关税、特朗普经济终局、市场动荡、比特币储备与 CoreWeave 上市

Joe Lonsdale (00:00:00): Brian Johnson. That's so funny. I, I, who knows? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:00:04): I am the king of nighttime erections. I go to bed thinking about myself, and I wake up thinking about myself. It's like, there's a big erection in between. Jason Calacanis (00:00:31): Alright, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. Man, we're starting off with three of the four original band members. Chamath Palihapitiya, he's your chairman dictator. The sultan of science, David Friedberg, and, of course, I'm your host, Jason Calacanis. And David Sacks from the original band will be on the second half of the show. We're gonna classics. Yes. We'll get some of the classics, including Ukraine Ukraine Ukraine coming up on the second half of the show in our greatest hits revival tour. But with us again sitting in the red throne is the one, the only. Joe Lonsdale is back. He is, if you can imagine, further right than Keith Rabois and Sacks. They tell him to pump the brakes. Welcome back to the program, Joe Lonsdale. How are you doing, brother? Joe Lonsdale (00:01:20): Hey, Jason. Doing great here in Texas today. Jason Calacanis (00:01:23): Ah, yes. I see you right over the hill on the ranch. Our ranches are within 20 minutes of each other. Joe Lonsdale and I are shooting guns at our ranches. David Friedberg (00:01:31): Are you on a ranch, Joe? Joe Lonsdale (00:01:33): Well, I bought a bunch of the homes and connected them, so it's kinda like a ranch, but it's actually a suburb. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:01:38): It's more like a compound. He has a compound. Suburb. Suburb. That creaking sound you hear are the libs rolling in the guillotines. Yes. He bought the small town he lives in. Joe Lonsdale's here. Of course, he is a venture capitalist, the founder of 8VC. They've got $6 billion in AUM, cofounded Palantir, OpenGov, and Addepar, three billion-dollar-plus companies he cofounded, and an early investor in Anduril. I'm in the market for secondary shares. You know how to reach me, folks. If you're selling your secondary in Anduril, I'm building a position for obvious reasons, and Oculus, Wish, Oscar Health amongst his other investments. Hey. What was the feedback, Joe, on your first appearance here on the All-In pod? Joe Lonsdale (00:02:19): People loved it. You know, you guys gave me no warning, I was, like, on mobile phone sideways, but it worked out. It was great. Everyone saw it. I guess it looks like people actually watch your show, Jason. It was surprising. Jason Calacanis (00:02:27): Apparently, people tune in from time to time, and that's why we called the number one podcast in the world. How are you doing, Chamath Palihapitiya? How are you doing, brother? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:02:35): I'm doing really well. Jason Calacanis (00:02:37): Okay. Once again, giving me a ton to work with there. And Friedberg, wait. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:02:42): What would you like to know? Why don't you ask me a question? Jason Calacanis (00:02:44): Oh, well, I ask you how you're doing. Maybe you say, oh, I had a great time with my kids. I took them to Disneyland, or I don't know, chef made an amazing arugula. You used to give me some color to work with here. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:02:56): Nat was in Rome all last week. Jason Calacanis (00:02:58): Great. What was she doing in Rome? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:03:00): She had to go see her factory. She also had to go and renew her visa at the U.S. embassy there. Jason Calacanis (00:03:06): Okay. So she's renewing her visa. Hopefully, she'll be able to get back in the country. I know we've tightened up the borders. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:03:12): Well, she's on an EB-2 visa. She's already but she should switch to this EB-5 as soon as it's announced. Jason Calacanis (00:03:17): Oh, yes. You can get the golden visa. And I think you already put a down payment on. Friedberg, how was your week? What how's everything going at El Hollow? You having a productive week? David Friedberg (00:03:26): As one of my management team members told me today, it's a very complex business. That's usually not a good sign when the conversation starts Jason Calacanis (00:03:33): with that. Is that a way of saying everything's David Friedberg (00:03:36): No. No. We we we are good. I was on the road this week. I just got back. Jason Calacanis (00:03:40): I mean, it's hard. Running a business is hard. You hire the smartest people you know, and what happens? They bring you the problems they can't solve. So it's never easy. We've got an incredible docket today. Let's just start with I'll give you a quick recap, boys, of the week since we last taped. To say the zone was flooded, in the words of Steve Bannon, would be an understatement. Here's your Trump tsunami for the week. Thursday, when we taped, the Epstein file dump fiasco. You remember that, Joe. Right? Big zero, big nothing burger. Then Friday, Zelensky was dressed down and kicked out of the White House by the vice president and president. Markets collapsed. They rebounded. On Saturday, we got a beautiful day off video of Trump dancing down a catwalk to "YMCA." Maybe he played some golf. He was at the White House South, Mar-a-Lago. Sunday, 9:24 a.m. Eastern, the president pumps three specific cryptos, Solana, Cardano, XRP, to be in the first government strategic crypto reserve. Joe Lonsdale starts tweeting. I start tweeting. Everybody's tweeting. He quickly retweeted himself, included Ethereum and Bitcoin, some decentralized coins. Reaction was, wow. Crazy. You had a little bit of a spicy take, Joe. We'll get into that later, and I'm sure our friend David Sacks will have much to say in the second half of the program, but it was pretty negative. Cardano ripped 70%, XRP 32%, Solana 25%. And then there was this crazy trade. One whale went 50 times long on BTC and ETH, $200 million position on just a $4 million investment. Everybody trying to figure out who that was. I'll leave it to you to speculate. Then we start the week. Monday, Trump says significant tariffs with Canada and Mexico, the market collapse. He walks back tariffs a couple of hours later and the market starts to rebound. Jason Calacanis (00:05:30): Then at 2:38 p.m., Trump announces a $100 billion investment from TSMC in American fabs. Huzzah for that. And our boy, David Sacks, gets dragged out to the podium for a quick 15-second cameo. Very nicely done to our boy, David Sacks. And then Tuesday, we have the most chaotic State of the Union I've ever seen. Highlights include an angry man shaking a cane and getting kicked out. There were some auction paddles from the libs. I don't know what they were bidding on. There were 13 Biden mentions and one Pocahontas. Wednesday, we have news that the Doge blitz might slow down. Supreme Court chimed in with a 5-4 decision backing the federal judge who ordered the Trump admin to pay out $2 billion for USA Contractors. Then there was a closed-door meeting with Elon. Maybe they discussed an approval process, maybe some voting type things. And then here we are today, Thursday, when we're taping. Markets down 2% on more tariff news. Breaking news drops at 11:30. Trump announced tariffs are off for Mexico. Markets aren't rebounding. We might be leaving NATO. David Friedberg (00:06:34): Can I Jason Calacanis (00:06:35): Hold on? One voice there. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:36): Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:06:36): Breaking. We might be leaving NATO. Breaking. We're shutting down the Department of Education. Psych. We just found out we're not. Okay, gentlemen. That's the week that was. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:06:45): No. There's there's three things that are also kind of interwoven in all of this. OpenAI dropped GPT-4.5, and I think it was not really that well received. Jason Calacanis (00:06:58): I didn't even know. Nobody's talking about that. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:01): Quen, which is the open source Alibaba, dropped a rev, which seems actually really best in class. So that was really interesting. Jason Calacanis (00:07:10): Okay. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:11): Then there was a story that said, LLaMA is going sideways. Facebook's open source LLM. Yeah. Then the markets have just been going, I think, the craziest I've actually seen in 20 years of following the markets. And, specifically, you're seeing the MAG 7 compressed towards the rest of the S&P 500, and then you're seeing this insane trade away from Europe. So there's a ton that happened this week. Jason Calacanis (00:07:39): I mean Yeah. I don't remember a more eventful week, Joe. Is this a little too much maybe? Joe Lonsdale (00:07:45): You guys missed the Shalom Hamas tweet by Trump too, which for a lot of us is a big deal. He said, I don't know if this is hello or goodbye, but he's threatening them really strongly. So for people who care about that part of the world, it's interesting to watch what's gonna happen. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:07:57): So that also happened. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:07:59): Oh my lord. Well, and shalom is hello and goodbye. Right? Just to clarify, as a word, you would say both. Right? Shalom. David Friedberg (00:08:06): Yeah. And and Jason Calacanis (00:08:08): peace. Word and peace. Joe Lonsdale (00:08:11): Well, Jason Calacanis (00:08:12): maybe he's leaving it to interpretation. Maybe they get to pick. Maybe it's hello? No. That's Chamath Palihapitiya (00:08:17): what he wrote in the tweet. Jason Calacanis (00:08:19): Oh, he did. Yeah. It's your choice. Okay. It's a choose-your-own-adventure, Chamath, from the president of the United States. But I think we should probably get into tariffs. This is confounding to most people. Maybe since I just did the whole rundown, I won't go into all the details about tariffs again. But just looking at it from first principles, Joe, I asked a couple of group chats. You're in one of them, in fact. And I have about, I would say about 400 people total in these four group chats. What's the strategy here? What do you think Trump is trying to accomplish? And man, I got a range of answers. Let me ask you. What is Trump in your estimation trying to accomplish with the tariffs on, the tariffs off, the tariffs on, the tariffs off? As Chamath said here, this is creating more chaos than any of us have ever seen in markets. Joe Lonsdale (00:09:09): Listen, Trump's negotiating, right? So I actually ran into David Sacks. Each senator gets one guest. We were both guests in the Senate dining hall, hanging out with a bunch of these guys. Multiple of the guests, some of them were spouses of the senators, multiple of the guests were people who had lost kids to fentanyl, right? And so it's actually, it's a very serious issue. It's a big thing on the populace, right? As it should be for all Americans, we've lost, you know, tens of thousands of young people recently to fentanyl and Canada has done nothing about their border. And so, you know, you just reported breaking news. I hadn't even heard yet that Mexico might be off, Canada's still on. He's using this to negotiate. So I talked to the senators, and I asked them what's going on because obviously I import things all over the place. I'd like to know what the hell the rules are, but he wants people to actually crack down on this stuff and save American lives. And I think that's a reasonable thing to use to negotiate and force them to do that. Jason Calacanis (00:09:56): Okay, so you believe it's negotiation because of the fentanyl issue. Chamath, let me go to you because many people are saying this has more to do with some great reset and maybe the 10-year. Do you think this is about fentanyl at the border or something else? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:10:15): I think that this Jason Calacanis (00:10:17): is Chamath Palihapitiya (00:10:17): the first week where I've seen the first real schism in how people are interpreting what's actually happening. I think that Trump and Elon were very much in a honeymoon period until this week, and I think there was the benefit of the doubt. But what I saw on X was a real divergence where on the one hand, there were people that were basically saying, Doge is deranged. Elon is crazy. Trump is lighting the world on fire in one camp. And the other camp saying he's sticking to the plan. And when I thought about this a little bit, if you went back to November, I do think it's important to remember that we were at this moment where you had this fork in the road, and you had all these important issues where I think the best way to generalize it was that the Democrats believed that the lines should continue to be blurred. So whether that was on gender or race or merit versus some other immutable trait or fiscal and monetary policy, things were just getting more and more blurred. And then Trump and Elon basically showed up and said, actually, we want to refocus, and we want to make the lines very visible and clear on all those dimensions. And a majority of Americans voted that in. But I think what you're starting to see now is the difficulty in actually implementing that plan. And what I mean specifically is tariffs are very nuanced and complicated. On the one hand, there's these short-term wins. There's these impacts. You could deem them positive or negative to the dollar. There's impacts to U.S. bonds. There's impacts to U.S. bond markets. There's impacts to how countries deal with foreign reserves. And then there's this impact that happens when the markets react to a tariff, and then Trump takes that off the table, and then they snap back. So you have this weird set of boundary conditions right now. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:12:33): So I think right now we're in the very difficult part of sorting through what the long-term implications are. And I can get to some of them later, but I think that's where we are. Jason Calacanis (00:12:42): I think that's really interesting. The goal of tariffs in your mind for Trump is fentanyl? No. Finance related? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:12:50): No. No. No. Jason Calacanis (00:12:51): Give me your definitive what you think this is about. