The Manosphere Report

0:00All right, everybody, welcome back to your favorite podcast, the all -in podcast.

0:04Today, we have a Conspiracy Corner episode for you.

0:10We're going to go over the 9 -11 inside job.

0:12We're going over Flat Earth, JFK assassination.

0:15It's going to be all conspiracy all the time after our amazing blockbuster episode during

0:21Ski Week. We're going all conspiracy here.

0:23Our guest today, Alex Jones.

0:25How many views did it get?

0:26Nine views? I mean, it's tough when you have one out of four besties.

0:31It doesn't. Michael Tracy is on standby.

0:34Not true. I can carry an episode for at least 400 ,000 views.

0:37I mean, you might. You might.

0:39I like your... Hey, for people who don't know, Tremoth has his own YouTube channel.

0:42He's got his escape hatch.

0:43But when this train wreck burns to the ground, he started his own YouTube channel.

0:47He's hedging his bets. Freyberg's working on his solo project.

0:51Everybody's doing solo projects. The band's got a lot of solo projects.

0:54The Beatles are experimenting. The Beatles are experimenting.

0:56We had a little Yoko Ono situation going on here.

0:59You know what the number one topic for this show was by the all -in

1:01AI bot, Sax? What's up?

1:04The number one was Dario versus Hegseth.

1:08The Department of War versus Anthropic was the number one topic selected by our AI

1:13bot. As a programming note for folks, that decision will be made end of the

1:16day Friday when this podcast comes out.

1:18So we will talk about it next week.

1:19But let's get to work.

1:20We've got a full docket.

1:21The Claude kill list has expanded.

1:24And an AI fan fiction sub stack tanked your 401k on Monday.

1:29Let's get into it. Anthropic's generational run continues.

1:33They're now three for three in tanking different market sectors in February.

1:38Congratulations. This is like they took the mantle from Brad Gerstner tanking the market.

1:44The Anthropic shit list. It is.

1:46February 3rd, Anthropic announces, hey, we got a legal plug in for Claude.

1:50Co -Work, Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, LegalZoom, all down at least 10 % since February 3rd.

1:56Then on February 20th, Claude code security is announced in a limited research preview.

2:02Stocks tank again. Crowdtry, Cloudflare, Okta, all down.

2:06Then February 23rd, Anthropic announces, Claude can modernize COBOL databases.

2:12If you don't know COBOL, that's the like oldest coding language in the world.

2:16That's where Sachs learned code when he was in college in the 70s.

2:19It's used for banking, payroll, government, healthcare, healthcare.

2:23It runs 95 % of ATMs in the US and it powers social security payments.

2:2985 % of all COBOL code runs on IBM machines.

2:32So IBM decided they would tank 13 % on Monday, their worst day since 2031

2:39billion dollars in market cap losses.

2:42So let's stop here before I get into the fan fiction piece.

2:47What's your take here of what's happening in the market, Shamath?

2:51Is this simply people are looking for an excuse to trim their positions because things

2:55have been top ticking, all time highs, and people are just looking for an excuse?

2:59Or is this reality? Is this the go forward reality that AI is going to

3:03compress these kind of stocks because it solves a lot of problems?

3:08I'm going to give you two explanations.

3:11I don't know what percentage I would allocate across the two, but I think one

3:18is tactical and one is much more strategic, but I think both are happening.

3:22The tactical one is that we're at a moment in time where a lot of

3:28the smart money hedge funds are starting to massively degross.

3:33And what that means is they're trimming a lot of positions and they're just...

3:38taking on a lot less risk.

3:41Why? I don't exactly know.

3:43It could be motivated by the second thing that I'm going to talk about.

3:46But the point is, in a degrossing cycle, you tend to be trimming risk and

3:51making your position sizes much smaller.

3:55So the longs become less long, the shorts become less short, and you just shrink.

3:58And so there's just general downward pressure.

4:01That is a clear behavior right now.

4:04But I think the structural change is the more important one.

4:08And this is sort of what I talked about this morning.

4:11In a normal functioning market, what we are always debating is when a set of

4:18cash flows go from becoming highly confident to less highly confident.

4:24It's a when conversation. So when will Coca -Cola's cash flows be impacted?

4:31When will Eli Lilly's cash flows be impacted?

4:34When will Meta's cash flows be impacted?

4:37And the answer to the when gets translated by the public markets into three things.

4:43Your price to earnings multiple, where if you invert that number, what that is equivalent

4:50to is the yield on the money that you get.

4:53So if you're 20 times PE, that's a 5 % yield.

4:57The second is a revenue multiple.

4:59And the third is what's called your weighted average cost of capital, which is to

5:04say, if you look at the next 20 to 30 years of earnings, and you

5:10want to figure out what that is worth today, you have to discount all of

5:15these back, and you have to assume a percentage of interest effectively that it takes

5:21to get there. And the basic math of this is that when you have a

5:25high whack, it's called, you're massively discounting these cash flows.

5:29When you have a low whack, you're assuming that these things are very durable.

5:32Okay, so what is happening?

5:35We used to debate when.

5:37This is no longer a when moment.

5:39The market is very much in an if mode.

5:43Are these cash flows durable at all?

5:46Could they fall off a cliff in year three?

5:48Is there some AI model that's going to come around the corner and obliterate this

5:53business without me knowing it?

5:55And because they've shifted into this if mindset, your risk becomes totally different.

6:02You have this event risk that you don't know how to price.

6:07And whenever the market shifts into that mode, what you see are that the holders

6:13of those equities want a massive margin of safety.

6:15What does that mean? They have to take PEs way down.

6:20If you used to trade at 40, you should trade at 20.

6:22If you used to trade at 20, you should trade at 10.

6:25They take revenue multiples down.

6:27You used to trade at 10 times revenue, now you're going to trade at three

6:29times. You take the whack way up, used to be a 6 % discounted weighted

6:34average cost of capital, you know what, I'm taking you to 12 or 13.

6:38That's the market's way of saying, I'm now debating if these things will even exist.

6:46And so I need to give myself a huge buffer to own this stuff.

6:50That's what's happening right now.

6:52It has a lot of ripple effects that we can talk about.

6:55Freeberg and I have talked about this a lot.

6:57The most obvious impact is how these tech companies recruit and retain talent because the

7:02biggest thing that it starts to eat into are the cash flows of a business,

7:07which really directly tied to stock -based comp and all this other stuff.

7:10But let me just stop there.

7:11So we have moved away from a when to now and if, and I think

7:16that that is - a very smart question to be asking.

7:19The answer may be for many of these companies that they will survive, but we

7:22don't know how long. And until that becomes clearer, you have to give yourself room

7:27to be wrong. You said when, then if, did you mean if?

7:30No, no, no, no. To when?

7:32We've always debated when. When will these cash flows disappear?

7:35Now it's like, will they even exist?

7:37Got it. Okay. So the second part of the story, Friedberg and Sachs, is that

7:42a substack post, fan fiction, taking place in the fictional 2028 global intelligence crisis went

7:53mega viral, 28 million views on X.

7:56It was posted Sunday night.

7:57It made the market tank on Monday.

8:00In this fictional substack post, the author said there's going to be essentially a death

8:07spiral that happens because of AI.

8:09How does that work? Well, first, companies embrace AI.

8:12Everything goes right. They're able to cut staff, their margins go up, similar to how

8:16Amazon has, you know, trimmed their white collar staff.

8:21Then they're so successful at this that they lose their customer base because consumers don't

8:26have discretionary funding to spend.

8:28Then it creates a death spiral where the companies keep deploying AI to try to

8:31hit the margins, cutting staff and the entire economy collapses.

8:35Dr. Doom level stuff. Unemployment's at 10%.

8:37S &P goes down from 38 % highs.

8:39After this piece came out, which speculated that agents would get rid of all the

8:443 % interchange fees and move everybody to settle transactions on stable coins, all the

8:49financial stocks got hit on Monday.

8:51Amex down 8%. Capital One down 8%.

8:53MasterCard 6 % fees of 4 % yada yada.

8:57Finally, this piece got a lot of pushback.

9:00There was a silly piece in it, or a section in it where they said

9:03AI agents would vibe code their way to displacing DoorDash.

9:09And that's kind of silly if anybody's running a network based business knows.

9:13Sacks, I assume you read this piece, or at least saw the fallout from it.

9:18What's your take? And then we'll go to you, Freeper.

9:20Yeah, well, I know that this Citrini article got passed around like a joint at

9:26a Grateful Dead concert. But I'm starting to question how legitimately viral it really was.

9:32There's some information that just came out that the attribution of the article has been

9:38amended, meaning the co -authors have been amended to include a short fund that was

9:44shorting some of the names mentioned in the article.

9:46This is according to another post that just came out.

9:50According to this post, the authorship attribution attributed to market moving was changed after publication

9:58of the co -author as a managing partner of a $262 million SEC registered hedge

10:02fund who confirmed short positions in the companies the report named.

10:07So I think that's point number one is I just wonder, did this article truly

10:11go viral or did the authors do anything to kind of amplify it?

10:15And we just don't know the answer to that question.

10:17But regardless of that, let's just take the arguments on their phase.

10:21I think one of the best responses to it was by another writer named Derek

10:26Thompson who wrote an article called Nobody Knows Anything, which I think is a reference

10:31to a famous take by legendary Hollywood writer William Goldman.

