy. So you can use a model to generate deterministic code. That's great. And as long as you unit test it and integration test it,

it'll be fine. But I'm saying, if you going to use a model in production, in an environment where if stuff goes wrong, there are consequences, we're not there yet. You don't want to use this for healthcare yet, but you could use it for writing or writing jokes or maybe tagging a file. No, no, no, no. That's too binary. It's already used right now in health care, but it's just the doctor's meeting notes that would normally take 30 minutes to go and transcribe. Yeah, so you can't be too black and white on that one.

What's happening right now, the reason why the progress is so rapid in coding assistance, and I think you're right, that Anthropic was a Claude 3.7. Claude, yeah, Sonnup 3.7.7. Yeah, Sonopri 7. Yeah, I think they're the leader. And in fact, I think the Manus demo that we showed, it's not entirely a wrapper on Claude

because they actually, they do a number of different things, but I think they are significantly using Anthropic for the code assistant part of it. In any event, the reason why the progress is so rapid with coding is because code compiles and you can determine objectively whether it works or not, you can validate it. And so that makes it a perfect area for AI to get better at through reinforcement learning

and test time compute is AI tries a bunch of things. It sees what works, it sees what compiles, sees what the user then accepts, and then to be able to learn to iterate based on that. That's why coding right now is really the big breakthrough application and use case, but it's not going to be the only one. I mean, math is another good area where I think AI is improving rapidly again, because math you have proofs and you can look at the results and see if it validates. Now,

I think one of the big questions in terms of AI progress is how extensible is the progress to other areas that don't easily validate that way? So, for example, legal work is, I think, a really good area for AI, but how do you validate that is correct? You would have to go to a court, right? The court is the compiler, like a lawsuit is the compiler, or maybe the laws. Or you could hire like a thousand lawyers or experts in the area to basically do, you know, reinforcement learning through human feedback.

But it's not like a compiler to your point. It's not like a math proof. The progress isn't going to be as rapid because it's harder to validate. But my guess is that once they figure out how to nail coding, math, and the things that are easily validated, they can move to the things that are harder to validate.

But I think this is one of the big questions is whether, I think people just kind of assume that AI progress will be equally fast in all areas, and I think it's possible that AI gets really good in some areas, better than human, but it's sort of childlike in other areas. And that's a possible outcome. Narrow tasks is like, I think, your point, right?

Like with a finite answer, or an answer we know with a finite answer. Or an answer we know is the definitive answer. This is the important thing about the agent kind of, let's just say, framework or architecture momentum was, instead of just saying, OK, we're going to do a single pass through the model, and then whatever it comes back with is,

we're going to be satisfied. Like you know, the legal work might be, might be reviewed by another agent whose job is to review legal work. And so we can just throw more and more compute at the problem. And we're just early in figuring out how to architect those. Or multiple models, right? You could have fly check, entropics, you could have entropic check, gpt check, Gemini. When you have some anomaly, it spits back out to the user. So human loop still matters in this type of process.

In the early days of OCR, you would have a computer say, here's the characters in this legal document. Then you'd have two humans type it in, and then you would get a certain level of certainty. You'll quickly find that when you layer these models on top of each other, the test time compute costs are astronomical. And Aaron's probably dealt with this. It's like I get a bill from AWS and it's like, oh wait, hold on a second. I just, you know, per 100,000 this month? What's going on?

Well, that by the way is another major trend line, which is that the new applications that we talked about are all much more token intensive. So we went from basic LLMs, which don't require that many tokens to give you an answer to the reasoning model where you can spend a thousand times more tokens just getting one answer to a question. And now the agents are gonna be even more token intensive than that.

So the amount of compute required to serve all these new applications is gonna be massive, which is why I think the CapEx build out actually makes sense. When you do a deep research to your point, David, you're firing off maybe 200 queries, and it's asking the AI is saying, hey, what query should I ask on behalf of the user? And then you go down that rabbit hole. It's basically like doing 200 of them at once. Ryan, your thoughts here on AI first companies and agentic computing. Well, the one I really wanted to tie back to is actually our

earlier conversation on tariffs. And there's a real use case of that of LLMs is how do you classify a product and you'd like to get to what we see today. When we did our first machine learning based natural language classification of a product, you take a product URL listing page, a Shopify page or Amazon page and say, Hey, what what classification code is this? What code is this? What duty is owed?

Six years ago in a hackathon, we got to like 70% accuracy. We're now in high 90s accuracy versus what a human trained expert will get to. But you actually get to it, which is not good enough. You know, you're wrong 3% of the time. You might've committed a violation of the law for sure. But actually what is truth in that regard? There's a lot of gray area in this

and truth ultimately is what does custom say? What does the CBP determine is correct? And those guys are using software that's a very simple algorithm and it's a decision tree that's going, okay, is it a shoe? Yes. Is the top made of leather?

Yes. Is the bottom made of rubber? And they just go through a very simple and that outputs it. So on some level, if you convince the government to use your LLM, it becomes true whether it's true or not. I think there's going to be some interesting cases like that, that we haven't really thought through of like, when does the government adopt these to be the source of truth? Okay, all of this speaks to this thing that's going to sound totally esoteric, but like we all used to shit on QA, right? Like the least talented engineers were allocated to QA. I think in the world of AI, it'll end up being the most talented. You know, we internally at 80, 90, we call it improvement engineering and it's a total specialty. It's

similar to when I kind of coined the growth team at Facebook. I feel it's the same kind of moment. Where improvement engineering is really the skill that translates toy apps and vibe coding into something that's very practical and real. And we like, and my team and the leader of this team, he's like steeped in things like Japanese kata management from like Toyota and quality systems. And these are all the things that

matter when you're trying to just shrink the error rate down to zero so that you can use it in a reliable way. And also to document it so that if people want to questions what happened or have, you know, recompense or some some way to come back and say, Hey, that that really harmed me. How do you even do that? Like, these are all very complicated issues that that will get sorted out super I think interesting. Okay, four, I gotta wrap guys, I gotta catch a flight to Miami. Let me do a closing here. If you want to keep going. You're welcome to three plane just wait just text the pilot and just

tell them you're all right, listen, I'm not burning all the all in credits, so to speak and all of our getting inside kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I'm not like you're worried about everything and then putting it on the all in budget and the rest of us are flying Southwest. Chairman dictator,

I'm off. It's a strange concept. Yeah, David Sacks, what does that mean? David, when was the last time you flew commercial? Clinton. I haven't missed a flight in about 15 years. For Ryan Peterson from Flexport, Aaron Levy from The Amazing Box, Chamath Palihapitiya,

David Sacks, your chairman dictator, czar, I am the world's greatest moderator. Love you you boys. I'm going all in What your winners want? What your winners want? What your winners want? Besties are gone That's my dog taking a notice in your driveway Oh man My avid Azure will meet me at Blitz

We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cause they're all just useless It's like this sexual tension that we just need to release somehow What your the beat? What your the beat? because they're all just useless. It's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow. Wet your feet. Wet your feet. Beak. We need to get merch.