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:12:53): I think what tariffs allow us to do is rebase the long-term reliance on the U.S. dollar. It allows us to rebase our ability to fund our own deficits, and it allows us to rebase the long-term ability for American companies to be economically vibrant. Jason Calacanis (00:13:20): Okay. So, Friedberg, we got one person with fentanyl on the border negotiating. We got one person on trade. Some portion of this I hear, and when I asked in these four group chats, I got, he's throwing stuff at the wall, the border. He's trolling the 10-year note, and he doesn't care about stocks. And then I got onshoring and manufacturing as a possibility. We're gonna make it more expensive to bring things in, so why don't you consider making stuff here? Do you think that third possibility is what's going on here? Does David Friedberg pick one of these three choices or another? What's going on here with tariffs specifically? David Friedberg (00:13:58): I don't sit inside of Trump's head, and I don't have any direct line of communication to folks that are constructing the theory and the policy. If I were to say, what's the most masterful plan in an optimistic way of what could be going on here? What's the master plan? I would kind of craft it as follows. Tariffs aren't being done in isolation. They're being done along with a coordinated policy effort to reduce income taxes and another policy effort to reduce government spending. So those are three actions, three legs on a stool. So tariffs, reduced income taxes, reduced government spending, and they are related to each other. They're related to each other because if we increase tariffs, one element of that is that to import products is more expensive. For example, I buy LED lights in my greenhouse, and the price of the LED lights just went up by 25%. This week, I actually spoke with the CEO of an LED company, and I was like, why don't you guys make the LEDs here? And there starts to become a crossover point where it actually makes economic sense for the company to make the LEDs here instead of sourcing them from Asia. And there's a hundred thousand examples of this. When the industrial supply chain goes to the lowest part of production, it's gonna end up offshoring when there's no tariffs. And if there are tariffs, then you start to do production here. So you're increasing both kind of security for the U.S. supply chain, but also increasing demand and creation of a workforce. Now I think that the income tax piece is critical here because in order to make the capital available to build that industry here, we need to unleash capital and reducing of income taxes, the economic theory would be that capital will now flow into these entrepreneurial activities, these opportunities that have emerged where suddenly it makes sense for me to make textiles, to make metals, to make materials, to make cars, to make all this stuff here in the United States that otherwise wouldn't be making. So both the corporate and the personal income tax by reducing it unleashes capital that instead of going into the government, it now goes into the private sector into building businesses. Jason Calacanis (00:16:06): Okay. David Friedberg (00:16:06): I think that there's another theory about this, which is as you drop the income tax, one of the kind of key theories that I've heard spoken about a lot lately, and I think we're gonna hear about it a lot more this year, is trying to get the United States to move away from an income taxation model to a consumption taxation model. So effectively, what the tariffs do is there's a tax for you buying certain things. So now instead of getting taxed when you earn money as an individual, you get taxed when you spend money. And some people think that that's both a more fair system and a more kind of economically vibrant system because that will drive investment in the things that people want to produce because the money's going into production. Jason Calacanis (00:16:45): Do you think that, Friedberg? I'm curious. David Friedberg (00:16:48): I don't know. It's a really interesting economic theory. I mean, I am not opposed to seeing some sort of an experiment play out where we look at a shift from income taxation to consumption taxation and see if it actually does have an effect on economic growth and productivity. It has not been done in 150 years. There's a lot of economic theorists on both sides of the equation saying this does work or it doesn't work. Okay. And let me just say one last thing. By reducing government spending, we are moving workers from the government into the private workforce. So as those new industries pop up, as those investments start to get made in building new industry onshore, where are the workers gonna come from? Remember, the government's 30% of the US GDP today. So if that's not a great way to invest money, maybe the private industry is better at investing money and employing people that will unleash the workforce and it will counterbalance the inflation that we're experiencing. So there's a lot of inflation because of tariffs. And by reducing government spending, that's the offset to inflation. So those three actions, I think, are three legs of a stool and they actually are all interrelated to one another. So that would be my grandmaster theory of what might be going on. Jason Calacanis (00:17:53): This is an interesting triangulation theory that people have been speculating about. And there are a couple of caveats here, Joe. Number one, we do have lowering income tax and lowering services experiment. It's called Florida, Texas, and a couple of the states where they have lower income tax and more consumption tax. We pay a lot more in real estate taxes here, something we consume. Putting that aside, the really interesting issue is we're at the lowest unemployment of our lifetime, 4%. Where are all these workers gonna come from? What do you think, Joe, now that you've heard the two other panelists here discuss it, what are we trying to get to? Where is the destination? At the end of this term, Trump's lame duck, he can go wild here. He's not running for reelection. And, you know, what do you think he wants to see? Do you think he just wants to cement some sort of legacy? And if so, what's that legacy, and how do these actions equal his goals and legacy? Joe Lonsdale (00:18:52): No. Listen, I agree with what David was saying, Jason. And it's a really important point also that we should mention is that the last four years, the economy's looked okay, but part of that is because government's been hiring like mad. And so the point he made is that actually, you know, having twice as many people harassing me, I just got back yesterday, no action on an audit, they'd been harassing me on for three years, they found nothing. Having twice as many people doing things like that or like running TSA or pushing papers around in the Department of Labor doesn't actually add output to the economy. And so it does seem like it makes a lot of sense. Let's take a million workers out of the consulting class around D.C., out of the paper pusher class around D.C., and let's actually deploy them to the actual productive economy. Elon and Trump have both been saying that. I think David's 100% right. It is true. A lot of my companies think that the tariff stuff are looking to build stuff here. So I'm not a huge fan of tariffs personally, but they definitely make sense for things in defense. They definitely make sense for negotiating with countries. And it is true. It is pushing certain people to, including me, to build some more things in America. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:19:52): Here's where tariffs make a lot of sense. If you have markets where there are domestic alternatives and or where things are fundamentally commodities, there's no reason why tariffs can't work to create the incentives to redomicile economic productivity inside of the United States. That's a slam dunk, I think. Joe Lonsdale (00:20:11): And, Chamath, there's another twist on that too, which I think we should all acknowledge is that America does have some really tough environmental laws. Despite what Jason may think of me, I actually don't want my daughters growing up with messy air, messy water, you know, a screwed-up country. Jason Calacanis (00:20:23): Oh, I understand that. I know that you're a nature guy, but here's where you're like a classic Bush nature guy. Joe Lonsdale (00:20:29): But here's the thing. In China and Indonesia and all these other countries, they are just over the environment as they make things. I think tariffs are very reasonable in that case. Like, it's not fair to make it more expensive for us because we're doing it well, and then we outsource it for them to destroy things. Right? So there are some things there where it doesn't Jason Calacanis (00:20:44): make sense. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:20:45): And what I would say is the other side of the tariff knife is that if there are markets, though, where you're making something that's fundamentally innovative, where you are but one maker, the problematic part of where tariffs really affect the US consumer is then the price of that product, of which there are no competitive alternatives, can go very, very high. And that's inflationary. And I think that that slows down consumption. And then if that consumption is not just of something that's a nice-to-have, but a must-have, then it becomes problematic. And so you could see where tariffs could impact certain industries. For example, if there are innovative drugs, I think that that's problematic. If there are innovative technologies of which there's only one vendor, that's problematic. So all of those need to get sorted out. But on balance in commodity markets, like look at autos. Autos is a perfect example. There are so many purveyors and providers of autos. There's OEMs all around the world. And so to have a compensatory system doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing where it's a tit-for-tat tariff. But in other markets where if you need, for example, a specific piece of equipment from ASML to build a chip, and now all of a sudden that machine is 25% more expensive or 30% more expensive and they pass that cost downstream, it becomes very speculative, and it becomes a little bit more fragile, I think. Joe Lonsdale (00:22:19): This is dangerous though. Right, Chamath? Because I agree with you in theory, but then there's something where, you know, if everyone's lobbying for their thing to be an exception, you end up getting this very crony system that you don't necessarily want. Right? So you have to be very careful how you define these things. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:22:32): Exactly. So this is why the I think, like, sector by sector, it's probably you can probably go and pass the smell test and say, if there are multiple providers and or if it's somehow commodity, I think it's easier to absorb the tariff in the short term. Maybe that's the right way to say it, which is if you believe if Trump believes everything should be tariffed, then instead of debating if, to your point, maybe the right thing to debate is when. And you have to put some things on a much longer glide path so that you don't just create inflation out of nowhere and or you don't hold back American business or American consumers. Jason Calacanis (00:23:08): Well, is a key point because you do need to have predictability to make investment and reciprocity. So really two important points Chamath's making here. One on reciprocity. These things haven't been looked at for a while. I'm not sure how they got so out of whack, but just putting some facts to this. Chamath's exactly correct. We get placed, when we send cars to the EU, they get a 10% tariff. But when we get their cars, it's a 2.5% tariff. Who let it get out of whack? I'm not sure. But why not make the reciprocity perfect and just, hey. You say 10. We say 10. You say 2.5. We say 2.5. And that would make, I think, a lot more sense. Just to put some numbers here on government employees, it's not as bad as people make it out to be. A lot of our spending is nonemployee related, but it is. If you look over the last two administrations, we have added million two, million three employees across all. Disagree. And that hold on. Let me just finish the sentence so you have the facts and then you can disagree with the facts. 1,300,000 additional employees added. This does not include contractors. And so we don't know what USAID was doing with NGOs and contractors. And I think that's where we do need to get some clarity. To Chamath's point, this has all gotta become predictable. You cannot put tariffs on, off every week or else how does your friend Dave, who wants to do the LED lighting or you're encouraging to do LED lighting know if they should build a factory and invest 10 million in that. You disagree with the number of employees? You wanna address that? David Friedberg (00:24:37): Yeah. Look. Okay. Jason Calacanis (00:24:37): Go ahead. David Friedberg (00:24:38): The government accounts for 30% of GDP in the United States. That's an extraordinary sum. Just Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:24:43): I was talking just about the employees. That's a much smaller percentage. David Friedberg (00:24:46): But that doesn't matter. The direct employees of federal agencies is a fraction of people that are employed indirectly by government spending. This is super important. Jason Calacanis (00:24:55): Sure. David Friedberg (00:24:55): Because as we all know, many government agencies write checks to large contractors, subcontractors, and third-party service providers that do the work for them. So the money gets transferred. They then employ the people and they do the work. So it doesn't technically show up on federal government payroll registers, but these are people that are indirectly employed by federal spending. That's super important to acknowledge that a large percentage of the U.S. workforce is indirectly supported by federal dollars. Joe Lonsdale (00:25:23): Yeah. And it's gone up massively with the NGOs too. So you've had about 4 million people employed by contractors in D.C., 1.6 million more at the states actually by federal spending. And then you have the NGOs. No one knows the NGOs. Biden administration took down the data I used to see things in 2020. So we don't even know how much money, but we know it was hundreds of billions. And so it's pretty crazy. The number one thing about how the budget is not being done fully is that Elon's doing an amazing job, you know, whether or not he cuts 500 billion or a trillion or a lot more, but the senators and the congressmen are not willing to take it out of their bill. The reconciliation bill right now, they're talking about cutting 1 to 2 trillion. So rather than like, this is over 10 years. David Friedberg (00:26:01): It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. Joe Lonsdale (00:26:04): If it was equal to what Elon was doing, it'd be at least 5 trillion and I push a bunch of them. They say, oh, the Congressional Budget Office and all these things. And I'm sure there's some tough things there, but, like, this is crazy. We need to see what these cuts need to be on the budget, and we need to cut 5 trillion. And none of these people have the balls to do that. It's not the political will to do it is my interpretation. Jason Calacanis (00:26:21): And just cojones. Let me just show you one chart to back that up. I have my new Disgraciade.com for the week. Look at this, Trema. We wanna talk about software and waste. 35,855 according to Doge, breaking news, ServiceNow licenses on three products only being used by 84 people. Oh my god. Are you kidding me? Thousand Acrobat licenses with zero point zero users. Absolutely abhorrent. And I'm saying it right now. I want an investigation into procurement. Who sold this? Who bought it? This could be a crime. This could be fraud. There could be kickbacks. I'm saying there could be. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:07): I don't think it's that. But I do think you have to look at the earnings of these companies and question where's all this. Totally correct. Jason Calacanis (00:27:14): Number two. Totally correct. If ServiceNow ever wants to work with the government again, Mister President, Mister President, our president, I want them to pay us back for the unused licenses, and I want a full audit for those last ten years. If they don't pay us back that money and give us a credit Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:33): Hold on. Hold on. Listen. Jason Calacanis (00:27:34): Banned forever. Hold on. It's not Thank you, Mister President. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:36): This may not be ServiceNow's fault. This may be the ineptitude of the people that bought Jason Calacanis (00:27:40): the license. David Friedberg (00:27:41): They should Jason Calacanis (00:27:41): still give us a credit. I want the money back for the American people. David Friedberg (00:27:44): I do think Adobe has the worst. Have you guys ever done Adobe subscriptions? They're impossible to cancel. I think Adobe Eleven thousand Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:50): square users. Only thing harder than canceling an Adobe license is trying to cancel Wall Street Journal. Jason Calacanis (00:27:55): I was about to say Chamath Palihapitiya (00:27:56): Wall Street Journal. That's the Jason Calacanis (00:27:58): worst the oddball time hall of fame. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:00): Let me just say something about the budget because Joe brings up something important. Jason Calacanis (00:28:05): Unbelievable. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:07): I'll just say it again at the sake of being redundant. We're getting to the phase where the details are complicated, and they now matter. Jason Calacanis (00:28:13): So yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:28:14): We've talked about repealing the IRA in its totality. Right? So that was a statement, and there's theoretically a lot of money there. But the details now all of a sudden become complicated. FERC published a report just this past week. And what do you think it said was the percentage of incremental electricity that was generated from renewables versus non-renewables? I'll tell you the answer. It was almost 91% in December. So if you now tie two huge initiatives together, which is how do we find a budget that saves money, and how do we continue to win in AI? Maybe you would have thought those weren't related. Well, guess what? We know that AI needs a tremendous amount of power. And whatever you thought you knew, actually, you had to re-underwrite because what Elon has shown is actually you need to now create these mega clusters, 100,000 GPUs going to a million GPUs. All of the power forecasting that we have is miscast. It doesn't even account for this, number one. Number two, there are 35,000 applications into FERC to get approved to generate electricity, 35,000. That's going to meander through some administrative rigmarole. There is a five-year delay to get a gas turbine into America and online. Okay, if you ordered one today, the fastest that you can get it turned on is 2030. The fastest that you can get nuclear turned on is 2035. So we don't have the ability to generate incremental electricity very quickly, but for renewables. But then if you rip out the IRA, there's many parts of the IRA, by the way, that are just trash. Nick, I don't know if you can find it, but Bari Weiss found this insane thing that made me so angry, which I'm happy to talk about, which was like a 30-day grant process that resulted in a $7 billion grant to some shell NGO. Jason Calacanis (00:30:15): Oh, this was throwing the gold bars off the castle on the But Chamath Palihapitiya (00:30:19): the other part of the IRA, this narrow part, is what it did to reinforce tax incentives and tax equity, which is a $200 billion market that incentivizes that 90% of energy generation. So my point is that when you start to get into the details, when the House Ways and Means Committee has to figure out what part to put back, this is gonna be hard because it's like, hold on. If you gut the whole thing, now all of a sudden you take 90% of the incremental energy generation incentives out of the market, you don't have enough electrons. There isn't enough electricity. So then you lose the AI race, so you start to lose it. I think the point is that we're now in the hard part where the details really matter. Jason Calacanis (00:31:01): Listen. You gotta start with the chainsaw. We saw that at Twitter. By the way, Trump just tweeted. Maybe you do when Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:07): we started this, he just tweeted this out. He said, guys, now it's time to get surgical. He said yes. Jason Calacanis (00:31:12): That was the metaphor I was about to use. It's like, you know, you start with you cut out the goddamn ServiceNow and Adobe subscriptions, and then you work on something, you know, more depth, and maybe that's where we are. IRA, just for the audience, Inflation Reduction Act. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:31:25): Can I just do a rant on this pop-up NGO thing? To me, this is like the worst of America, and it makes me so angry. And I'll tell you my lived experience. So I'm on the other side of this. I started a company with these guys from Tesla to make battery materials in the United States in We grind, we grind, we put in tens—I put in tens of millions of dollars. We get a deal with a big OEM, and then you see these DOE grants. We spent millions of dollars. We file a very detailed plan to build battery metals and battery capacity in America. We got Okay? It was an entire year-long process. We got rejected. We put it past us. We kept working. We found more deals, we found a way to survive, raise a little bit more money, and then we applied again on some success, and we got a $100 million grant, okay? That's what just happened this year. But then yesterday, I read, and Nick, maybe you can throw this tweet up, this Bari Weiss investigation. Somebody in 30 days who was connected to the Democratic infrastructure had some shell organization that got a grant that was 70 times bigger than us. Like we've made stuff. We have deals with OEMs. We had to validate it every step of the way. We were rejected once. So our process to get a $100 million DOE program was two years. These people showed up in 30 days and got $7 billion. That's just wrong. Jason Calacanis (00:32:57): Why didn't you lead with DEI or something? You would've gotten a billion. You just led with the wrong thing. You were actually providing a product or service people need. Joe Lonsdale (00:33:06): This is this is why the government Jason Calacanis (00:33:08): equity in there for the minerals? Joe Lonsdale (00:33:10): This is why it's so frustrating to build for the government, guys. This is what Palantir and SpaceX had to deal with. That's why they both sued the government is that all the friends who used to be the CIO, used to be the general, made the right donations, had the right kid on the board. It's all corrupt. And then it's actual substantive people you have to work like Jason Calacanis (00:33:26): How can Chamath Palihapitiya (00:33:26): they give $7 billion in 30 days? David Friedberg (00:33:29): What can they we're gonna find out. Joe Lonsdale (00:33:31): Got a bunch of Democratic operatives on the board. David Friedberg (00:33:32): Let me well, let me challenge you guys on one point. There are now claims being made by reporters and by third parties that are saying it is a new form of kleptocracy with all the friends of Silicon Valley installing their friends and agency heads as undersecretaries and so on that's gonna benefit Silicon Valley investors, Silicon Valley companies. Joe, Chamath, Jay Cal, I mean, how do you guys react to the claims that there's now, you know, this new kind of kleptocratic movement? It's the old guard is gone, but now there's a new guard that's gonna Jason Calacanis (00:34:04): produce. You have Palantir. You have Andrew. So go ahead. You answer, Joe. Joe Lonsdale (00:34:07): Let's talk about this. I mean, when we go to DC, when I go to DC, what I am asking is I want there to be a fair competition. And if I win, I want my company to actually be able to win the contract because the way it's worked for 20 years, like Epirus, you just raised $250 million this week. It's a great company. We had a big contest four years ago, L3, Raytheon, Northrop. These guys, you know, in and out of government for decades. They've gotten tens of billions of dollars to the same technology area. When we went head to head with them, we didn't just, like, beat them by a little bit. We shot down the hardened drones nine and a half times farther away. Same size, same power. Nine and a half. Completely wiped the floor. Jason Calacanis (00:34:41): What was the cost difference between the bids? Like, are you saving us massive money? Joe Lonsdale (00:34:45): Massive money. I invested only $30.40 in the whole thing at that point, and they've spent billions, and we have much cheaper, much better, not even a question. And you talk to the, like, at the time, the chief of staff of the Air Force, the guy who wrote the four-star, and he says, well, Joe, this was written three years ago. It looks like Raytheon probably did help write it and they required all these things and the way you're doing it. I'm like, yeah, I'm using a chip instead of a cathode ray tube. That's why it's working so much better. He's like, yeah, it was written for the way they're doing it. And I could overrule it, but it'd break a lot of glass. So you'll probably win again in three years because everyone knows you're the best, but it's too, it's too, you know, too stressful to give it to you right now. Like, that is that so so so what I'm doing is I'm not going and saying give my companies money. I'm saying, I'm saying make this actually a functional, logical process and give me a chance to win if I'm the best. And that, that is a hundred times better for our country to put David Friedberg (00:35:29): your money away. How do you make that transparent and how do you avoid? There has to be massive transparency. Jason Calacanis (00:35:34): How do David Friedberg (00:35:35): you avoid perception of conflict and the perception of kleptocracy? Joe Lonsdale (00:35:39): Well, it's acquisition, it's acquisition reform. Right? So, like, this is a really important story. You guys probably know we were in the Philippine jungles in the early 1910s, needed new pistols. Our pistols were terrible. They have, like, a one-page thing of what they needed. There are six arm manufacturers competing. That's how we got the Colt 1911 in, like, three months. It won by a large amount. It's an awesome gun. Twelve years ago, we had a 700-something-page document that the bureaucrats spent years on outlining what they needed for a new pistol. It probably needed to do DEI stuff. I have no idea. It's a long, comical document. They still don't have a new pistol today. And so the way we do it is we have a very clear process where it's very specific on the outcomes, not on the inputs, and you have a contest. And then you make sure that, you know, it's not, it's obvious who wins, guys. It's not like we're, like, slightly better. It's like we're shaming them. So the only way they can stop us is by playing these games because just I Chamath Palihapitiya (00:36:30): think that if you're in the administration or if you join some part of the administration, whether you're a full-time employee or a GSE or just a volunteer, there's going to be that perception of impropriety or influence peddling. That comes with the territory. So how do you avoid it? And I think that Joe is exactly right. When the administration was getting formed, one of the things that happened, I had an opportunity to work with some of the folks to write some proposals for what theoretically could happen in some of these bigger government organizations where there's just huge pockets of spend. And where I spent most of my time is what Joe talked about. How do you create open standards so that it's very clear what the competition is, so that the rules on the ground can't get manipulated by people who are rolling out of government into private industry, or somebody has a very deep relationship because of lobbying. Those are the things that pervert the clarity of what should happen, because then what happens can be far afield of that. So number one is I think knowing that this time around, a different class of people are gonna be seen on the quote-unquote popular side, it's really critical that all of us that are involved in this promote extremely transparent open standards. Publish every RFP, publish every spec, publish every evaluation criteria, make these things as mechanistic as possible. So for example, if you're gonna go and field a drone, there's an incredibly detailed set of data that you should be publishing in. It's not dissimilar to how an FAA asks for flight test data. And you should be able to review that so that then it can be escalated. So that if somebody then gets a deal because of preference, and you think you're structurally better on the data, there needs to be an escalation and a release valve that says, hold on, this is just being manipulated. And I think that's how you fight back on not just this version of a potential winning side versus losing side, but forever in the future. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:38:35): The government should be open. The government should be transparent. And every single point at which they're making a decision and giving money should be measurable and known. Jason Calacanis (00:38:44): You guys got exactly right. There's transparency. There's oversight, obviously, but there's whistleblowers as well, and there's the role of the press in all of this to sort of fact-check it and to check in on it as a safeguard with the public getting engaged. And that's one of the great things that Doge has done. By having a Twitter handle, I can pull up, hey. Here's what's going on with these licenses and make an example. So that kind of transparency helps. And then finally, we have to look at campaign finance. That is where a lot of the appearance of impropriety exists. Go back to this other Chamath Palihapitiya (00:39:18): thing because that's a super important point. Like, it just occurred to me that if what you said happens, then look, the incentive today in America is to try to position oneself to have one of these roles. And the reason is because, David, of what you said. There is the chance to then preferentially nudge an opportunity your way. Right? Yes. Why do people sit on committees? Why do people volunteer? At least at that level. And if you introduce open standards, then the real incentive to want to go do this should be because you actually are patriotic and wanna just help. Joe Lonsdale (00:39:55): So, Chamath, I think you're right about the standards, but I wanna push back on the incentive today. Like, I know a lot of the people who are getting into this, and I really do think they're there to fight for the country. I don't say this, like, as, like, you know, naively or something. Like, these people really are there for the right reasons for the most part. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:40:10): No. I know. I'm just saying generally over, like, the last 50 years, if you look at people, there is this implied sense. Like, for example, like, Goldman Sachs had a direct line to become Treasury Secretary. If you were the CEO of Goldman, you were the Treasury Secretary. Now don't you think that that was discussed amongst partners at Goldman? And do we not think on the margins that that beneficially helped Goldman? Of course, it did. We'd be naive to think otherwise. My point is not that. My point is just that going forward, the best thing all of our friends could do is just make it all open source and open standards. Yeah. That would be an incredible artifact, I think, for America. Jason Calacanis (00:40:45): Joe, think you telling us, hey. I trust these people. They're our friends. You know, that works with all of us because, yes, we know them. We know they're gonna do the stand-up right thing. And if you already have a ton of money, like some incremental amount of money is not going to move the needle for you. It's farcical for us to think that David Sacks is gonna give up four years of income producing, have to sell all his positions, and that is in some way good for his balance sheet. It is not. He's gonna miss out on four years of AI and the massive run-up of our lifetime in order to serve the country. But I can tell you people don't believe that just like you know, used to talk about the kleptocracy and the revolving door to Raytheon or whoever that people have talked about forever. What you need is whistleblower protections, journalists going after this like Bari Weiss is doing old-school journalism, investigative. The whistleblower laws are great in our country. We need to keep reinforcing those. But I'm gonna go back to we need to limit campaign contributions. We have to get rid of super PACs because these create the appearance of impropriety. And the appearance of impropriety with Trump's meme coin and that announcement on Sunday for the crypto reserve was, you know, it doesn't help the mission here that Trump is trying to get done. So maybe you could speak to that because that's where the appearance of impropriety is great. You got people like Saylor, who's doing his Bitcoin thing. He's going on Friday and, you know, Sacks will do a little bit here and announce some stuff on the program, hopefully. But maybe you could talk about what you objected to with the coins, the meme coin, and or the announcement of the crypto reserve. Should our government and after all these donations from massive people, like I saw at the crypto ball, all the people who were tweeted by Trump, that looks terrible. Yeah. Me what you think. Joe Lonsdale (00:42:32): I agree with you on that tweet. You're sneaking two things together here, though, so I wanna be really precise, Jason, because Jason Calacanis (00:42:36): Let's be precise. That's what we do here. Joe Lonsdale (00:42:38): There are a lot of different possible ways that people can help politicians. And so one of them is if you're a celebrity, like, even all your guys show at this point, you can you can affect what people think. Jason Calacanis (00:42:49): That's definitely. Say more. Joe Lonsdale (00:42:50): There's other ways that if you're part of a big union, if you're part of a government union, that's a very powerful influence in our society. If you're part of the American Medical Association healthcare system, the doctors and health systems are very powerful even without super PACs in our society. And what a super PAC is, it's a form of free speech and it's true, wealthy people have the ability to influence things through that speech, but it's like one of many. And so if you're cutting that, you're basically saying, okay, don't want Elon and Joe to have as much say there, but I do want to have even more say for the celebrities and for the doctors and for the union members and government. So you have to realize you're dealing with a complicated situation with lots of forms of I do agree with you. As I said and listen. I saw David and we gave each other a hug. I think we're all good. But I was very frustrated with the posts of Trump mentioning specific coins. I don't know who was trading them before. It just looks bad. Like, we're fighting all this grift. We're doing all these things where we have the moral high ground. I agree. I don't want to give up the moral high ground with these silly schemes. That that's a hundred percent the case. Jason Calacanis (00:43:46): Are you saying with, like, there's many forms of influence that you think super PACs and rich people should be able to Joe Lonsdale (00:43:51): I think speech is important. Jason Calacanis (00:43:52): I million dollar, 20 million dollar donations. You'd actually think that's fair for democracy in Joe Lonsdale (00:43:57): a good thing? I actually think speech is very important. I think the ability for me to send out something and say, guys, I'm studying this. It's corrupt. It's been corrupt for 50 years. We have to all get together and stand against these health systems, these crazy defense companies that have kept Europe and everything. Like, I think my ability to speak and do that and to convince people is really valuable. And I've, you know, I pass dozens of laws each year in these different states by convincing people, nothing to do with making me money, that these incentives and accountability are wrong. I think that's a good thing that I'm allowed to do that. Jason Calacanis (00:44:25): Should there be a cap? So when you say speech, you mean write a check? You mean write it's not large checks. You have Joe Lonsdale (00:44:30): to be careful. So the reason the Supreme Court ruled for super PACs is not just about giving you're not you're not giving them the money. You're actually speaking yourself. So when Elon spends $300 million, he's actually spending it many times putting out his own speech or he's putting out his speech pay people Jason Calacanis (00:44:45): to go. What about you, Chamath? Do you think that Soros, Elon let's take the names out of it. Do you think there should be a cap on what you're able to donate to super PACs? Because this does create the massive appearance of impropriety, whether it's in crypto, whether it's on the, you know, Soros on the Democrat side. This seems to be I mean, I'm in favor of there being more hard caps, whether it's $5, $10, or $25 million. I think there needs to be caps. And I think we should put a fund together for the last two or three people and let them get that money from the government to run their campaigns like other countries do. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:45:15): I think it's important to note that this pendulum has swung pretty wildly out of whack since Citizens United. Yeah. And this is not a Republican thing, meaning there's a whole bunch of factions. There's the George Soros faction. That's true. There's the liberal Democrat faction. Lest we forget, I think Zuck spent $350 million in 2020. Jason Calacanis (00:45:38): Oh, yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:45:39): Then there's the Koch brothers faction, and then there's what showed up this year with Elon. So my point is there's all kinds of pockets of spending in all manner of ways. I think the question is, should Citizens United have allowed this kind of spending? And are we better off as a democracy for it? And I think, what does Chamath think? The reason why I would be in favor of going back to the way it was is that I think the biggest problem is the redistricting and the gerrymandering that happens and the amount of influence that happens downstream inside of state and local elections. And there are just places that are just so sclerotically stuck. If you look at the federal, despite all the spending, you still see at the presidential level, like pretty reasonable and healthy competition between two people. It's much more difficult to see dynamism lower and lower down ballot. And so the reason to get rid of Citizens United from my perspective is that you'd have much more vibrant local, state, mayoral elections. Those things have huge impacts, I think, to quality. Jason Calacanis (00:46:52): Okay. So you and I are in that camp, Chamath and the other. Friedberg, your thoughts. You're the deciding vote here. It's two to one in terms of the panel. It's not. David Friedberg (00:47:00): two to one. Four. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:47:00): It's not Jason Calacanis (00:47:01): two to Well, you just said to me you you just said to me you think we should go back the way it was. Joe Lonsdale (00:47:05): The Supreme Court's on my side, so you guys are Jason Calacanis (00:47:07): in trouble. Exactly. No. No. Yeah. I mean but the point of this program sometimes is not just to is to take ownership of your opinion and defend it. I mean, we have I wanna see people own it here in the discourse. Or, Friedberg, you can say pass, but you don't get to say Okay. David Friedberg (00:47:22): What does it mean to spend money on a political point of view? Joe Lonsdale (00:47:28): Exactly. David Friedberg (00:47:30): What does it mean? Joe Lonsdale (00:47:31): It it means you can put a book. I mean, the other side wanted to censor books. David Friedberg (00:47:34): That's the thing. Like like, if I wanna if I wanna pay someone to make a book for me, if I wanna pay someone if I wanna pay 50 people to go and engage the community so I can get some leverage on my time. If I wanna pay someone to make a website to promote my point of view on something, I should be able to do that. And if my point of view is related to a vote that Congress might be taking or is related to a candidate that's running for election or is related to taxes or is related to some other social issue, I don't know how you can kind of very clearly delineate the difference between some kind of political party or some political candidate versus my having a point of view on an issue. If I care very deeply about animal welfare, which I do, and if I had enough money that I felt like I could spend that money to influence people's point of view, to improve animal welfare through laws and through candidates, I would spend that money. And I should have a right to do so. And I shouldn't feel restricted that I can't go publicly express my voice, make websites, put up billboards, put up posters, buy ads in papers, telling people how wrong it is, the way we treat animals and slaughter them and keep them living for their very short lives in terrible conditions. I want to be able to express that point of view. And so I kind of veer to this idea that, like, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:48:54): you a question? Do you think that your money spending, if the balance of power to get your view was to redistrict certain places so that then you could get a majority of people that were ideologically aligned to you elected, would you do that as well? Forget there's no ads running. This is about a different form of electoral influence. Would you do that? David Friedberg (00:49:16): So not spending money, you're saying? Like, I'm not spending money Chamath Palihapitiya (00:49:19): to You'd spend money, but it's not for It's not for posters. David Friedberg (00:49:22): How do you spend money to redistrict? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:49:24): You get certain people elected by trucking people out to vote, and then you get that person to join a coalition that then redistricts. David Friedberg (00:49:32): I mean, maybe trucking people out to vote as an action should be illegal. That seems pretty reasonable to me. Jason Calacanis (00:49:36): Well, yeah. I mean, to your point, Friedberg, you asked, like, how do you define it? Chamath Palihapitiya (00:49:39): What I'm trying to point out to you is for every dollar that goes into politics, I think it's I would ask you guys to just suspend belief that a percent of that goes to ads, man, or what I'm trying to say is Yeah. I hear you. I would say a very small not a very small. Ten ten ten to 20 cents goes to ads. 80% goes to all kinds of shady stuff. Jason Calacanis (00:49:59): And this also canvassing. By the way, you call David Friedberg (00:50:00): it shady, but I would argue, like, what if I wanna make a bunch of websites? What if I wanna make, like, you know, have people go out and express the point of view in the town square? You know, like, there are other aspects of what you might What I'm saying Chamath Palihapitiya (00:50:11): is that's fine. That's in the 10-cent bucket. The 80 cents, what I'm trying to tell you explicitly is how it's spent today is not in the ways that you think. David Friedberg (00:50:18): I think that the fact that someone calls it shady might be because they disagree with my point of view. If they agree with my point of view, they Jason Calacanis (00:50:24): might not call it shady. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:50:25): I think I think the tactics today look, I play with the conditions on the field. But if you look at them, meaning, like, using dollar incentives to incentivize people, that's allowed today. You can pay people to vote today. David Friedberg (00:50:37): Before we had before we had Jason Calacanis (00:50:38): them join a super PAC or something like that. But let hold on. Let me let me just get Joe involved here. So, Joe, you heard Friedberg's. You're kind of in alignment, I think, broadly. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:50:46): Yeah. Jason Calacanis (00:50:47): But we can define some very specific things that are obviously political, like the window of when you spend the money. Mhmm. Why? Telling people, well, because you could say in the sixth in the year I lead up to the election, hold on. A specific vote? I get it. I get it. If you're not if you're targeting an issue, that's one thing. But when you tell people, she's for they then, he's for you, that's clearly a political ad. Now you could take those ads, you could take canvassing. Could define a subset of behaviors, and you could say, You can raise up to this amount of money per person in that way. That's me. Those things are explicitly political when you tell people this is about candidate A versus candidate B. If you were to say this, we're not gonna mention any candidates, but we're gonna talk about your puppies and you trying to increase your Q score here on the goddamn pod by saving puppies. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:51:34): Don't be David Friedberg (00:51:35): a animal welfare is a up issue, Jason Calacanis (00:51:37): and it's something that you shouldn't just dismiss like agreeing with you. I just don't like how many points you're scoring with the audience over. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:51:41): Did you guys see this thing on Instagram my wife showed it Jason Calacanis (00:51:43): to me? I'm gonna save five puppies from my ranch. Somebody save some pounds. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:51:48): Did you guys see this Instagram reel? My wife showed it to me. It's like of a of a calf chasing a dog. And it cuts to this Asian guy, and he's like, what's the big deal here? What are we talking about? Like, you you want us to not eat everything, blah blah blah. And then he realizes that they're talking about the dog versus the the cat. Jason Calacanis (00:52:05): Don't trigger Friedberg. Don't do that. Delete Friedberg. Friedberg, I got 30 acres of paradise. Don't laugh. I got 33 acres of paradise. I'm gonna save every animal in in Central Texas. Go ahead, Chamath Palihapitiya (00:52:16): buddy. I'm gonna eat them. David Friedberg (00:52:17): And I would give you money to do that. Yeah. Joe Lonsdale (00:52:19): Okay. Great. Jason Calacanis (00:52:20): I got a deal. Joe Lonsdale (00:52:21): Actually, I actually agree with what Chamath was saying about gerrymandering. I think we could use AI for that. It's a separate conversation. It's discussing how it works right now. However, Jason, the problem at the end of the day with defining what's political or not is the boundary cases are really tough, and you do end up needing effectively a censorship board. Example is I write a book about the dangers of communism, and it explains how it's linked to things going on today. And I, like, give it out at, like, all these people are gonna be voting. I mean, there's just so many boundary cases. Jason Calacanis (00:52:50): Yeah. But if we just said, you can spend up to $10 million a year doing political activity. $10 million a year gives you a cap so you can only buy so many books and buy so many ads. Joe Lonsdale (00:52:58): It's not political activity. It's my art. This is an artistic piece of art. But when Jason Calacanis (00:53:02): you put the book in and say vote for Biden, then we would say, okay. You put a vote for Biden. Joe Lonsdale (00:53:06): You see what I'm saying, though, it becomes it becomes really complicated. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:53:10): I just ran it through Grok, and what the answer was is that 56% of all the spending happens to be on ads, and 44% of all dollars and $24.25 was spent on other. Yeah. Yeah. So there Well, Jason Calacanis (00:53:25): so if you put canvassing in there, I bet you it's 75%. So if we just say for those two activities, put a hard cap on them, I would be for that. Let's take those guys off question, Jack. Yeah. Let's talk about the market. Market's Joe Lonsdale (00:53:36): Let's talk about CoreWeave. Jason Calacanis (00:53:37): Alright. Gentlemen, we can't talk about politics all day as exciting as it is. Let's talk about this CoreWeave IPO. If you don't know, CoreWeave is part of a new type of infrastructure provider called NeoCloud. It's a fancy way of saying using GPUs to build data centers. This is a really interesting company because they got onto GPUs early, and they had a lock-in on a large number of NVIDIA's GPUs. They've got 32 data centers with 250,000 NVIDIA GPUs. As an example, when Elon built the largest, fastest, data center, Colossus, that was 100,000. So this is, you know, really, really a big company. They're gonna do an IPO. Analysts are estimating they're gonna raise at least $3.5 billion at over $30 billion. Their secondary was $23 billion in November of 2024. So this is cooking with oil. They've got incredible revenue, by the way, $1.9 billion in 2024. But if you look at two years ago, how much revenue they have, the growth is amazing. Nick put a chart in here and post because it's like a 10x, I think, each year or something crazy like that when I talked about it on the other pod. But they're very unprofitable, almost a billion dollars in loss in 2024. And that's interest payments on a lot of their debt. They have almost $8 billion in debt. Huge debt load to buy all these GPUs, and that has been the question we've been talking about here, Chamath, is are these GPUs, are these NeoClouds, fancy way of saying. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:55:08): I'll give you Yeah. Couple of factoids about CoreWeave, which I find super impressive. So the first question is, like, you would say, why didn't AWS, GCP, and Azure eat these guys for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? And as it turns out, they had one very specific technical decision that I think was extremely valuable, which is that these guys did not use hypervisors. Jason Calacanis (00:55:30): Explain what that is. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:55:31): So a hypervisor is basically a middleware layer of software that allows you to abstract units of compute so that then you can make them available. And instead, they basically allowed you to write to the bare metal in this very native approach that allowed them to get a lot of traction. So it's a really interesting thing to note that just that simple thing, like one simple technical design decision, can allow you to build what looks like, at least from the revenue perspective, an incredible business. Right? So kudos to them. Super awesome to see that you can still maneuver around the big giants. I think that that's cool. I think the big question with CoreWeave is what is the period of amortization and the useful life of these GPUs from NVIDIA? And I think that that question is up in the air. As you said, Jason, a lot of their losses are these interest payments. And as long as they have that calculated right in their models that they used to borrow all this money to buy all these GPUs from NVIDIA, this is gonna be a killer business. To the extent that they got that calculation wrong. Meaning, we thought the useful life was 10 years, but it turned out to be five. This business is deeply underwater. So I think that that's the bet. The bet is they've built an amount of headway. They're gonna continue to do this good technical engineering. But the other side of it is, is the useful life right? Is the technology curve right? Is Moore's Law and all these other things, will they work in its favor or against it? And I think that's Jason Calacanis (00:57:05): though, Joe, people say the useful lifespan of GPUs is three to five years before the next generation is so much more powerful, especially in relation to power consumption, that it's worth upgrading. Now with servers, old CPUs for running Facebook, it's a totally different story. You can keep those running five to seven years before it's not worth running and you have to turn them off. Do you think here? I Joe Lonsdale (00:57:28): mean, you're right. There's an economic question on the power and all these things. I actually know Brandon. He lives nearby me in my house in Montana. He's a really smart guy. And I think the really interesting thing, you know, when they built this that I think is relevant going forward is these guys were commodities traders, and they were originally buying stuff to, like, mine Bitcoin and other stuff like that. And they realized as commodities traders, there's, like, a certain supply and demand in the market of GPU chips, but also of all the data centers, by the way. And it's really interesting what they did is they locked down the full supply of tons of data centers, tons of the power they needed, tons of the chips, and they're very thoughtful. I mean, they're effectively traders, and they're very economic. And I think they have modeled this stuff well. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:58:05): That explains the technical decision because they have to have very low latency throughput in order to transact efficiently as commodities traders. I'm guessing so well. Joe Lonsdale (00:58:14): Exactly. Jason Calacanis (00:58:14): Calacanis here for this company, Friedberg. They had massive revenue growth, but they have a dependency, 60% of the revenue now from Microsoft. And Microsoft seems to have done this either, it's unclear, but maybe to service the OpenAI deal where they needed to give them a bunch of infrastructure, or it might be for Azure. It's unclear. I've been asking this question for a couple of years now, but what do you think of a business with one client with 60% dependency? Joe Lonsdale (00:58:41): And this is how these things work, Jason, they just, one client tends to grow really, really fast. And they're actually, you know, so they do this orchestration framework called Sunk. I know a little bit about it. It's, like, really easy for scheduling workflows and batches and all these things. So I think a lot of other people are using it really well. They've just bought Weights & Biases, right, which, like, everyone uses basically. Yeah. It's a great buy. And they're killer. Awesome. Chamath Palihapitiya (00:59:01): They're killer for training. I mean, I think these guys are crushing training. Jason Calacanis (00:59:04): Satya Nadella said that Microsoft was doing this maybe not for a long-term usage. So, Friedberg, your thoughts on CoreWeave. David Friedberg (00:59:13): I'm not as deep as you guys are. I remember in 2002/2003, I worked for nine months at a private equity firm, and I would cold call, like, companies that hadn't raised venture capital that were profitable and fast-growing and see if they would take our money. That's the business model. And I spent a lot of time in the sector of businesses that were called speed doublers. I don't know if you guys remember these companies. 2002/2003 was before we all had broadband Internet. So we were a lot of people were using dial-up, and you could pay $9.99 a month for a speed doubler. And what it would do is it would basically, on your browser, set the server Jason Calacanis (00:59:48): to be David Friedberg (00:59:49): Their server, and they had a cache of many of the popular sites on the Internet. So when you started browsing the Internet on your computer, everything loaded faster because they had really fast servers and you got these caches. And these companies, dude, they were doing, like, tens of millions of revenue, high margin, 50% plus EBITDA margin, and growing like a % plus a year. And I remember we spent a bunch of time looking at these companies. This is right before I joined Google. And I was like, this feels like a transitory business. It's like an arbitrage between where we were and where we're going. And that's what ended up happening. Many of them just cash flowed out. The founders took money, or they were able to get a really smart private equity recap done, get some money out, and run at some low multiple of EBITDA or something. And so I worry a little bit about a business like this where there are four or five companies that are each doing $80 billion of CapEx this year to create infrastructure that effectively starts to replace what these guys are effectively offering out as a service. That would be my biggest kind if I were to do diligence on this business, that's where I would spend a lot of my time is like, guys, what's the capacity gonna be in a year or two sort of like when broadband hit the Internet? You didn't need speed doublers anymore. Do you really need to be paying as much as you are today? Is there gonna be as much demand? How much is this gonna get bundled in with GCP or AWS and so on in the future? So that would be my kind of macro hesitation and caution on the diligence as I ran my diligence on this thing. Joe Lonsdale (01:01:13): You basically need an economist to map this all out. It's the same question for data centers in a related way, right, which you just need to map everything. And I don't have those date those numbers, so you're right. It's a hard thing to figure out. David Friedberg (01:01:22): That's right. That's right. Jason Calacanis (01:01:23): Well, the founders have control of the company. David Friedberg (01:01:25): And they sold 500 million secondaries. Jason Calacanis (01:01:27): A few months a lot. Maybe it's 150 each or something. Joe Lonsdale (01:01:30): But they've kept most of their position. They're smart guys. So let's say Jason Calacanis (01:01:33): They still own the majority. David Friedberg (01:01:35): Don't know. I'm sorry. I don't want to speak negatively about the business, and I haven't spent much time on it. But, I mean, I think that that's Jason Calacanis (01:01:40): gonna worst that can happen if you speak negatively about somebody's business. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:01:43): Know? Jason, you've done the Joe Lonsdale (01:01:44): worst thing. Jason Calacanis (01:01:44): You've been trying to tell us. Maybe you Chamath Palihapitiya (01:01:46): get one Jason Calacanis (01:01:46): off for 20 years. You tell us, J. You have no idea. What Chamath Palihapitiya (01:01:50): is it like to be on somebody's shit list for a decade? Jason Calacanis (01:01:53): I don't know. I mean, the ratings keep going up for This Week in Startups and All-In, so I'll take it. Shout out. David Friedberg (01:01:58): Are you purposefully starting to dress up, JCal, by the way? Because I noticed every week now you're wearing Jason Calacanis (01:02:03): a I a speaking gig. Yeah. David Friedberg (01:02:04): And a jacket. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:02:04): I had Jason Calacanis (01:02:04): a speak I had a speaking gig, but my friends at Eton reached out to me, so I might be trying to do a little graph like that. David Friedberg (01:02:12): Right now? Jason Calacanis (01:02:12): Are you plugging right now? Hasn't reached out, but Eton shirts, which I'm wearing right now, E-T-O-N, you know, the famous shirt people are Are you pulling out? I also no. No. No. No. I got but I'm also saying Tom Ford's people reached out and said, you know, that lapel vein, you can take that off if you want. We'll have somebody come over. So I just want to shout out my friends over there. Have no I'm David Friedberg (01:02:31): commercial deal with them. shout the Kiton, K-I-T-O-N, jackets I've been wearing. K-I-T-O-N. Jason Calacanis (01:02:36): Kiton, very nice. I like to wear David Friedberg (01:02:38): them all the time. I love those jackets. Just saying, let's move on. Jason Calacanis (01:02:42): By the way, I yes. And Joe Lonsdale's outfits are recently by the Uighurs, the Uighurs in China. He gets them specifically made for $17 each month. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:02:50): I I was recently sponsored by a company. This cut this is incredible. What they do is when you're flying into an FBO an Jason Calacanis (01:02:57): ad in it. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:02:57): Right? They they meet you at the FBO, and they take your watch, and they they set the new time for you. So especially if it's a mechanical watch is a very complicated Oh, Jason Calacanis (01:03:06): Oh, yeah. This is very important. Right. I you know what? I was flying to Malta. This exists. To my And I had my watch collection, and they did this for me when I was flying between Montenegro and Malta. Absolutely. Just trolling. I'm Chamath Palihapitiya (01:03:19): just trolling. Jason Calacanis (01:03:21): This is like Forbes, Five Billings telling you how to look at the world. We should get rid of income tax. I'm sure everybody listening is like, really convenient. No income tax for the billionaires and centimillionaires. Good job, guys. All right. Let's keep going down the top. Alright, Chamath. You know, we've been going back and forth in the group chat, and you've been talking about it publicly, maybe Main Street versus Wall Street, and what's going on in the markets here? Because there's EU bond issues. We obviously it seems like in some ways, maybe the Trump campaign is not thinking about the stock market as much as they're thinking about the bond market. Explain to us your take on markets right now. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:04:01): Yeah. I think that there are three markets that are important. There's the US long end of the curve. So this is the 10-year bond yield. I think then there's the US equity market. And then the most next important market are the European bond and equity markets together, and I'll explain why in a second. But just on the first few, I mentioned this before, but I really do think we're in a secular shift where I think the MAGA majority and the base of people that can be a reliable voting bloc in the future, as I've said before, are working and middle-class folks that don't necessarily own a ton of stocks nor do they own homes, of which there's a lot. Second cohort are people that are pro-innovation and pro-tech, and the third are patriotic business owners. I think that cohort is very large. And I think that when the core strategists inside of MAGA figure this out, one of the big takeaways is that they're not gonna care about the stock market and Wall Street. And a lot of the policies will be viewed through the lens of Main Street. And I think that you started to see this rhetoric now, one from Bessent, and we'll play this clip in a second. And the second was just today from Trump himself. But, Nick, do you wanna play the Bessent clip if you have it? Speaker 5 (01:05:26): I think over the medium term, which is what we're focused on, it's a focus on Main Street. Wall Street's done great. Wall Street can continue to do fine, but we have a focus on small business and the consumers. So we are going to rebalance the economy. We're gonna bring manufacturing jobs home. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:05:47): That was the first. Second one was just today. Nick, I sent it to you. Do you wanna just show it to these guys, which I think is really interesting? Jason Calacanis (01:05:53): So it says here, breaking news from, I guess, Unusual Whales. Trump has just said he's not looking at the stock market. Okay. So I'm not sure I believe that, but okay. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:02): So why is this actually valuable? Well, if we are incentivized, if the government of America is incentivized to implement policies that crack the equity markets, it's actually really good in some ways. Number one is if you deflate asset prices, you also deflate inflation. Jason Calacanis (01:06:23): Give an example there for the audience so we can make it clear. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:06:26): Nvidia is ripping at all-time highs. You are like, oh, wow. I'm so cash-rich. You can go get a margin loan. You take that money. You reinvest it in a second home and a third home. You sell some stock. You start to buy cars, all this other stuff. It drives consumptive behavior that on the margin isn't there if the markets were much, much lower than this. So if you rebase the equity values that people have, what you do is you actually depress the amount of free cash flow that they have to spend on other things. So it's a deflationary tactic. How the bond market reacts to that is if the stock market goes down is you start to become a flight to quality. Right? Oh my gosh. There's volatility in the stock market. Oh my gosh. I don't wanna deal with the stock market going down. Let me just sell, take some chips off the table, and buy 10-year bonds. When you buy the bonds, the interest rate goes down. Why is that good for America? We have $10 trillion we need to go out and borrow in the next nine months. And so if we can pay 3%, 3.8%, 4%, we save ourselves trillions of dollars versus if we had to pay 4.5%, 5%, 5.5%. So that's the second thing. And then the third thing is that right now, what we had this week because of the Ukraine and Zelensky thing is basically Trump saying, we are totally risk off this war. And I'm not going to debate whether that's right or wrong, but that's what he said. We're going to curtail the aid. We're not even going to share intelligence. They're on their own. What did that force? What happened this week was the Europeans had to basically circle the wagons, and they said, okay. We're going to step up. And what they announced was a four-year plan to borrow money to invest in defense. What they also did, which was really interesting, is the UK specifically said, we're going to borrow it in this clever little way, this is their interpretation, so that it doesn't actually count in the debt-to-GDP calculations of my country. Jason Calacanis (01:08:27): They're starting to play convenient. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:08:29): But then so then how did the bond market react to it? Nick, you can show it. They're like, you know what, guys? If you want to fight this war, obviously, you're allowed to do whatever you want, but the cost that you're going to have to pay is going to go up. This has been going up every day. And you're at a point now where this is severe fiscal pressure on these governments. I do not know how they sustain their deficits and raise more debt. So all of this is happening all at the same time. I think Trump is pro-Main Street. Equity markets basically do not get bid. The bond markets respond positively. Yields go down. Good for America. They extract themselves from spending programs like, again, it's more than a spending program, but I'll just say it in this context, narrowly, Russia-Ukraine is a spending program that if you take off the table, that balance of responsibility goes to Europe. And then the markets are saying, this is not right. We want this war to end, and we're gonna make it more expensive for you to litigate it. If you put it all together, it's a really interesting moment in the markets I haven't seen in a very long time. Jason Calacanis (01:09:36): Joe, do you think this refinancing of our debt is the endgame here? There's, like, maybe 10% of people who seem to have fallen in that camp when I queried on these four group chats. Hey, you know, if we can depress everything, we lower consumption, we break inflation even more. Maybe people lose their jobs, you know, less consumption. And rates go down, we have to cut rates three or four times, put pressure on the Fed, then we can maybe refinance our debt, which is coming up some percentage of it. What do you think of that theory? Joe Lonsdale (01:10:11): You know, Jason, Chamath has a lot of interesting thoughts here. And I think it's a very smart analysis. I'm not fully aligned. It is true. Bond markets hate war. War is expensive. War is inflationary. It's very clear Europe is going through, okay. You know, war is more likely for us to spend money. That and that hurts them. You know, in the US, I think the number one thing that Scott Bessent and Trump would want around this is to fight for Main Street, they said. But that really is, you know, the kind of populist energy we have right now. And so I think they are focused on lower interest rates. Lower interest rates, you know, I have someone who works with me, their spouse, you know, is a real estate agent, and they're having a really tough couple of years because interest rates spiked up. If you get interest rates down again, there's so many different places in America where people start making money again with the title companies, with brokers, with there's so many things that happen, right, with that. Jason Calacanis (01:10:54): Trickle down. Yeah. Joe Lonsdale (01:10:55): It's it's well, it's not just trickle down. It's like this is the part of the economy that just really does start to turn on and certain transactions can happen again. And you're right. It is cheaper debt that is an advantage as well. So I think disinflation is very important, and I think we have to find some way to get there. Chamath may be right that it's worth hitting assets to get to disinflation. That's something that Scott could be working on because of all the debt, but it is true Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:15): that easiest. David Friedberg (01:11:16): You know? It's the easiest. Joe Lonsdale (01:11:17): It's the it's the easiest. And we and we do and we do need it for sure. So and I hopefully I think there's some other more clever ways to get there, but I do like that direction. Jason Calacanis (01:11:25): You said there's some more clever ways to get there. Obviously, we don't wanna see 8, 9, 10 percent unemployment. That's another way to get there. We don't want that because, you know, Main Street equals jobs. So what are your other ways to get there? Joe Lonsdale (01:11:39): Well, other ways to get there is there's really two right now in our society that are very positive. One of them is higher productivity through AI. I'm working on a ton of things as is Chamath Palihapitiya (01:11:48): Sure. Joe Lonsdale (01:11:48): everyone else doing that. Like, we're doing construction for much cheaper right now. Jason Calacanis (01:11:51): Government can't do that, though. Right? Government can't be involved in that. That's up to us. Yeah. We can Joe Lonsdale (01:11:55): make sure not to describe it. David's doing good work. We can make sure not to screw it up. There's a lot of people trying to Jason Calacanis (01:11:58): screw it Joe Lonsdale (01:11:58): up in government, so I think David's job is very important there to get Jason Calacanis (01:12:01): us Sam, someone's not here. Please. We don't Joe Lonsdale (01:12:02): want to interrupt people. And then the second thing is actually cutting spend, like just giving out hundreds of billions willy-nilly to Stacey Abrams et al is very inflationary. So I think cutting spend actually is a very positive thing. We could do a lot more Jason Calacanis (01:12:16): of that. Friedberg, you heard the two gentlemen. What are your thoughts on the refinancing of interest? As I've done before, I'm gonna give you incredible leadership credit for three years ago on this pod pushing all of us to really think about what would happen if the debt increased another $8 trillion, which it did. And I think that influenced a lot of people in our circles. And obviously, that's something that the president took on when none of us thought any president would ever take on that issue. How much pain do you think Trump is willing to take with the stock market going down in order to refinance the debt? Is he willing to be incredibly unpopular? Is he willing to deal with the criticism from Wall Street and from equity holders over some sustained period? And how much would he be? If the market goes down 10 or 20 percent, do you think he's gonna cry uncle, or do you think he's willing to take that kind of pain, Friedberg? David Friedberg (01:13:10): Like I said, I don't know about Trump. There's a, you know, I would say 60-40, I'd be right. 40%, I'd be wrong. So I don't know. Jason Calacanis (01:13:17): Most people are here for that. That's actually a pretty good ratio in poker if you can win that many hands. David Friedberg (01:13:21): Yeah. I mean, I'd say 60%. He's probably different than Trump 1.0, and he's probably less influenced by the short-term rumblings about the market. Jason Calacanis (01:13:30): Okay. David Friedberg (01:13:31): And he's probably listening to Besson on this one. Although, you know, I think it's got to be a complicated relationship between the two of them at the moment. I do think that he is aware, and I would imagine the administration generally with Bessent and others in kind of key leadership positions are trying to make the case that if we can get rates down, we have an opportunity to kind of refinance this $10 trillion that's coming due in the next 12 months and get ourselves into a more sustainable financing position. There's still the fiscal position, which is how are we spending money and how are we spending money over time that needs to be addressed. Joe Lonsdale (01:14:15): This is the central question. You're totally right. Jason Calacanis (01:14:18): Let's address that specifically with Ukraine. You're a bit of a hawk, an American exceptionalist, Joe. And we are looking at a situation where we spent $175 billion. There were some other numbers that Trump was floating around that were incorrect, and they got fact-checked. $175 billion is what we're actually in for according to all accounts. This was done, as I said many times on this very program and got laughed at and joked about, done on a lease loan. Trump, because these things were done on a lease loan, now has the upper hand with Zelensky, and he's a great negotiator. And he said, we want $500 billion back. Don't need to make this about dollars and cents here because obviously this is life and death and people's democracy we're talking about, their sovereignty. But that $175 billion, if he gets that $500 billion back, that's a 42% IRR in three years on this. Even if we just got our money back, that would be fine for the American people. How do you look at the war in Ukraine both financially and in terms of containing Putin and finally in terms of our participation in NATO? Is it time for us to leave NATO? Joe Lonsdale. Joe Lonsdale (01:15:31): Wow. Well, you know, Jason, Putin's a bad guy. That's number one. He shouldn't have invaded. Jason Calacanis (01:15:35): you for saying that. It's refreshing to hear it on this podcast. Joe Lonsdale (01:15:38): You know, I do think the last administration mismanaged it. I don't think he would have invaded with Trump as president. He certainly would have invaded with a competent person threatening him. So but, you know, but now we have to have peace, I do want peace. I don't want to have the war continuing. But to get peace, you gotta get both sides to come to the table. I prefer peace through strength. I prefer being really strong on Putin and showing why he has to have peace, but then you need Zelensky to be a partner for it too. And I do think, listen, I do think Zelensky had the wrong idea in the White House last week. He should have been thanking them. He should have come more humbly. He should have actually been directed towards really wanting a peace. And listen, I agree that Ukraine's a very corrupt country. We may find out that he and his cronies have been taking a bunch of money. I don't know if they are or not. Either way, he has not really been signaling the right way to be open to peace. And a peace that does, I think, have to give up a little bit of Ukraine in order to get there. I think that's the option on the table right now, and that's the direction I Jason Calacanis (01:16:26): The NATO question? What's the, you know, and thank you for being so candid here. What's the NATO outcome here? Is it time for maybe Europe to just go it alone? Because they don't seem to like what happened last Friday at the White House. Yeah. And maybe do you think it's time? Maybe we bow out and let them arm up? Joe Lonsdale (01:16:48): This is really tough for me because some of the people I care about most in the world live in places like Germany and around there, and I want them to be safe. I also think that the historic relationship between the UK and the US is this very, very valuable thing that we have that shouldn't just be tossed aside. These are critical, very long-time allies and cousins. You know, I think Europe's in a very, very bad place. It's very dysfunctional, man. It's I do not see European civilization going the right way the next 20 or 30 years. I think JD's right to criticize them on anti-free speech, like, you know, arresting people who criticize the Islamic threat, like, more than the people actually doing the rapes and stuff. It's crazy. These places have lost their You know? Yeah. It's bonkers. So do I want to totally give it up? No. But do I want to demand fiercely that certain things get fixed and to use our foreign policy apparatus to make sure we fix those things if we're gonna stay in the relationship? Jason Calacanis (01:17:37): What do you think, Chamath? This NATO question seems like Europe is kind of signaling that they're willing to go it alone. And should the United States just say, okay. Go for it. We're out. Because that's literally what Sacks retweeted recently. He just said, hey. We're out. It's your problem. And I think the administration's given him free rein to discuss the topic. He discussed it here for many years. What are your thoughts? Should we be out on NATO? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:18:01): Well, I think the question is when do these transnational organizations outlive their utility? That's the question on the table. And it's not just a question for NATO, but it's a question for a bunch of these other things, the WHO, NATO, the United Nations. There's many of these organizations. What you've seen is that there are competitive organizations now that are just as important, if not more. So if you didn't like OPEC, well, then there is this OPEC plus plus thing. If you didn't like how the Europeans and the Americans did intelligence gathering, then all of a sudden Five Eyes came out of nowhere. If you didn't like the G7, there's the BRICS. Right? So there is this tendency for the world to create these startups to try to challenge incumbency as the conditions on the ground change. I think the most important thing right now the Europeans need to do is acknowledge this one critical fact. The individual governments of Europe are vibrant and powerful. The European Union itself was created almost without any real teeth. And so what happened is the folks there started to pass inordinate numbers of laws. Joe Lonsdale (01:19:18): Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:19:19): And that has made it really complicated to be a European company, a European citizen, and that has to get sorted out. What is the real decision there? Is it about being Italian? Is it about being European? What is the separation? And I don't think that that's clear. And I think once they figure that out, all this other stuff is much easier to figure out. Jason Calacanis (01:19:38): Well, you also have, yeah, other organizations. Interpol. Right? We have that. You have the UN. I mean, it is maybe time to just re-underwrite each of them. Friedberg, what do you think? David Friedberg (01:19:49): I think that there's a viable case for a peaceful transition to kind of a multipolar power dynamic. And if you're a techno-pessimist, you're gonna have a point of view that there are more limited resources available to humans on Earth, and therefore, we have to have influence to access those resources. If you're a techno-optimist, you will believe that through AI and automation and all these other technologies that we could spend quite a bit of time around, that we are going to have abundant housing, abundant fuel, abundant materials, and generally an abundance of everything that one particular group might demand or need. And you don't need to go be an empire to access the resources that your people are demanding. And what I mean is the mining industry is a good example. There was this discovery, which I think we put on the docket for the Science Corner today, of a giant thorium reserve in Inner Mongolia, which can be used to make a thorium molten salt reactor, and there's enough thorium in this reserve in China to produce enough energy for 60,000 years of consumption based on current consumption rates. I saw a fantastic presentation this week by a startup that's using AI and other sensing technologies to