10:36In any event, what the article says is no one really knows what's going to

10:40happen with AI in two years, nevermind 20 years.

10:43And so they resort to science fiction writing masquerading as analysis.

10:47And the author here, Derek Thompson, says that the conversation about AI is really just

10:54a marketplace of computing. eating science fiction narratives.

10:56And he says, that's not to say I think the technology is a parlor trick,

11:00but rather that the level of uncertainty is so high and the quality and supply

11:04of real -world, real -time information about AI's macroeconomic effects so paltry that very serious

11:11conversations about AI are often more literary than genuinely analytical.

11:16So, in other words, what he's saying is, look, this guy is writing very compelling

11:20science fiction, but there's no real analytics behind it to defend it.

11:25And yes, this could happen.

11:27Here's a prediction market on whether people believe the Citrini report's going to come true.

11:32Something like 12 % believe the Citrini scenario is going to happen.

11:35But the truth is no one really knows.

11:37I mean, there's other dueling science fiction narratives where AI is going to create such

11:41a world of abundance that we're not going to need for anything.

11:45And just by the way, Derek Thompson is one of the abundance guys with Ezra

11:50Klein. This is why the market's getting whacked.

11:52I think that you're right, Sachs.

11:54Nobody knows. So, if you can get 5 % for owning government bonds, why are

11:58we taking excessive risk here?

12:00Yeah, let me just build on your point about SaaS.

12:02So, the reason why there's so much uncertainty around SaaS is that SaaS used to

12:06be such an easily modeled and predictable category.

12:11And, you know, I saw as a VC, we saw the same story play out

12:15across many, many different categories of software.

12:17You'd have this initial period where there'd be this experimentation phase.

12:21You have a bunch of different products that come to market.

12:23There'd be a battle. And then the market would eventually settle and there'd be a

12:27category leader. And they would capture most of the market share and the vast majority

12:31of the market capitalization. And they would have very, very predictable metrics.

12:35It was very easy to grade a SaaS business.

12:38You look at ARR, you see annually recurring revenue.

12:41You look at the net dollar retention.

12:43You want to see, depending on the phase - RPO, RPO, Revenue Underperformance.

12:48Right. And so, you know, these things began to be seen as like an annuity

12:52with growth, right? They were rock solid, yeah.

12:54Yeah, because a good net dollar retention would be something like 120%, which means that

12:59your sort of cohort of existing customers on balance would all renew the next year.

13:04And actually, they would renew at 120 % of their previous year's contract values.

13:09And the reason you got that extra 20 % is they would buy more seats

13:13or there'd be additional products or features they would upsell.

13:16It got to be very, very predictable.

13:18And so, when people were buying software companies at, I don't know, 13 times ARR,

13:24they thought they were buying a growth annuity.

13:26And now, all of a sudden, you got to factor into that.

13:29Well, wait a second. What if AI disrupts the whole market?

13:33What if it doesn't eliminate - I don't think AI is going to get rid

13:36of Salesforce, but it could eat into their growth opportunity.

13:39We just don't know. What if it changes the pricing model?

13:42I mean, it just creates a whole lot of unknowns.

13:44And I actually don't believe in the Citrini or the Doomer take on this, but

13:48I can see why the market would feel this level of uncertainty - 100%.

13:55Given how predictable a category SaaS used to be just, say, a year ago.

14:02Yeah. Well, chaos is a ladder, Friedberg.

14:05And this means opportunity. So, if we look at this and SaaS has headwinds, then

14:10is there a winner? Is open source the winner?

14:13Or is this all deflationary in your mind, Friedberg?

14:15And we just make less money and the earnings of these companies get compressed?

14:20The size of them gets compressed?

14:22How do you think about it?

14:23I think fundamentally, if you're driving productivity with AI, you're driving leverage on human time

14:32and leverage on capital. the question is, how quickly can you drive that up?

14:37And that's a function of how much consumption there is how much capacity there is

14:41for consumption. So on the one hand, I'll just speak broadly, I think like humans

14:47have this desire to improve their livelihoods by roughly 10 % every year.

14:51Meaning like your income and your ability to purchase stuff that's new relative to where

14:55you were last year has to go up by 10 % for you to be

14:57happy. If it's less than 10%, you're probably unhappy.

15:00Is that that's your anecdote?

15:01Or that's like, it's just like an anecdote.

15:03Like, I think I think that's sort of like my rubric for thinking about like,

15:06why are people unhappy or happy?

15:08So if your earnings are the same, but things are getting more expensive, you're not

15:11happy. If your earnings go up by 10%, things stay the same price.

15:15You got 10 % more than you had last year, you're you're gonna be happy.

15:17I just think like all humans are driven by this need to consume more each

15:21year than they did last year.

15:23So I think for me, that's like, the lower limit on consumptive capacity in the

15:29world. The question that we're now facing, which we've never faced in human history before,

15:35is there a upper limit on consumptive capacity?

15:40Because AI creates such a profound shift in productivity, and in leverage, that normally you

15:48would say, hey, when we get a new tool, we get new leverage in a

15:50system, we build a new technology, we can make more with less.

15:53Therefore, everyone gets access to more things for the same price, or the cost of

15:58things that they consume come down by a certain price.

16:01But there may be a situation now where the ability to make stuff exceeds the

16:07capacity to consume stuff. And that is something that I don't think we've faced before.

16:13And I think that's sort of where a lot of the models start to break

16:15just general economic models, just general productivity models, and general social models.

16:21And this goes to the point about like, what is everyone going to do?

16:24In the same way that I think we've argued that maybe SAS was a transitory

16:29business phenomenon that existed between the foundation of the internet, and the era of AI,

16:35it may be the case that knowledge work in general, is also a transitory phenomenon

16:41that only existed between the foundation of the computer, or computing tools, and the existence

16:47of AI, generally speaking. And if all of that goes away very quickly, and all

16:52of those people can be redistributed and recast into doing other higher level, more creative

16:56things, their productivity goes up by 100x.

17:00Is there really a consumer on the other end of all of that productivity?

17:04Is there really enough consumptive capacity?

17:06And I think that's the profound question that we all face.

17:09I don't think that there's any...

17:11Is that your way of saying that SAS goes to zero?

17:14Or that's your way of saying these companies go to zero?

17:18I'm just saying knowledge work in general.

17:20Like the... I understand. But what is the implication to these businesses?

17:23But is this just another dueling science fiction take?

17:25I mean, or what's your evidence for this?

17:28I think it's fine to have a sci -fi take about the future.

17:31I think it's intuition, I think.

17:32Yeah, but is there data?

17:33Because I can show you some data that I think contradicts what you're saying.

17:36And I have some firsthand sort of...

17:38In the sense that there is more leverage stacks that people are able to actually

17:41deliver? Well, Jake, I want to hear what you have to say, because I know

17:43you're experimenting with this. But let me just show you a few data points real

17:46quick, because I think this is relevant.

17:48So we're really talking about the disruption caused by coding assistance, right?

17:53This is like the first big killer app of AI.

17:56I mean, I guess after writing and research for chatbots, and we'll have agents later,

18:01but really, it's all about coding assistance, right?

18:03And the ability to more easily create code.

18:05That's what's creating the disruption to the SaaS category.

18:08Well, so this is focused on the data data we see right now around...

18:12that. And there are a lot of people who are pointing this out that Anthropic

18:18right now has a job listing for a software engineer on their website right now

18:24for $570 ,000. And a lot of people are kind of pointing out, okay, so

18:28wait. So what Anthropic is saying is they're still trying to hire software engineers at

18:33a very high wage, but somehow they think these jobs are going to be eliminated.

18:38Chamath might apply for that job.

18:40Yeah, austerity measures. Sounds pretty good to me.

18:42That's a lot of money.

18:44Chamath might take that job and then just have AI do it for him.

18:46No, I'm worried. I hope my 80 -90 team doesn't see that offer.

18:50That's a big number. Our equity is way higher, but our salaries are not that

18:56high. I mean, you put these things together, that equity is money good.

19:00The reality is those guys are doing $5 to $6 billion structured secondaries every year

19:05now, or they're starting, which means that they will.

19:07That's like cash compensation. So for me to match that, I need to be 3x

19:12higher than that. Right. And I think a lot of people are kind of pointing

19:14out, well, this is a contradiction.

19:16Anthropic doesn't really seem to be practicing what they're preaching if they're paying enormous amounts

19:20still for software engineers, even as they claim they're obsoleting the entire category.

19:24Something doesn't quite add up.

19:26Citadel Securities did a new report that rebuts that Citrini report.

19:32And they show a couple of stats here, which I think are really interesting.

19:36So job postings for software engineers are rapidly rising.

19:40They're showing, I think it was roughly a 10 % year -over -year increase in

19:44the demand for software engineers.

19:47On a related note, they also show that company formation is also rapidly expanding.

19:54And that may have something to do with AI making it easier to start a

19:58business or to get leverage, to your point, Freeberg.

20:01So look, there's a couple of competing effects going on here.

20:04And I think Aaron Levy had a really good explanation of why you might see

20:10something very counterintuitive happening. And again, it all goes back to Jevon's paradox.

20:15But what Aaron says is that when you lower the cost of something that was

20:18previously supply constrained, demand for that thing goes up.

20:22Software engineering is just one of the easiest examples to contemplate.

20:25But there are going to be many other jobs like that.

20:28But think about software engineering, even among startups in Silicon Valley, which I think are

20:33probably some of the most attractive places for software engineers to work.

20:37There's always been a chronic shortage of them.

20:39Then you've got the Fortune 500 companies, non -tech companies, which have always had an

20:44even harder time hiring technical talent.

20:47So you have this massive unfilled need for software engineers across the entire economy.

20:53Now you're going to be able to get a lot more leverage out of software

20:56engineers. It doesn't mean they're going to get fired.

20:59It just means that now maybe you can have a lot more 10x software engineers,

21:04and they're getting those jobs are now being spread throughout the whole economy.

21:08I also think, just to put some numbers on this, I think the cost structure

21:12of the average Fortune 500 business is something like 5 % IT.

21:17And that includes all of their IT, not just their software.

21:21What should it be? What should the percentage of software be in an enterprise cost

21:27structure? Elon describes companies as cybernetic organisms that are part software, part human.

21:33If you think about the current Fortune 500 company being 1 % or 2 %

21:37software, maybe they should be 50 % software.

21:40I think what Aaron is saying here is the market for software and software engineers

21:44was so constrained by the lack of availability that even if we 10x or 100x,

21:50the productivity of software engineers, the demand will be there to absorb this new supply.

21:56And so it could lead to this explosion in productivity without the massive job loss.

22:00I think you're right. I think the thing that I would look at is I

22:04would expect OPEX as a percentage of revenue to fall off of a cliff.

22:08But within that OPEX, the percentage of it that you allocate to technology and technology

22:14related things probably goes way, way up than what it is today.

22:18Okay, Jason, the batch of people that are applying for launch.

22:22Has SaaS stopped? Has software stopped?

22:25It's AI first companies, obviously, and people are rebuilding traditional SaaS tools just cheap, basically,

22:33everybody's building the grid, you know, as we talked about at the all in summit,

22:37like, some of these companies are trying to build the best pilot in the world,

22:41or way most trying to build the best driver in the world.

22:43People are now trying to build the best SDR in the world, the best salesperson,

22:47the best executive coach. And so we have been like obsessed with Claude Cowork, but

22:53mainly OpenClaw. And so what we did was, and I think it's not developers that

23:00are going to do all this work, it's knowledge workers.

23:02So we had, we have 20 people in our firm, we had 15 of them

23:05come in this weekend. And they all got trained over like six or seven hours

23:10how to have their own OpenClaw agent, and we started building it.

23:13Every piece of software that we wanted to buy or build over the last 10

23:17years, that we never got to, my people are building in the last 30 days.

23:22As an example, you know, when you're selling ads for a podcast, you want to

23:27check all the other podcasts and what advertisers they have, we trained an agent to

23:31go take the top 100 podcasts, look through the transcripts, figure out who the advertisers

23:36are, check those advertisers in pipe drive, tell us when the last time we contacted

23:39them, and put it into the sales room.

23:41That was an SDR our job that we wanted to fill and software we wanted

23:44to build. Then we wanted people to have like, that was a that was a

23:48human that you were paying money.

23:50And now you've replaced with software or that human still exists.

23:53And now they just do it in a better redeploying that human, we have a

23:56human doing it, we're going to redeploy them to do other things.

23:59And the consistency of this and the accuracy, and then it's doing it all night

24:04long. So we have like seven of these agents in these kind of roles.

24:07The next piece we did was we gave my agent, which is like the Ultron,

24:11acts root access to Gmail, calendar, zoom, notion, slack.

24:17And what it's doing is it's giving each person, here's what you got done this

24:20week with their manager, here's the emails you sent, here's the meetings you took, here's

24:24the contacts, here are the threads you were involved in.

24:26And then it's helping manage those people.

24:29And so we are getting all that all that to me says, you Jason, despite

24:34all your doomerism, seems like you're growing, and you're going to be hiring more people

24:39and you're more productive. Am I getting this wrong?

24:41I'm not doomerist. What I think is going to happen in this position is you're

24:44growing and you're going to be hiring more.

24:46No, no, we're not going to add more people.

24:48Definitely not adding people. The people we have are becoming 10 or 20 % more

24:53efficient every week, because the software we would have paid for or built from another

24:57vendor if we had the time, or we wanted to build custom software, we had

25:0010 engineers, it's being built by our open claw agents.

25:04As an example, when we make clips for this podcast, other podcasts, we have a

25:09go and look at like a This Week in Startups episode from 10 years, tell

25:13us the three best moments, and it makes the clip, it puts the subtitles on

25:17it, and then it puts the clip into the Slack room.

25:19That was something that was going to be a full time job.

25:22So we're getting 10 -20 % more efficient.

25:25Then I started doing it at home.

25:27So I had to take our Instacart full time job.

25:29Pull out the last 10 orders we did, and then tell us what we order

25:32most of time, and then it's going to automatically build a car for us.

25:36Every single knowledge work job is being automated right now, and you can take it,

25:41and if you're a business process head, where you know how to do a business

25:44process, and you can structure it and write it with an agent, it'll just run

25:49it every day, every week.

25:50We did another agent, how do you make better thumbnails?

25:54And we said, every Saturday, in your skills, so when you build an OpenClaw, it

25:59has like a soul file, and it has a skills file.

26:02In the skills file, we told it, Zach, every week, go out and look for

26:06people discussing how to make better thumbnails on YouTube, how to make better titles.

26:12It found this week, Chamath, somebody at MrBeast company talk about how they're using heat

26:18maps. It was an article I would have never known.

26:20It added it to its skill, and now whenever we post a thumbnail, it tells

26:24us, based on its skill, that it refines every week how to make that thumbnail

26:28better, and it's starting to make the thumbnails.

26:31This is becoming recursive, so you keep the same number of people, but they get

26:3510 % or 20 % more efficient.

26:37I don't know what this means for the larger economy.

26:39All I know is it's the most exciting time I've had online since the web

26:43came out, since the internet came out.

26:45It is so much fun to automate all this stuff.

26:48The big question that I am thinking about, that I haven't gotten a good answer

26:53about, so I don't know what you guys think is, all these businesses are going

26:58to need to batten down the hatches and give themselves room to figure this all

27:01out, right? Like, if you take Sax's point, like, if you take your point, J.

27:05Cal, which is the young, nimble companies like yours are going to be rapidly experimenting.

27:11The bigger, larger companies are going to slowly onboard themselves to start experimenting.

27:17All of that means we're going to get much clearer answers to all of this.

27:21But what it also means is that you're going to have to have time so

27:25that you can figure this all out.

27:26Yes. And if you want to buy yourself time, you're going to need a ton

27:31of cash. And if you're going to think about saving cash, the one place tech

27:36companies literally incinerate cash is how they do compensation.

27:42And so I kind of think, like, at some point, the next shoe will drop,

27:46and all of these tech companies have to really look at stock -based comp because

27:50they literally incinerate most, if not all, of their free cash flow fighting the dilution

27:55from stock -based compensation. So if you want five or six years to just be

27:58in the arena, on the field, figuring this out, you're going to want to kind

28:03of be very cash flow generative and really conservative in how you spend your money.

28:08Yeah. Sax, the people who embrace this, I think, become five or ten times more

28:12valuable than the people who are not.

28:13That's where I think the opportunity in the economy is.

28:15So unless you think humanity is going to run out of problems to solve, I

28:20think it's going to be boom.

28:21It's going to be boomtown.

28:22And I think people are going to start more companies.

28:24Because the barrier to start a company is no longer three or four million dollars.

28:29You can just have two or three people, and you start setting up these agents,

28:32and man, you can make software, you can do sales, you can do PR, everything

28:37is getting faster and faster and faster.

28:39So the time between, like, conceiving of a product and publishing it and finding a

28:44developer, you don't even need a developer.

28:46You can just publish software.

28:48The wake -up moment for me was we were talking to our agent about, hey,

28:53we want to get this functionality out of Slack.

28:56And it's like, yeah, Slack doesn't have that.

28:58But have you considered MatterPost?

29:00I'm like, what's MatterPost? It's like, oh, it's an open source project.

29:02I can spin it up this weekend, export your Slack instance and put it there.

29:05And I was like, oh, don't do that.

29:06We're only spending six. okay, I'm a year on Slack or 10k a year.

29:10But the software is building CRM systems for us, it's building agents for us, and

29:15it wants to just build all the software stack.

29:19So you could, when you renegotiate with Slack or HubSpot or whatever company you're working

29:26with, you're going to be able to say to them, hey, we could roll our

29:28own. And when you want to upsell us on this latest thing, like you talked

29:32about, Saks, upselling is such a big part of SaaS, you're like, I can actually

29:36build that software myself internally.

29:38I don't need you to do it.

29:39Ryan Peterson just posts on X, Claude for Legal seems to work just as well

29:44as Harvey, by the way.

29:47Now the SaaS apocalypse is going after private companies now too.

29:51Well, I think for a while now, there has been a question of which layer

29:54of the stack is going to capture all the value.

29:57So is it going to be the model companies or could it be the applications

30:01that are built on top of the models?

30:03Or, you know, if there's a lot of competition at both those layers of the

30:06stack, do the chip companies get it all?

30:07I think it's a unclear question, but totally.

30:11Yeah. I think, you know, for any given vertical application, you do have to defend

30:16why you think your value prop will be sustainable as the underlying foundation models just

30:23get better themselves. And it's open source.

30:26Like this week, we put up Kimmy 2 .5, can do about 80, 85 %

30:31of the jobs. So we lowered our token bills massively when we stood that up.

30:35All right, listen, this is TBD.

30:37We got a lot more to think about on this topic.

30:39Just on this point of a lot of these debates about AI are dueling science

30:46fiction narratives. I just think that the Doomer narratives are inherently more appealing to people.

30:51I mean, I think it's partly just, you look at most sci -fi movies are

30:55dystopian, not utopian. In addition to that, I think we have a bunch of heuristic

30:59biases in favor of the Doomer narrative.

31:02So one of them is the seen versus the unseen.

31:05It's a lot easier to see the jobs that already exist that could be obsoleted

31:10than it is to imagine the new jobs and the new business models that haven't

31:14been created yet. And that will likely take some great innovator or a genius to

31:19think of in order to create.

31:21So we have that huge heuristic bias of not being able to see the creation

31:25that's coming. It takes way less creativity to think about the potential destruction.

31:29And then finally, I think the other heuristic is just the whole fixed pie fallacy.

31:35Most people do tend to think of the economy as a fixed pie.

31:39This is why you see so much anger against millionaires and billionaires is because of

31:44this idea that if someone's getting rich, it must be at the expense of someone

31:46else. That's not actually the case.

31:48The economy itself could be growing larger as a result of someone inventing something new

31:53that increases production. A really good line from another article that was written just a

31:57couple of weeks ago was, the economy is not a pie, it's a garden, and

32:02technology is rain. So again, all of this technological innovation is going to increase the

32:09growth rate of the garden.

32:10It's not a fixed pie.

32:11And just because you see an expansion and productivity in one part of the economy

32:17does not mean that you're going to see job loss in another part of the

32:21economy. Yeah, I think the job people are not seeing, but I'm seeing right now

32:25is the person who creates agents, manages them, and is the maestro of the agents,

32:31the person who can take the business process, explain it, and train the agent to

32:36do it. And there are certain people in business who are just really good at

32:39operations. You were one of them, Sachs, running companies.

32:41And that person who can fire up an agent, train the agent.

32:45and figure out how to manage them and figure out how to increase their skills.

32:49Sure, look, with any new technology - It's a great job and it's not a

32:51developer. Look, with any new technology, there's always a huge change management aspect with enterprises

32:57because it's hard for them to adapt and change.

33:01And the people in the organization who can lead that change management are the ones

33:05who are going to create an amazing career opportunity for themselves.

33:08But it's hard to do, and that's going to slow down the rate of change,

33:11just the amount of inertia in the economy.

33:13And also, one other constraint is going to be that at some point here, we

33:17may be token constrained, right?

33:19I mean, we may not have enough energy like we've talked about, even though the

33:23chips are getting so much better that tokens per second, tokens per watt, and tokens

33:27per dollar are all increasing very fast, but we're still going to probably be constrained

33:33in the next couple of years on some dimension, whether it's land, power, shell, or

33:37just energy production, or maybe chip production.

33:39There are real world constraints on just how fast we can scale the infrastructure and

33:45that will mean that these hyper -utopian or hyper -dystopian narratives will be wrong.

33:51I don't think there's time in the next few years for the whole economy to

33:54change in the way that the extremes would present.

33:57I think you're right. I think you're going to see a 10 -axing in the

34:03demand for tokens, but I also think you're going to see a 90 % price

34:08reduction in the cost of an output token probably by the end of this year.

34:12So I think that, to your point, it's going to just create an enormous upswell

34:17of demand because we're going to be able to cut the prices of an output

34:20token so dramatically. And I think that's going to - And by the way, that

34:23discussion we had, Chamath, last week when we talked about the tokens outpacing the employee's

34:28salary and just where are these tokens all going to come from, that was our

34:31most viewed clip or one of the most viewed clips in the history of this

34:34podcast. So people are actually really focused on this.

34:37I had my team at 89.

34:39We redid our cost model and now we have that as a line item.

34:43When we think about fully burdened cost of employees, we now factor that in because

34:49we're at a place where some of our engineers are just racking up ginormous bills.

34:54And then separately, just general runs that we do for general purpose stuff that we

34:59need to just run our product.

35:00It's so expensive. So I am waiting with bated breath for what Zach said, which

35:05is like we need an explosion in the capacity that's available because I do think

35:11that the silicon solutions are coming that will cut the cost, but we need a

35:17large block of land power shell ready to then turn all of this stuff on

35:21so that we can actually take advantage of it.

35:23Rumors the new Mac Studio is coming.

35:25We'll have an M5 chip in it and we'll be language model ready.

35:29So that's the rumors that they're building it for models.

35:33So that could be an incredible turn of events.

35:35It's everybody's desktop running the local model.

35:37Zach, you want to have the final word here, or Freberg, before we...

35:40Just to go back to what Jamath was saying there, I mean, you've got political

35:44forces that want to stop the construction of all data centers in the United States.

35:48Which is crazy. If that gains steam, then that's going to be a huge constraint

35:51on any change whatsoever. Can I tee this up for you, J.

35:54Cal? So I went back this weekend and I looked at the number of data

36:00centers that have faced local opposition and whether there were patterns.

36:04And I posted it on X, so Nick, maybe you can put this up.

36:07But it was really a very small behavior, which was pushing back on data centers

36:16and getting them canceled. We had about 25 projects total, of which 20 were just

36:22in Q2 alone. There are...

36:24a hundred data center projects right now that are facing some form of local opposition.

36:29So interesting. Whereas if you take that 40 % number and you apply this and

36:36then you multiply it by the number of megawatts that they have announced.

36:39Last year, we lost almost five gigawatts in terms of canceled projects.

36:46This year coming in 26, we have about seven that could be canceled if you

36:51use this map. If then you flow that through, open AI, Sarah Fryer said this,

36:57that every gigawatt for her, for open AI, is about 10 billion of revenue.

37:02So if you assume that that's roughly accurate, plus or minus a billion here or

37:05there, what that means is that 2025, the industry as a whole lost 50 billion

37:13of revenue. And this year, if seven gigawatts gets canceled, it's about 70 billion.

37:19Now you're talking about 130 billion of lost revenue over these two years that'll go

37:23forward in time that we miss out on.

37:27I think that that's really bad.

37:28We need to figure out a way to nip this in the bud.

37:30So confounding because we were sitting here five years ago, 10 years ago, local municipalities

37:37were fighting and giving discounts to try to get these data centers open to get

37:40the jobs and get the revenue.

37:41And now we've got people trying to stop them.

37:44This is a perfect transition for the State of the Union.

37:46Before we get there, two important programming notes.

37:49All In is going to host two events in 2026.

37:53One of them, Liquidity, May 31st to June 3rd.

37:56In Yonville, up in Wine Country, Chamath has taken control of the event and he

38:01has set a standard for who gets on stage.

38:04None of you mids can control the programming.

38:06I decide. That's it. Chamath came in.

38:08He dropped the hammer. Who do you got so far?

38:11You want to tease a couple of people who you invited to come speak?

38:14I'll tease two. The first is an incredibly dear friend of mine.

38:19The axe of axes. Dan Loeb, who founded Third Point, who is an unbelievable investor

38:28in literally every domain. Private credit, public equities, private tech.

38:36He's just a beast. It's a good get.

38:39He's a beast. So he'll be doing a really important keynote.

38:42He has not done one of these public speaking slots in a very long time.

38:46And then the second is the CFO of OpenAI, Sarah Fryer.

38:50Oh, wow. Unbelievable star. And we're going to double click into the entire business model

38:55of OpenAI on stage in front of everybody.

38:57So go to allin .com and then for those of you who plan ahead for

39:01travel. More coming. More great memes coming.

39:03More coming every week. If you are an All In Summit fan, I can't believe

39:07it, Friedberg. We're going to be in our fifth year, September 13th to 15th.

39:11Only gets better. Gets better.

39:13Gets better every year. I'm going to have some good parties too.

39:15I mean, that Back to the Future and the Blade Runner parties, those were epic.

39:18allin .com slash events. Hey, can I give a plug to friend of the pod,

39:23Bill Gurley? He's got an amazing new book.

39:25Phenomenal book. Running Down a Dream.

39:26Please. Wait, wait, wait, wait, before you start.

39:28There it is, Running Down a Dream.

39:30I just want everybody to stop, pause the podcast.

39:32I want you to buy three copies, give it to two young people and a

39:35parent you know. This book is incredible.

39:37It's a great book. It's a great book.

39:39It really is inspiring for kids and Bill Gurley, friend of the pod, he always

39:44shows up for us. J .K., I'll do an impression for us of what it

39:46would be like if you and Bill Gurley started a podcast together.

39:49All right, everybody, welcome to the JCBG podcast.

39:51I'm your host, Jason Calacanis and I'm Bill Gurley and we're here in Texas at

39:57Terry Black's where we're getting some beef ribs and we're going to discuss investing.

40:02in marketplaces, as well as my new book, Running Down a Dream, which will teach

40:09your kids how to not be f***ed ups.

40:12And if your kids are f***ed ups, you can hit them in the back of

40:15the head with the book.

40:17Texas style. One of the big topics, and I think something you're working on with

40:24President Trump's acts, is this energy pledge.

40:28I've been seeing rumblings about this.

40:30Explain what's going on in terms of getting the country in sync around these data

40:35centers and energy. Well, the president announced in the State of the Union last night

40:40that he supports a ratepayer protection pledge, which requires the major tech companies to provide

40:47for their own power needs for AI data centers so that residential consumers do not

40:53see their rates going up.

40:54I think this makes total sense.

40:56I think, Chamath, to your point, this is the reason behind a lot of the

41:00opposition to new data centers is that the local residents fear that their electricity prices

41:04are going to go up.

41:05And that shouldn't be the case.

41:06And so the president has said that he's committed to not allowing residential rates to

41:11go up as a result of data centers.

41:14It's pretty straightforward. You get the big tech companies, the hyperscalers to pay for the

41:18increase in the electricity costs, or you let them set up their own power behind

41:22the meter. The president's been talking about this for over a year, that our biggest

41:27AI companies would also become big power companies because we had let them stand up

41:31their own power generation behind the meter.

41:34So these data centers don't even have to connect to the grid.

41:38They could just do co -location themselves.

41:40But also, I think that with this ratepayer protection pledge, what you're going to see

41:46is that it could actually bring down consumer prices.

41:49Because what happens is that when these data centers then set up their own power

41:52and connect to the grid, they can give back the excess to the grid.

41:57Also, they will make investments in scaling the infrastructure.

42:01So although electricity is priced at a metered rate, the costs to generate it are

42:06not all variable. There's a lot of huge fixed costs in there.

42:09So when you increase scale, then you can actually reduce the metered rate.

42:15So again, this is really, I think, the rebuttal to Bernie Sanders, who just wants

42:19to stop all progress whatsoever.

42:22I saw a funny post calling it bananas, which is build absolutely nothing anywhere near

42:27anyone. So this is the bananas is replacing the new NIMBY.

42:32So you just can build absolutely nothing.

42:34I think the president's approach finds a very good balance here, which is, look, we

42:38can have progress. Just don't make residential consumers pay for it.

42:41Let the big tech companies pay for it themselves.

42:43And I think you'll see more coming out about this from the White House next

42:47week. Quite a deft move.

42:48Freeberg, how should America be thinking about this great data center build out energy usage,

42:56you know, if you expand it out over the coming decade?

42:59And how do you sell that?

43:01To the backdrop that you talk about the socialist movement, you got a great interview

43:04coming out with Ray Dalio on the all in interview program.

43:07Next week, how do you think about those competing forces?

43:11You've got the socialist saying bananas, NIMBY, slow down, decel, and then you've got this

43:18incredible race we're in for efficiency and this opportunity and abundance?

43:23How would you sell it to kind of bring these two sides together?

43:27Or is it just impossible?

43:31The data coming in and out of data centers moves at roughly the speed of

43:35light. So you could put them anywhere.

43:38And I think that our policymakers this is at these events.

43:40As long as the頻id vale being shifted, we might buy these three inversions now.

43:41If you haven't taken out the风 мыtали, Thank you.

43:41need to be very cognizant of that fact you have and we do connect the

43:47internet using high -speed cable high -speed fiber optic throughout the world and so theoretically

43:55if we don't embrace and allow the economic development of the data center industry and

44:02it will fundamentally be an industry because it is almost like the new sort of

44:06oil where the oil rigs gonna go where the railroad's gonna go where the telegraph

44:11line's gonna go where the factory's gonna go if we don't put them here someone

44:16also put them on their shores someone also put them in their country someone also

44:19put them in their jurisdiction and a lot of the economic value that arises from

44:24the people that will build those facilities the energy that will be installed to produce

44:30power for those facilities and then all of the second and third order industries that

44:35emerge as a result of those installations that value will accrue elsewhere such a good

44:40point so yeah it's not gonna like just go away but the demand is there

44:45the economy is moving forward ai is moving forward we live in a world with

44:50196 countries and data centers do not take up a lot of space they're very

44:55small relative to the economic value that they produce if you zoom out on the

44:59map of the world all the data centers in the world fit under the tip

45:03of a pin and so this is a very small footprint and if we're gonna

45:08give up hundreds of thousands of jobs and many billions of dollars of economic value

45:14creation we're being pretty silly and pretty obtuse in our view of the world i

45:18would just like encourage the system that i think is the right system and we

45:21talked about this last time we're provided data centers are producing their own electricity that

45:27means that you're taking electricity consumption off the grid because they otherwise are not being

45:32used on the grid and that will reduce the cost of electricity for other residential

45:36and industrial users so it's silly to think that we need to put a moratorium

45:41on data centers as soon as you do that the companies that use data centers

45:44are not going to slow down they're going to go put them somewhere else and

45:46we're going to miss out and it's such a good point shamath because you were

45:49recently in the middle east and i've been there a bunch in saudi uae these

45:55are the folks who built a large portion of those oil refineries and they are

45:59savvy to this and what are they doing in saudi uae qatar all of these

46:04regions they're doubling down they're 10xing their data center bills so to your point friedberg

46:11either we build them or they're going to go somewhere else and there are people

46:15who are willing to underwrite these and they're willing to take out the red tape

46:19from the process here and move quicker than us so we i think this is

46:24a pretty deft move by president trump to say hey you guys should all just

46:28guarantee that consumers don't get impacted the water thing is a total hoax like the

46:33water is recirculated that's a hoax i think this is really smart i think that

46:37what the president is doing and what sacks is doing is really smart the thing

46:41to keep in mind is that there's still a risk that prices go up and

46:45it has nothing to do with these data centers and it has everything to do

46:48with the business model of being a utility because what happens is in order to

46:54get a license a monopoly license in an area to provide energy to generate energy

46:59for a community the exchange works in the following way you go and you present

47:06a capex plan to the public utilities commission that's effectively your budget that says here

47:12are the lines i'm going to upgrade here are the generators i'm going to upgrade

47:15independent of data centers the reality is the draw you the electricity consumption of individual

47:22Americans is going up because we have more devices, we have cars, we have all

47:26of these other things. So what we also have to do is we have to

47:29look at how utilities' business model actually incentivizes them to increase prices by making all

47:36kinds of investments. So we have to do a good job of making sure we

47:39hold everybody accountable because otherwise what you could see is that the data centers are

47:44taking on the burden for themselves.

47:46But price is still continuing to escalate because a utility says, I need to spend

47:51a billion dollars this year to upgrade my infrastructure.

47:54And what that allows them to do is take that billion dollars and essentially invest

47:57it for a return. That's the business model of utility.

48:00And this is really happening in blue states.

48:04Micron has a hundred billion dollar mega fab in New York and there's a lawsuit

48:08by six, one, two, three, four, five, six concerned citizens.

48:12That's shameful. And the project has taken 1 ,200 days, 1 ,200 days between their

48:21announcement and the groundbreaking. And they spent 612 days on the environmental impact study.

48:27People wake up, just go to Texas.

48:30Elon built his factory here, the Gigafactory in under like 18 months.

48:35This is the great state of Texas.

48:37Come here, we'll build it for you and you'll be done.

48:40I don't know why anyone bothers with the blue states anymore.

48:42They make it too hard to build.

48:44It's retarded. It's so dumb.

48:46It's such a self -owned too.

48:47Don't you want to be part of the future?

48:49You're literally ankling the entire country.

48:53Disgrace the odd. By the way, there are a lot of people in New York

48:55who want to work. This is not a case actually of this new fab being

49:00unpopular. The majority of people in the area actually want this plant being built.

49:06They want the jobs. They're going to come there.

49:08A lot of people say data centers don't create a lot of jobs.

49:10This is actually a chip fab.

49:12So it will create a lot of jobs, a lot of good high -paying jobs.

49:14People want it. But six people can stop it with a lawsuit after it's already

49:19been through a two -year environmental review.

49:21It's not blue and red states.

49:22These are nonprofits that get organized to create this kind of chaos.

49:25I remember looking at a massive lithium investment in Nevada.

49:32And the whole point was to domesticate lithium production.

49:36And what was interesting is this enormous deposit that's just sitting there ripe for development,

49:42right before they were about to get environmental approvals or right after, there was a

49:46lawsuit by people who wanted to protect the upper land grouse.

49:50It's seared in my mind that the upper land grouse of Nevada is the reason

49:54why we do not have domestic national security around lithium.

49:58And you have to ask yourself, why is this possible?

50:02And it's possible because you have these environmental nonprofits that can go and create this

50:07chaos with absolutely no risk to them.

50:10Zero. They can fundraise around it and they can create this chaos.

50:13I mean, Nick, to this point, this is an example of Greenpeace.

50:17And specifically here, they were pushing back on an oil pipeline to such a degree

50:22and they created so much chaos that they were sued.

50:25And a North Dakota judge just said that he's going to order Greenpeace to pay

50:28damages that should total almost $350 million in connection to those protests.

50:34And it should not be the case that six people can slow down a hundred

50:37billion dollar investment package. That's not right.

50:40Well, I think there is, and I just want to highlight this important point.

50:44There's not a lot of logic and reason.

50:47You guys are right. But I do think there's a lot of emotion and there's

50:51a huge aversion to big tech, a huge aversion to wealth creation by select individuals,

50:57select companies. a huge aversion to economic growth that doesn't benefit everyone.

51:02There's a fundamental kind of underlying left behind emotion that drives a lot of this.

51:07And I've said it before, but I think unless there's systems or mechanisms that get

51:11folks to come along with the value creation ahead and help them connect their own

51:16lives to the value creation that's being realized, they're not going to be supportive because

51:21there is this kind of diametric opposition towards big tech, towards the wealth gap, towards

51:26value accrual to a select few companies or select few individuals, and this fuels and

51:31feeds that. So I think fundamentally, maybe it's not just about giving the data centers

51:36their own power capacity, but there's got to be mechanisms and tools that helps the

51:41broader population understand or recognize or get some benefit from it as well, where they're

51:45an owner in it, or participant in it, because they have the power, as we're

51:50seeing, they have the power to stop it.

51:51Therefore, they want to have some benefit for providing authority to do it.

51:55And these six people are concerned about housing costs, worker exposure to toxic chemicals, pollution,

52:03air and water, greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, flooding of the wetlands, all these things

52:08that obviously could be mitigated.

52:11All right, let's keep moving here.

52:12We got a lot more docket to get through.

52:13State of the Union came in at 108 minutes.

52:18And it's the longest in 60 years, actually the longest since they started tracking this.

52:23The theme of President Trump's State of the Union this year, America at 250, strong,

52:29prosperous and respected. Trump took a bunch of victory laps, inflation, jobs, closing the border,

52:34all those have gone really well.

52:36But this comes to the backdrop of Trump's approval rating being super challenged.

52:41He started his first year at plus 11 .7%.

52:45Now he's negative 14 .3%, 26 point swing, economy started plus 3 .4 down to

52:5318 .2 and trade started at 5 .9%.

52:55And we'll talk about the tariff stuff later and went down to 22 .7.

53:01So let's call balls and strikes here, gentlemen, favorite moments.

53:05What were your favorite moments from the State of the Union and just general impressions

53:09of one hour and 45 minutes of Trump going to town?

53:15I thought it was great.

53:17Favorite moment? Favorite moment or two?

53:20Well, I had a couple.

53:23One was the Elon Omar Rashida Tlaib death stare and them just like losing their

53:33minds and screaming. I just thought it was so un -American.

53:39The second was when he was calling for law and order where I'm focusing and

53:43prioritizing on American citizens and none of the Democrats stood up.

53:51I thought that was kind of foolish.

53:53It was like obvious things and the Democrats wouldn't applaud.

53:56But this time they did like they did for the hockey team, which I thought

53:58was like the right thing to do.

54:00And then the fourth thing is just a shout out to our friend Brad Gerstner,

54:03who got a big shout out from the president.

54:04I don't know, Sachs, if you engineered that or not, but that was that was

54:07fantastic. That was incredible. He got like a double shout out.

54:10It was like a double tap.

54:12Yeah, that was really cool.

54:13That was surreal. Our group chat went crazy.

54:16It was really that was really cool.

54:18Those are my four highlights.

54:20Great. Here's your here's your clip of Democrats not standing for Americans over illegal aliens.

54:3020 seconds. If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support.

54:35The first. The duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal

54:42aliens. Why wouldn't you stand for that?

54:53That's an easy one to stand for.

54:55Doesn't make any sense. Would you stand for it, Jacob?

54:59Yeah, I mean, I'm pro, I can be anti -ice, but I'm pro -American and

55:05pro -reasonable. Immigration, like 90 % of the country is, so it just doesn't make

55:10any sense. But do you think American citizens should be prioritized over illegals?

55:15Of course, of course, yes.

55:18Of course, yes. And then I also think there should be a path to citizenship

55:22for people who have been here for a while, and I think that's what the

55:24majority of the country thinks as well.

55:25Your point is, I can hold two thoughts in my head, so I would have

55:28stood if he asked me.

55:30Yes, obviously we should take care of American citizens first, yes, and we should deport

55:35violent criminals. We've been over this like a million times here.

55:37This is like consensus in the country.

55:39What do you think is going on in everybody else's head when they're like, we

55:42cannot stand for this? These two sides, I mean, I think it's like the tariff

55:46thing. It's like the ice thing.

55:48These two sides cannot work together.

55:50It's just the most polarized it's ever been.

55:53Trump is not like the kind of guy to reach across the aisle.

55:56The Democrats are now digging in.

55:58So we just have a dysfunctional government where, you know, in a more functional time

56:02period, like under Clinton, let's say, or Bush, people would have gotten together.

56:08I'm jumping ahead to the tariff discussion, and they would have said, yeah, of course,

56:11tariffs are done in Congress.

56:12That's the law, whatever. What are your thoughts, Mr.

56:15President? How can we support your tariff program?

56:17But now it's like, oh, well, we don't work together.

56:19We don't actually have discussions anymore.

56:22There's no bipartisan, you know, collaboration.

56:25All these politicians are disgraceful, disgraciated across the board.

56:29They should be working together for the American people.

56:31If the president wants to do tariffs, they should be reasonable about it and give

56:35him the power to do reasonable tariffs.

56:37And he should be reasonable and say, hey, I understand that's your power.

56:40Let's get together and we'll chop it up and let's have dinner together.

56:43But they're just too polarized.

56:44It's just disgraceful where this country has gotten to.

56:46I blame both parties. Whenever the Democrats get smoked out as being radicals and extremists,

56:54you always want to basically say a pox on both your houses and blame the

56:57Republicans and Democrats equally. The fact of the matter is the president said to the

57:02audience, to the members of Congress, hey, if you agree with the statement, stand up.

57:08And of course, every single Democrat sat there stone face and refused to applaud or

57:14acknowledge what he was saying.

57:16This was a very easy test for the Democrats to pass.

57:20In fact, it was a political risk for the president because it was so easy

57:26for the Democrats to demonstrate that they're operating in good faith and they're willing to

57:30be bipartisan and they're not extremists and they're actually commonsensical and logical.

57:36And they completely failed the test.

57:38And by the way, it wasn't just on that one.

57:40I mean, let me just tell you some of the other ones where they refused

57:43to applaud. So they refused to applaud the grieving families of innocent American women and

57:50children murdered by criminal illegal aliens, including the mother of Irina Zuritskaya.

57:56That was very sad. That was sad.

57:58That was unbelievable. They refused to applaud for securing our homeland and ending the invasion

58:04of criminal illegal aliens, killers, rapists, gang members, and traffickers.

58:08They refused to applaud for unifying against political violence.

58:12So the president mentioned the assassination.

58:15Charlie Kirk, they would not even do a polite clap for Erica Kirk in unifying

58:20against political violence. They refused to applaud for keeping violent criminals locked up.

58:26They even refused to applaud for lower prescription drug prices for millions of Americans because

58:31it was President Trump who orchestrated that policy.

58:33And there were so many other examples like that.

58:36And, you know, I think the reason why this speech was so effective, and by

58:40the way, it's not just me saying it, something like two thirds of the people

58:44that CNN polled. So two thirds of CNN watchers said it was highly effective.

58:48And something like three quarters of CBS News viewers said it was highly effective is

58:53because the president laid out 80 -20 issue one after another, right?

58:58Or even 90 -10 issues or 95 -5 issues.

59:01I mean, these are all issues where the overwhelming number of Americans, I think, agree

59:06with the policy the president laid out.

59:08And in every single case, the Democrats are supposed to even give it a polite

59:12applause. And that is different than in the past.

59:15And you can say that's because of hyper -partisanship and polarization.

59:19But it's also because of another thing is because the Democrats have become a party

59:23of radicalism and extremism. And the viewpoints that they expressed through their aesthetics the other

59:32night, they do express those things in policy and in speeches all the time.

59:37So it's not just like a one -off or, you know, somehow like we have

59:41a misconception of who these guys are.

59:44I think, you know, the big line of the night was when Trump just sort

59:47of said these people are crazy.

59:48I mean, he said it in like almost mournful and regretful way.

59:51He doesn't want them to be crazy.

59:53He wants them to be rational so he can work with them.

59:55But I think that point resonated.

59:57I'll still point the other side, which is this has been going on for a

1:00:00couple of, you know, state of the unions here across this.

1:00:03The Republicans didn't stand for the Democrats often.

1:00:06And it's a bit of showmanship.

1:00:08But the truth is, Trump is the divider in chief.

1:00:11He always is attacking people.

1:00:13He's always mocking people. So they don't want to play ball with him.

1:00:16So I do think you can both sides of it.

1:00:20You have no choice in politics.

1:00:21You've got to that philosophy.

1:00:26Trump's philosophy of we have to counterpunch.

1:00:28We have to attack. We never have to apologize.

1:00:30We never have to be reasonable.

1:00:31That's part of what's broken down in our politics.

1:00:33And these two sides should work together.

1:00:35We should go back to a bipartisan.

1:00:37Are you going to work with Ilhan Omar?

1:00:39When he is talking, when the president talks about.

1:00:41I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but she is the mirror.

1:00:42Hold on. I'll finish my statement.

1:00:43You asked a question. I think Trump is the mirror of that.

1:00:47He has been hostile towards these Democrats.

1:00:49He doesn't give them an inch.

1:00:50They should be more collaborative.

1:00:52That's what the balance of power between the executive branch, you know, and these, you

1:00:59know, congressmen and the Congress and the Senate, like this is how it's supposed to

1:01:03work. And these two sides need to learn how to get back to listening to

1:01:07each other, understanding each other's positions, and then finding a middle ground.

1:01:10And that's why the Democrats lost last time because they didn't have the common sense

1:01:14to say, hey, everybody wants the border closed.

1:01:17To your point, it's a 90 % issue.

1:01:19And Kamala Harris was too dumb to just say, yeah, we should have closed the

1:01:22border. It's closed now. And we've got it.

1:01:25Anyway, the whole thing is a mess.

1:01:27I understand you got to fight for your team, but I don't like the counterpunchies.

1:01:30I like collaboration. You just actually made the key point.

1:01:31You made the key point, which is underlying the optics and the polarization, you have

1:01:36issues. And on those issues, President Trump is on the side of the American people.

1:01:41The issues where 80 % of the American people agree, some huge percentage, I don't

1:01:45know exactly what it is, thinks that the Somali daycare fraud in Minnesota was an

1:01:51outrage. And the president... is right to point that out and what's the democrats reaction

1:01:56you've got ilana omar screaming from the audience at him yeah she's a loon i

1:02:00mean at the end of the day you did have you did have elizabeth warren

1:02:06stand for uh stopping nancy pelosi from trading stocks and that gave trump his best

1:02:12one -liner of the night that was his best one -liner clearly and they stood

1:02:16for iran too and stopping iran from being a nuclear i give elizabeth warren credit

1:02:20for that there you go you don't have to punch her back insider trading act

1:02:25without delay yeah see that's something bipartisan look at that zach that's what you need

1:02:31to get the country back to okay but that hold on but this this just

1:02:34proves the point you were making before you said that it was polarization stood up

1:02:39for that i can't believe can't believe did nancy pelosi stand up if she's saying

1:02:45sing pow good job that's why he's so good is he's in the moment and

1:02:49he's reacting to what's happening in the chamber he's got good timing he's not just

1:02:52reading from a teleprompter and he nailed it but look that moment disproves what you're

1:02:57saying jacal because this is not just about polarization on that issue elizabeth warren was

1:03:02willing to stand because she actually to her credit wants to ban insider trading by

1:03:06members of congress yes but on the rest of those issues like securing the border

1:03:09she did not stand why because she does not agree with the president on that

1:03:13issue we just have to get back to these sides working together that's my personal

1:03:17feeling uh freeberg any thoughts on the uh theatrics and uh trump's first year writ

1:03:24large and you know the sort of back and forth and is there any hope

1:03:28that these two teams could collaborate at some point on something like say the ballooning

1:03:35deficit which trump has not gotten under control in his first year and it's going

1:03:38to be 2 .5 trillion dollars added what are your thoughts here on them collaborating

1:03:43on anything important freeberg that's probably one thing they can agree on is just keep

1:03:47the money flowing got it they'll both give a they'll both give a standing ovation

1:03:51for burn more capital and put us more in debt well said my guy david

1:03:57friedberg sultan of science it is your time to shine the world's greatest moderator has

1:04:04decided we're going directly to science corner this is your time what do you need

1:04:16me for this is very important for you freeberg's gonna talk lightning round for science

1:04:20corner go freeberg wait wait are we doing any more topics after this or can

1:04:23i just leave yes tariffs yes we're doing tariffs why would we do that because

1:04:27i want to get paid you're gonna put the audience to sleep i'm not saying

1:04:31science corner doesn't have its audience listen you can why wouldn't we do yeah exactly

1:04:36look at you you're like screaming let him do his work three let him two

1:04:39let him cook let him cook freeberg tell us about this harvard speaking of science

1:04:42i think that there's a very important moment happening right now we've talked a number

1:04:46of times on the show about yamanaka factors these are these four proteins that were

1:04:51discovered by shinya yamanaka that we found later that when applied to cells mammalian cells

1:04:59can actually reverse the age of those cells reset the epigenetic clock reset the epigenome

1:05:04which is the little markers on top of the dna that turn genes on and

1:05:07off back to a youthful state extraordinary groundbreaking work that was done that won the

1:05:13nobel prize led to the foundation of several companies there's a harvard uh scientist named

1:05:18david sinclair he's a bit of a controversial character do you guys know him i

1:05:22think you guys one of one or two of you may have met him so

1:05:24jamak you ever met him i i i followed him i've seen his stuff so

1:05:28sinclair is kind of bemoaned a little bit by the scientific and academic community for

1:05:33being a little too overhype snake oil salesman, as some folks have claimed, because years

1:05:39ago, he sold a company to GSK saying resveratrol would reverse aging.

1:05:44And, you know, he made $720 million on that, it didn't end up working.

1:05:47And he's promoted certain supplement companies and so on.

1:05:50So I want to preface with that before I kind of underwrite what he's saying

1:05:53with this next thing. But he's a co founder of a company called Life Biosciences.

1:05:58And they've reached a major agreement with the FDA to be the first company to

1:06:02treat humans with Yamanaka factors.

1:06:06Specifically, what they're doing is they're going to be delivering these Yamanaka factors.

1:06:10These are these proteins that rejuvenate cells and make them youthful again, into the eye.

1:06:18And so their first indication is to actually inject them into the vitriol fluid in

1:06:22the eyeball. And they'll affect the retina in the eye, to address people that have

1:06:28gotten blind from glaucoma, or one of these kind of stroke like diseases that happen

1:06:33in the eye. And the expectation with this phase one clinical trial is that the

1:06:38delivery of these Yamanaka factors into the eye will rejuvenate the retina, make it youthful

1:06:44again and restore vision. If it works, which it's expected to because we see this

1:06:49result happen in animal models, it could be an extraordinary breakthrough, not just in terms

1:06:54of blindness, but in terms of the first human application of Yamanaka factors to reverse

1:06:59aging. The way they're doing it, is they're actually packaging up DNA, that will make

1:07:06these proteins into viruses, AAV virus that is delivered into the eye, the virus will

1:07:14then go into the retinal cells, and then will deliver this payload for this DNA

1:07:18to make these proteins in the eye cells.

1:07:22And it can be turned on and off.

1:07:24Amazingly, they've created a switch mechanism in it, where the protein production, the production of

1:07:29these Yamanaka factors can be turned on and off by taking an antibiotic called doxycycline.

1:07:35So the person that gets the delivery of this drug takes the antibiotic, turns on

1:07:39the production of these Yamanaka factors, and then theoretically, their eye cells will de -age,

1:07:44will get youthful, and their vision will be restored.

1:07:47So phase one clinical trials underway, first time in human history, we're seeing Yamanaka factors

1:07:52being delivered into humans, literally the tip of the iceberg.

1:07:55There are now over a dozen startups that are trying to deliver Yamanaka factors, which

1:08:01are these proteins or some other sort of protein that can actually reverse aging by

1:08:05restoring the epigenome and cells and make them young again.

1:08:08So this is the beginning of a wave of what I think will be the

1:08:12most extraordinary revolution in human therapeutics, and ultimately could lead to, you know, some people

1:08:19would argue the fountain of youth.

1:08:21Is this just a talk study?

1:08:23So is it mechanism? Yeah, well, they'll see results.

1:08:27They'll see results, but they're gonna they're gonna keep dosing low, but you will see

1:08:30results. God, that's gonna be incredible.

1:08:33It's gonna be incredible. By the way, the number of other folks that are gearing

1:08:36up for phase one, using, if not the Yamanaka factors, other factors that they've identified

1:08:42or designed as an alternative to Yamanaka factors, again, to rejuvenate the cells.

1:08:46And just to remind folks, the way this works is it was discovered that these

1:08:50proteins, when they go into a cell, they take all of those little markers that

1:08:54sit on top of your DNA that turn genes on and off, and they create

1:08:58a system that causes them all to move to the right place.

1:09:01So it resets the markers so that those cells will start to operate like they're

1:09:05supposed to, when they were young again.

1:09:07That's it. It's gonna be incredible.

1:09:09Yeah. Do you think like you know, in all seriousness, people's knees or joints or

1:09:13what, where do you think it could flow to next?

1:09:16Arthritis. Yep. And by the way, when applied, and if it's distributed in the skin,

1:09:21they've seen some results in monkeys where like wrinkles go away.

1:09:24It like literally makes these cells all work youthful again.

1:09:27And so a lot of the damage that happens over time is not damage to

1:09:31DNA. It's damage to the epigenome.

1:09:34It's the parts that sit on top of the DNA that turn genes on and

1:09:37off, and they get moved to the wrong place as you get older.

1:09:40And by resetting them and getting them back to the right place, boom, the cell

1:09:44is young again, the organ is young again.

1:09:45And suddenly you look and act and feel young again.

1:09:48It's an incredible technology. We're just at the early stages, the early innings of turning

1:09:53it into therapeutics. Again, the discovery goes back to 2006.

1:09:57And now we're starting to see it get into clinic.

1:09:59Let's rejuvenate. Let's rejuvenate some hair lines on this podcast.

1:10:02That would be next up.

1:10:04Speak for yourself. I don't know.

1:10:06You got a little you got a little peaks going there, my brother.

1:10:09What are you talking about, bro?

1:10:10My hairline's incredible. I'm 50.

1:10:12I mean, it's not bad for 50.

1:10:13I give you credit. You're holding your own.

1:10:15All right. Let's talk about our final topic.

1:10:17SCOTUS struck down Trump's emergency powers tariffs.

1:10:21Last Friday, SCOTUS voted 6 -3 against President Trump's EPA tariffs.

1:10:27Six judges voted against. Three conservatives, Roberts, Barrett, Gorsuch, and three liberals via Bloomberg.

1:10:34This is the biggest rebuke of existing executive policy in 91 years since SCOTUS struck

1:10:40down FDR's first new deal in 1935.

1:10:45UPenn, Wharton Analysis, says the tariffs collected, about $175 billion to date, 50 % of

1:10:51all tariff duties, might wind up being refunded.

1:10:55This is going to take some time to sort out in the courts.

1:10:592 ,000 importers have already filed for refunds.

1:11:02We talked about it here.

1:11:03I think the majority of people felt like this is the way the decision would

1:11:06go. And we talked about here that there were other options for President Trump to

1:11:12pursue. He immediately said he was not deterred and invoked a 15 % global tariff

1:11:18across the board via Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act.

1:11:23Here's your polymarket. Will the court force Trump to refund tariffs?

1:11:2918 % chance, but spike to 40 % after the SCOTUS decision.

1:11:33How will Congress react? Polymarket says 3 % chance Congress passes any tariffs by March

1:11:4031st. So again, as I referenced earlier, these two sides just can't seem to work

1:11:46together. And that would have resolved the whole thing.

1:11:49Sachs, you want to give us your take here?

1:11:52First of all, I don't think that the tariffs are going away.

1:11:55What the court basically indicated, especially the 70 -page Kavanaugh dissent, is that there's multiple

1:12:00alternative bases in law for the tariffs in existing law.

1:12:06So for example, Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 enables temporary 150 -day

1:12:15tariffs of up to 15 % to address balance of payments issues.

1:12:19And the president has already invoked this.

1:12:21So we are now operating under that.

1:12:24What the 150 days is going to do is by the administration time to substantiate

1:12:29via studies and agency reviews, what it needs to prove in order to invoke more

1:12:36sweeping tariff authority under Section 301 of the Trade Act and under Section 338 of

1:12:43the Tariff Act. Section 301 authorizes tariffs responding to unfair...

1:12:48Based on the foreign trade practices.

1:12:50Section 338 of the Tariff Act allows tariffs against countries discriminating against U .S.

1:12:56commerce. The Kavanaugh dissent actually provided a roadmap for the administration to put in place

1:13:03tariffs using one of these alternate bases.

1:13:06So I think that one way or another, the tariff policies of this administration and

1:13:11the favorable trade deals that they allow us to strike with many nations, they will

1:13:14continue. And I think the court seems to know that because the majority's opinion as

1:13:20concurrences collectively said nothing about how the administration should go about refunding the tariff revenue

1:13:27already collected. I think that if they expected this decision to end the tariff policies

1:13:32altogether, they probably would have said something about that.

1:13:35And I think that brings up a really important point just on the merits here,

1:13:39which is why would we want to give back hundreds of billions of dollars to

1:13:44a bunch of importers when we're trillions of dollars in debt?

1:13:47And I'll just say that the people who originally predicted that somehow these tariffs would

1:13:51be catastrophic for the economy, those predictions all prove not to be true.

1:13:55So I think that this is ultimately, I think, going to be a popular policy.

1:13:59The administration will figure out a different way to do it.

1:14:01And I predict that future administrations, whether they're Republican or Democrat, will keep some version

1:14:08of the tariffs in place.

1:14:09But I think that they will be ultimately popular on a longstanding basis.

1:14:14I think we've proven the experiment has been successful.

1:14:19What was the experiment? We needed to smoke out what the right balance of trade

1:14:26should be between the United States and all of its partner countries.

1:14:30I think that what we uncovered is that for the most part, they were structural

1:14:34imbalances that were made not because they made economic sense for America, but it was

1:14:39just part of a hodgepodge of globalist drivel that people just bought into.

1:14:45And if you strip all that stuff away, we had a hollowed out manufacturing class

1:14:49and we have a hollowed out middle class and the tariffs will create more equality

1:14:55for the American worker in the end.

1:14:56So now I think the debate should be about how to implement these in a

1:15:00structural and permanent way. I think we talked about this before, Jason, that this was

1:15:05sort of expected. And there are many other mechanisms.

1:15:09I think the president activated one of them immediately.

1:15:13I don't think this is going away and I don't think it should go away.

1:15:16So I think now the point is Congress really should ratify these things because it

1:15:22is clear that it was the right thing to do.

1:15:25And if they don't, then, you know, the president still has a lot of room

1:15:29to get these done. But these make smart economic sense, in my opinion.

1:15:32Frieberg, any thoughts on the ruling?

1:15:34Does it give you some, I don't know, respect for the courts that they made

1:15:41a judgment not along party lines for once?

1:15:44Yes. Does it? Yeah. Okay.

1:15:46Yeah. And I think that all, I think all Americans should feel assured and comforted

1:15:53in the fact that I think a lot of people view the Supreme Court as

1:15:56having a high degree of partisanship.

1:15:58But the fact that the president, despite having a majority of what others would think

1:16:04were kind of politically aligned appointees on the court, had a ruling that he did

1:16:08not want, I think should give everyone good faith that the system that the founders

1:16:13set up is working, that there is a judicial branch that adjudicates the law against

1:16:17the executive branch when they think that it doesn't map.

1:16:20And I think that that was very important to see.

1:16:24So, you know, I clearly, you, the, the debate of That tariffs, the economic effect

1:16:28of tariffs, the security, structural, trade relationship effect of tariffs, and the importance of that

1:16:33is a separate conversation. But I do think that the read of the law being

1:16:37what I would say is nonpartisan with respect to the court's action is important and

1:16:42probably very valuable. I'll reiterate that.

1:16:44This is a great moment, I think, for the Supreme Court to make a thoughtful

1:16:49decision. And I think we need to think about executive power a whole bunch, whether

1:16:53it's Biden with student loans or Trump with tariffs.

1:16:56We have this beautiful system set up by the founding fathers.

1:16:59I know it's frustrating. Gridlock's frustrating.

1:17:02Having to work together is frustrating.

1:17:04Trust me, we all come to this podcast every Thursday.

1:17:08We have to work together.

1:17:09It's hard to work together.

1:17:10You've got to learn to work together.

1:17:11And we don't want an executive branch that can unilaterally just roll over the other

1:17:16branches. And that's going to end.

1:17:18I think Trump's going to lose the midterms and we're going to get to more

1:17:22chaos again. And we might as well start this reconciliation process of these two sides

1:17:28stopping their law for against each other and working together for the American people on

1:17:32the important issues. The tariffs, there are some fundamentally important things that Trump was doing

1:17:39there. And they were working.

1:17:41They could have been chaotic.

1:17:43That's a reasonable criticism of them because business owners didn't know what to do.

1:17:49So Trump did it in a chaotic way.

1:17:50That's just a fact. He should have done it in a more thoughtful way.

1:17:53And the Congress should have been alongside him saying, hey, what tools do you need?

1:17:57How can we help support this?

1:17:59We know that there's trade imbalances.

1:18:01We know that people are being unfair.

1:18:03Let's work together as one America to negotiate these things.

1:18:07So both sides start having dinner together, start playing cards together, and do what we

1:18:11do here on this podcast, which is you fight it out, you argue, but then

1:18:15you come together and try to find some resolutions for this stuff.

1:18:18So they should go and tell Trump, hey, we'll approve all the tariffs you did.

1:18:23We will not force you to get refunds.

1:18:25The Congress should come out and just say that.

1:18:27And then they should say, hey, and when you want to do them in 2026,

1:18:30just run them by us or ask us for some parameters that you want.

1:18:34And let's just be thoughtful about it.

1:18:35These are our concerns. That's it.

1:18:36Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

1:18:38Can I just do one response?

1:18:39Absolutely. I'm sure you have some debate club points that you want to point out.

1:18:42Well, I just want to make one.

1:18:43I mean, do you think Susan Rice is going to respect your call for comedy

1:18:49and basically working together? Kumbaya.

1:18:53I want the esprit de corps.

1:18:54No, I don't. I think both sides.

1:18:56She just had a diatribe where she basically said that Republicans, and actually, not just

1:19:02like partisan Republicans, but even tech companies that merely were working with the administration, should

1:19:07expect to get prosecuted. I mean, she was basically outright saying she and the Democrats

1:19:12are going to pursue law fair as soon as they get back in charge.

1:19:16They're absolutely going to do that.

1:19:17Just like when Trump got in, he went after Comey.

1:19:20He went after Jerome Powell.

1:19:21The law fair is happening on both sides.

1:19:23Both sides need to drop the law fair.

1:19:24We need to get rid of these pardons.

1:19:26They're ridiculous. And we have to be a team.

1:19:29So let's just get some esprit de corps and teamwork going in Washington, D .C.,

1:19:33and that's what we should vote for in the midterms.

1:19:35We should vote for moderates who want to work together.

1:19:38And in 2028, we should have some kind of moderates and tickets that want to

1:19:44work together. That would be better for all Americans.

1:19:48This kind of chaos is not good, folks.

1:19:50All right. Listen, this has been another amazing episode of the All In Podcast, your

1:19:53favorite podcast. Like, subscribe, whatever the hell you want to do on your own time.

1:19:58Four, David Sachs, David Friedberg, Chamath Pauli -Hapitiya.

1:20:03Love you, boys. I am the world's greatest moderator, J .K.

1:20:05Love you, boys. Love you, boys.

1:20:05Thank you. See you next time.

1:20:07Bye -bye. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge

1:20:42orgy because they're all just useless.

1:20:44It's like this sexual tension but they just need to release them out.

1:20:47Wet your feet. Wet your feet.

1:20:53We need to get merch.

1:20:54I'm doing all in. I'm doing all in.

1:21:06I'm doing all in.

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