identify new rare earth deposits in the crust of the Earth that we have absolutely no visibility into today. And many of our assumptions about how much availability there is on certain rare earth metals is wrong and that there actually may be many, many orders of magnitude more material available to us to mine. And the technology for mining is getting better. The technology for discovering these deposits is improving and so on. So in that world where suddenly I can make all the food I want, everyone can be fed. There's plenty of land. There's plenty of housing. There's plenty of water. There's automation and robots that are serving me and all this sort of amazing stuff that's coming this century. David Friedberg (01:21:56): Do I really need to be having a freaking conflict with Russia and China over access to some jungle or some plot of land on the other side of the planet? Or can I live sustainably in my country and everyone's gonna be generally happy? So I think that this idea that maybe the US exits NATO and the US dials down its level of conflict and opposition to Russia and/or China is a pretty reasonable, and I would argue maybe even a techno-optimistic point of view. And, you know, we may find that in the next couple of years, we start to really believe it. And if we start to believe it, all the things that we're fighting over today, you don't really need to fight over anymore. And except for the expansionist intentions of individuals, which is a sociological phenomenon, which may still continue. But I'm not sure that you need to be investing as much resources as we have historically. So I would argue maybe NATO in a multipolar world of abundance isn't as necessary as it has been in the past century, which was a world that was limited in resources, fighting for access, and a growing global population, particularly in a developed world in the West, that's made it a necessity to maintain US primacy and US policing of the world. I know others might have a point of view that's a little bit different on that, but I just think we can maybe do that. Jason Calacanis (01:23:16): I think actually what you're talking about is a Star Trek beautiful version of abundance in the world. If these rare earth minerals create unlimited energy and you're energy independent, you look at the world differently. And Joe, we certainly in America look at the world differently as we're all Gen Xers here, basically. We look at the world much differently now since we have energy independence than we did under Bush and these farm wars, you know, in the Middle East. Joe Lonsdale (01:23:42): Yeah. I mean, listen, yeah, and I'm one of the most optimistic people. Call myself the American optimist Jason, as you know. Jason Calacanis (01:23:48): I have a great podcast. I'm the same optimist, Jared. None of us have been on yet. Appreciate it. Gonna get you on. Together mean, Sacks on? Have you had Sacks on at least, American Optimism? Joe Lonsdale (01:23:58): People are too busy to come on. I'll try to get you. Jason Calacanis (01:24:00): Alright. I 0 for 4 with besties. Got it. Okay. Alright. Joe Lonsdale (01:24:03): I gotta work on it. Listen. I would love AI to get to the point. I think it will where it starts to accelerate growth where this energy stuff can be mined more easily. But until, I'd say until we're at at least 6% growth because we are going to the post-scarcity world, we don't know when it's coming. I do still think global trade really matters. I do think global security for ourselves, like we don't want random people with nuclear proliferation. So there are issues that are going to affect all of us. But I think Dave makes a really great point that it is becoming less important over time. It's true. Jason Calacanis (01:24:30): Let's talk about this ChatGPT. I guess they came out with 4.5. It was such a dud. I didn't even realize that they launched it. Chamath, you monitor this, or, Friedberg, did you try it? Because I've been using Grok as my default now, then Gemini, then ChatGPT. That's my order right now because I wanted to see how good Grok is. And man, Grok is Joe Lonsdale (01:24:50): It's great. Jason Calacanis (01:24:51): Really caught up. And I don't have an interest here. I don't have equity in any of these companies. I own Google in the public markets, but I don't own the other two. But pretty amazing, yeah? What do you think of this 4.5 dot and what it means, Chamath? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:06): Well, I use them in the company building context and specifically at eighty ninety because of what we're building. And what I would tell you is that I think Anthropic just continues to do an incredible job. I think Claude 3.7 is it just kicks ass. Jason Calacanis (01:25:25): Oh, you're you're on Claude 4.0, you're using on the back end. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:29): We use it for a lot of automated code generation. Got it. And its models on code generation, I think, are just exceptional. They're they are the best in market. Then what I would say is as a consumer, I've mostly flipped my usage to Grok 3. Jason Calacanis (01:25:44): Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:25:45): And the reason is that it's in line with where I consume most of my information. It's elegantly integrated inside of X. It's Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:25:54): Point this out to explain to people. When you're in Twitter now X, on the top right hand of a tweet, there's an X AI button. When you click it, it just gives you the full context of the tweet. So I was reading one of Dara's from Uber's tweets about autonomy. I guess they added two more partners. When I clicked it, it gave me more than I ever could want. It was almost like a deep research of the context of a very short retweet he did. And I didn't have to cut and paste and form a question. So owning a social network equals instant, and here we're gonna show it with Joe Lonsdale's where he says, Hey, listen, the crypto tax feels like taxation to me. And look, it goes and finds four web pages. You can see there, it tells you which ones, Wikipedia and CNBC amongst them. And then it gives Joe's position. This is like very elegant. This is super elegant. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:26:43): And I think there's a small tweak to this, okay. That Elon and I were talking about actually on X, which is then just the nature of being able to analyze a post for its veracity becomes really valuable. That extra little thing when it's available, I think, will have a really big impact on how people use it in this context. So I use Grok for the consumer applications. For all of our cogeneration, we're using Sonnet 3.7. It's exceptional. Jason Calacanis (01:27:09): Which is Anthropic, which is doing a major round of funding. Got it. Okay. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:13): Yeah. And I think, like, the thing with the GPT-4.5 is that it's kind of, like, good. Now here's a tangent. Let me just do a small little rant, which is we're at the bleeding edge of where these benchmarks are useful. Meaning, part of why, Jason, maybe you weren't necessarily watching this as closely. And I think where the media and the sense-making organizations get confused is they don't know now what to say because they'll say, hey. Look at how I did on Sweebench. Look at how I did on Aimo. Look at how I did on Amy. And the problem, the dirty little secret of these model makers is that these guys are so trained on the evals that they're overfitting. Joe Lonsdale (01:27:54): Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:27:54): And all this overfitting basically makes it pretty unreliable. Jason Calacanis (01:27:58): So what this means to translate into plain English for humans listening is they basically are optimizing for the test out of the benchmark, which is kind of like a person in high school optimizing for the SATs. It doesn't mean they're gonna be a great student, but it may mean that they just spent a lot of time taking SAT tests. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:28:14): Yeah. So we have one problem, which is that I think it would be very valuable for the industry that it be solved, which is that we need to have extremely difficult and always changing third-party independent verifiable benchmarks that Jason Calacanis (01:28:28): we use. A great idea. Like, the safety test for cars is that's not run by the companies. Got it. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:28:33): Less about safety, though, more about capability. Sure. Sure. Sure. If we're reporting on that, then these leaps will mean something more than what they are today. Right? So got it. When Alibaba pushes Gwen this week, it was an exceptional model. It's probably one of the better open-source, if not the best open-source model out there. Deepseeks, I think, is also quite good. It doesn't get any press anymore. So I think we're starting to get to this place where there's such abundance that actually people are just kind of, like, overwhelmed with all the choice, and they don't know how to differentiate. Jason Calacanis (01:29:03): This is like a hundred Michelin star restaurants opening up in your city. You just don't have enough meals to eat. We're basically drowning in abundance to Friedberg's point. I don't think we understand exactly how golden this golden age is in Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:18): terms of technology. Becomes really important. I think that's Jason Calacanis (01:29:22): why absolutely. We discussed that. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:23): Access is very valuable. But, also, I think Google just said that they're gonna drop an AI button right into the front door core search page. I don't know if you guys saw that, but Jason Calacanis (01:29:32): they said they're doing it. When you're logged in, you will get the snippet at the top. Inside of YouTube, they're doing summaries of the chat and the comments. And then you think about what Meta could do. You know, they already put the AI box up there, but, you know, they'll knock some of that off. No. I'm not gonna pop Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:47): Google front door like Google.com. Yeah. Joe Lonsdale (01:29:49): Does anyone use that anymore? Run. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:29:52): Well, I mean, Google searches are still going. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:29:54): But And Facebook is about to launch a competitor to ChatGPT and Grok. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:29:58): Well They're doing a straight up Chamath Palihapitiya (01:30:00): A standalone app. And the thing that they are so good at is whenever they launch an app, it doesn't matter when they launch it. They'll just get it to a billion people. Jason Calacanis (01:30:07): Yeah. I mean, that is super true. All this, I think, leads to so much abundance. What I'm seeing in startups, I was the first investor in a company called Superhuman, very elegant software, luxury software for email productivity, give it a shot. What he did was I didn't mean to ask a super plug here, but anyway, I'm so in love with the company and the founder. I just had them on This Week in Startups. He's like one of the best product minds I've ever met. Going. Extraordinary. And Superhuman now, because it's gotten so cheap to do AI that they are composing in this beta I'm in, all of the replies to your email in real time on the back end, and you can see potential drafts. Summarize everything. Even if you never read the summary, that would be cost prohibitive six to twelve months ago. But now it's a no-brainer because they're paid software. It's like so this is gonna get very interesting very quick. Joe, your thoughts on this abundance. Joe Lonsdale (01:31:05): Yeah. I'm actually building something on email, like you said, that works with your team to automatically kinda like, you know, create reports on everything that comes in and route it for you. Because a lot of our friends, when you're a CEO, you basically become a traffic cop. It's actually the email's gonna do it for you. It's gonna be it's gonna be really nice. But listen, I'm invested in Grok3 and I'm biased towards Elon, but you know, a lot of our companies will build on top of multiple of them as well. And, you know, think you're talking about cogen, I'm, you know, in Cognition, I think a lot of my companies using dev and it's actually just like crushing it. This stuff's getting like 15% better every month. It's it's it's really amazing, it's good for companies like that. I'm mostly at that level where I'm like using all of them or using a bunch of them. So I love the fact there's always competition because it just makes it cheaper and better for me for all my companies I'm building. Jason Calacanis (01:31:45): And and it's it's not slowing down is the other piece of this. Joe Lonsdale (01:31:48): No. It's getting better. It's scary, actually. I it would I thought it would asymptote, and it hasn't. Jason Calacanis (01:31:52): So no. That's the part that's so fascinating to me. And then there's a really interesting ripple that I don't know if you guys are aware of yet, but journalists who have been losing their jobs at a tremendous pace are now being hired by data aggregators to come in, look at queries. Let's say you had an expertise in agriculture, Friedberg, they'll pay you, and I actually saw one of these job descriptions, $40 an hour to sit there and answer questions about agriculture, look at answers and refine them and do reinforcement learning. We're gonna have a new job class, which is people who train AIs and people who fact-check AIs and refine AIs. And this could be a $50,000 to $150,000 a year job because every time you make the AI a little better, everybody on the planet gets to benefit from it. This is an extraordinary new job career. I don't know what it's gonna be called. Reinforcement learner. I don't know. Friedberg, you get the last take here. Great job on the abundance angle, which just pushed a really great discussion here. Wrap us up with your thoughts on these LLMs and the pace of AI. David Friedberg (01:32:56): I disagree with Chamath. I think it's like you got a lot of great stuff here. It's changing every week. I'm not paying attention to the details anymore. New models come out every week. This is like when the internet launched, new websites. You know? Like, this is carrying us forward. It's impossible to dissect and predict what's gonna win, when, and why Jason Calacanis (01:33:15): right now. Are you obsessed with in the AI front? Is there are there things at all? David Friedberg (01:33:20): I I use ChatGPT research a lot. Jason Calacanis (01:33:23): The deep research, right, where it fires up a bunch of pages. Okay. And you're paying that means the $200 a month or David Friedberg (01:33:28): you have to $200 a month. Yeah. Yeah. No. I find it very good. Yeah. And then, we build everything at Ohalo on GCP, and we've run a bunch of different models. Jason Calacanis (01:33:37): That's Google's cloud for people who don't know that right now. David Friedberg (01:33:39): Got it. And then we run models. Jason Calacanis (01:33:40): They're incredible. Yeah. David Friedberg (01:33:43): Lots of different tools, but it's awesome. Jason Calacanis (01:33:45): Hey. As we wrap here, we're following our muse here at All-In. Whatever the besties are most interested in, we are gonna bring you, the audience, along with us. So Friedberg and I have been obsessed with content creation media. So we're doing a little media summit at South by Southwest. Apologies that it's sold out. And then Chamath, you know, he likes this F1. He's a big F1 fan. I've never been. I'm really excited that we're gonna be throwing the best party You're not invited. At F1 Saturday, May 4. I am coming. I'll know you're not. The bag. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:34:17): Thursday or not, there's only room for two. Jason Calacanis (01:34:19): I get the bag. I'll be outside. You know what? I'll just go to E11EVEN. Give me my bag, and I'll go play a tournament. I'll go to E11EVEN and have a steak, and that's it's a it's a club. I'll get I'll pop some bottles at E11EVEN while you guys are at F1. You can Photoshop me in. But the fans can come, and our community can come, allin.com/events, for all the details. And if you're on Chamath Palihapitiya (01:34:40): Saturday night. Big party Jason Calacanis (01:34:41): on Saturday fun. David Friedberg (01:34:42): We're throwing a big party in Miami around F1, and we're gonna do a little stage show beforehand because Jason Calacanis (01:34:47): it's gonna be awesome. David Friedberg (01:34:48): And we're gonna, what about celebrating my birthday because I'm not gonna be able to make it in June. Jason Calacanis (01:34:52): Can I wear my Apple Watch? Can somebody loan me a nice watch for F1? I can't show up with an Apple Watch. Anybody got a Chamath Palihapitiya (01:34:57): You're not allowed to wear an Apple Watch, Stephan. Jason Calacanis (01:34:59): Okay. I'm gonna put my Apple Watch in my drawer. I've never been to a dealer watch. I want a watch that costs $25K to $75K. What's a good starter watch for Jay Cal? Chamath Palihapitiya (01:35:09): That's like an appetizer. That's what my watch has as a watch. Jason Calacanis (01:35:12): Got it. Your watch's watch. Joe, you got going to this watch thing. What should I buy for a hundred times? What do you got there? You you Joe Lonsdale (01:35:18): can get a decent Patek for a hundred now. It's like they've gone down. Yeah. It's Jason Calacanis (01:35:22): I mean, everything's collapsing. Like, shouldn't I be able to snipe something here? Joe Lonsdale (01:35:25): It's deflation, thanks to Trump and AI. Right? You can grab Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:35:29): AI general okay. Whatever. Somebody give me a suggestion for a watch where we're getting drifted. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:35:33): Get a good mechanical watch, not an automatic. A mechanical watch. Jason Calacanis (01:35:36): Wants to sponsor me for watches and get a mention here on the show, I will riff the hell out of that. Jason@Calacanis.com for life. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:35:43): I just got a text from Swatch and Tudor. Jason Calacanis (01:35:46): Oh, Swatch watch. I used to wear actually, in the eighties, I don't know if Friedberg definitely had a ton of those Casio watches. Right? Did you have the Casio where you would, do your David Friedberg (01:35:58): The G-Shock. The G Jason Calacanis (01:35:59): Shock is Chamath Palihapitiya (01:36:00): a great watch. That's a Jason Calacanis (01:36:00): good I'm talking about him with a calculator watch. David Friedberg (01:36:03): I actually, I had that. It was I remember it was $50. It was a really big deal to Jason Calacanis (01:36:07): It was $50, and it was worth it. Joe Lonsdale (01:36:09): You play the game, you start and stop it as Jason Calacanis (01:36:11): fast as you could. That was that David Friedberg (01:36:12): was fun. Exactly. You remember that? Jason Calacanis (01:36:13): Yeah. Yeah. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:36:13): Had one on each wrist. Jason Calacanis (01:36:15): I was doubling down. David Friedberg (01:36:18): I recently bought a G-Shock on Amazon as kind of like a memento to Jason Calacanis (01:36:23): Hold up. David Friedberg (01:36:24): Recap and my, yeah, freaking daughter stole the G-Shock. Jason Calacanis (01:36:26): It's It's Chamath Palihapitiya (01:36:27): a cool Jason Calacanis (01:36:28): Friedberg, we can all bet on this. What calculator do you have on your desk right now? How many calculators are on your desk now? How many can you reach? How many Casios are within reach? There's only one calculator that matters. Only one for me. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:36:41): Yeah. Okay. HP 17B. There's only one. Tia, I got Jason Calacanis (01:36:44): my Tia. What are you talking about? Joe Lonsdale (01:36:45): I got Jason Calacanis (01:36:45): my Tia Joe Lonsdale (01:36:46): 89 still. 89 for me. Jason Calacanis (01:36:47): But oh, now you just David Friedberg (01:36:48): told me how you're younger than me, Joe. Now I know Jason Calacanis (01:36:50): you're, like, four years younger than me. Yeah. That's true. Point of privilege, actually. David Friedberg (01:36:54): Yeah. It was the 81-82 transition that was, like, a big deal. Yeah. Jason Calacanis (01:36:58): You know what I was doing when you guys were on David Friedberg (01:37:00): your calculator? I can't even imagine. Jason Calacanis (01:37:01): I was in McKinley Park in Bay Ridge getting to second base. Alright. Enough. allin.com/events. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:37:07): Did the guy consent? Jason Calacanis (01:37:08): Absolutely. Absolutely. He was a really hot dude. Please, we have two genders, folks. There's an executive order. I've read it. Alright? Alright. My Trump grade for the week is C for chaos, A for effort with A for effort with Doge. Let's try to get back to a B, President Trump. We'll see you all next time on the All-In Chamath Palihapitiya (01:37:28): pod. Love you, boys. Thanks, Joe. Joe Lonsdale (01:37:31): Thanks, guys. That was fun. Chamath Palihapitiya (01:37:32): Jason Calacanis (01:37:33): Alright, everybody. We're suited up. We're suited up because the czar, the wolf of the White House is here. My brother, David Sacks, we were trying to get you on the program. You were gonna make a drop-in to talk about all this great crypto news coming out of the White House. And, let's face it, this was, some people saying chaotic, some people saying intense. This is a pretty amazingly intense week for the administration, so we'll get into a little bit of that. But you're here specifically to talk about the crypto reserve. So welcome back to your program, the All-In Podcast, David Sacks. David Sacks (01:38:07): Good to be back. See that you've suited up here. Jason Calacanis (01:38:10): I mean, I figured for people who weren't here for the pre-show, I get on, Sacks is wearing a white shirt and a tie. I'm wearing a blazer and a white shirt. So I'm like, ah, I gotta go put a tie on. He's like, ah, Jake, I'll wear a blazer. I gotta go get a blazer. So then we came back, and here we are. Well, David Sacks (01:38:26): I just have to correct one thing. I think it's been a very smooth week at the White House. The president has lived up to one of his campaign promises. This is not something new. Remember you go all the way back to his national speech during the campaign, and he reiterated this many times that he wanted to create a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Sometimes he called it a digital asset stockpile. What we've ultimately done here is both. He also, in his week one executive order on crypto, you guys remember I came on the show to talk about that, he asked our president's working group on digital assets to evaluate the idea of a reserve or stockpile. And we made a recommendation, and this administration is moving at tech speed. It's really great to work for an administration where you can actually get things done and things move quickly. We made our recommendation, then we worked with the lawyers to implement it, and the president signed it last night. But this is fairly consistent with everything he's always said. Jason Calacanis (01:39:17): Agree on that. I guess the one criticism that you're gonna get when you go face the media, so I might as well put it here, is the order in which you're doing things. Sometimes Mr. Trump is very expressive on social media, which is better than, let's say, the previous administration, which just wasn't available and in cognitive decline. So I guess the question of he announces something and then you guys explain it deeper. Is that the optimal way to do this? Should we not worry about it? Should you come out with more official stuff? I guess that's the move fast, break things that we are used to in Silicon Valley, but people, whether it's in business, are maybe a little concerned about that things are maybe different now in the White House and in how we're running our government. Maybe you can expand on that. David Sacks (01:40:03): Have you ever considered that maybe you just had an overreaction to a tweet? Jason Calacanis (01:40:07): Well, okay, so if we're gonna place the blame on me for David Sacks (01:40:11): this, I wasn't Jason Calacanis (01:40:12): the only one. Original crypto OGs were like, wait a second, why is he picking these three and not these three? You know, so that made a lot of people, putting myself out of it, like, whoa, what's going on here? Is he picking favorites? And that's, I guess, everybody's big concern. So maybe you could Right. David Sacks (01:40:27): Well, we're not. Yeah. We're not picking favorites, obviously, except I will say this. We do think Bitcoin is special and I can get into the reasons why. Jason Calacanis (01:40:34): That's a great thing. David Sacks (01:40:35): Yeah. Well, Bitcoin's the original cryptocurrency. It's the first one. It's the only one that doesn't have an issuer. Right? It's very decentralized. It's, you know, in crypto, they call this the immaculate conception. We don't really know how it got here. We don't know who Satoshi is. It's almost mystical, you would say. Yes. It's the most valuable one. It has a $2 trillion market cap, and it's the most secure. It's never been hacked. Right? So we're now, you know, over 15 years into this journey, and there's been a lot of people who've been skeptical along the way, and there's been a lot of ups and downs. But here it is. I mean, I remember back in 2011, and I think it's the first time I bought a Bitcoin, I think it was at $120. Now it's at $90,000. Again, there have been all sorts of wild swings along the way, but this thing just keeps chugging along. And you can think of that $2 trillion market cap as like a $2 trillion bug bounty. If there was a way to hack this, there's every incentive in the world. And by hack, I mean, like, to double spend, create basically a counterfeit Bitcoin, I guess, would be the way for people to think about it. Jason Calacanis (01:41:35): So the security, it hasn't been compromised. I think we can all say that. Joe Lonsdale (01:41:39): Well, I David Sacks (01:41:39): I don't know if it's a miracle. I think it's exceptional design. Sure. You know? And so I think what you could say is that it's been tested in a very robust way, and there's been every incentive to basically break the encryption, and it continues to chug along. And so I think the price has gone up as the protocol has gotten more acceptance. This is another point, is that Bitcoin's most widely accepted as a store of value throughout the world. Yeah. So we do believe it should be treated special. Now that being said, we're also creating the digital asset stockpile. the other digital Yeah, Jason Calacanis (01:42:10): it's big difference between these two. So there's a digital asset stockpile, that's the picker, and then on the other side, there's a strategic reserve for Bitcoin because we do acquire Bitcoin, we, The United States Of America, when we seize from terrorists, criminals, etcetera, we do seize these. And then we often make the mistake of liquidating them when maybe we should be holding them. Yeah. So explain that architecture. David Sacks (01:42:33): So we have the reserve and we have the stockpile. So the reserve is just Bitcoin. The goal is long term preservation. Think of it as like a digital Fort Knox for digital gold. We wanna put the digital gold in there. We wanna keep it secure. We never wanna sell it. That's the goal of the reserve. And you're right that we've made the mistake in the past of selling this stuff. At one point in time, we had about 400,000 Bitcoin on the federal balance sheet. We sold roughly half of that for something like $360,000,000 total. If we had held all of that, it would be worth just that the portion we sold would be worth over 17,000,000,000. So we made this mistake of prematurely selling Bitcoin when we should have held it. We don't wanna make that mistake with regard to the rest of it. We think there's around 200,000 coins left on the federal balance sheet, but the truth is that nobody knows because we've never done a proper audit. So part of what this executive order provides is that we're gonna do for the first time a government wide accounting of the digital assets that we actually have. Jason Calacanis (01:43:29): So And if digital assets emerge in some department, I don't know, the FBI sees this some, the CIA sees this, some I don't know which organization winds up having them, they're gonna be legally required to report that David Sacks (01:43:41): and then put that in the Yeah. Well, they'll be legally required to report it and then they'll go in the reserve if there's a final adjudication. You know, obviously, if those coins could go back as restitution to victims, or if the person who they were seized from wins their court case and gets them back, they're not gonna go into the Federal Reserve. But if there's been a final adjudication and a final forfeiture, yes, those will go into the reserve. Anyway, that's Bitcoin. Okay, so then you got the stockpile. Let me just talk about that. So first of all, like I said, we don't know exactly what digital assets the federal government has. I've seen reports that it might have, for example, 50,000 ETH, which is Ethereum. But again, we need to get to the bottom of that. When we figure out exactly what the assets are, we're gonna move them into the digital stockpile. The purpose of the stockpile is responsible stewardship. It's a place for safekeeping. It's a centralized, you could say, account under the direction of the Secretary of the Treasury. And the Secretary of the Treasury will figure out how to maximize the values of these holdings. Now, there's a couple of important differences between stockpile and reserve. So one is the reserve, the executive order actually provides that the Secretary of the Treasury will not sell the Bitcoin, okay? We're prohibited from selling the Bitcoin. There's no such prohibition with respect to the stockpile. If the Secretary of the Treasury decides that's in the long-term interest of the U.S. to rebalance the portfolio or change the portfolio, the Secretary has the discretion to do that. Jason Calacanis (01:45:08): Okay. Which makes sense because there's a long tail of crypto. We might see something that we don't have the ability to predict the future, and we don't have the staff to sit there and look at these assets every day like a fund manager would and say, what do we do with these? What percentage should it be of the overall stockpile of the overall holdings? So maybe the decision with Ethereum is, hey, this thing's waning, we just put it into Bitcoin because we know that's the more solid one. Yeah, that's what I'm reading into it. David Sacks (01:45:31): Yeah, I mean, I think that that's largely fair. I mean, look, I think that the stockpile should be subject to good portfolio management, right? And fortunately, we have a Secretary of the Treasury who is an extremely successful former hedge fund manager. So he's gonna figure out the best way to manage these assets, and we give him the flexibility to do portfolio management. Jason Calacanis (01:45:51): Whereas like and he to live and die with what he does. He has to make those decisions, and that's going to be, you know, part of how he's evaluated by the President. So hopefully he's going to be sharp about that. David Sacks (01:46:00): Right, but the reserve is different, right? The reserve is just digital Fort Knox. There's one other important difference between stockpile and reserve. So with respect to reserve, the EO provides that the secretaries that I'm talking about, Treasury and Commerce, they're allowed to figure out strategies to accumulate more Bitcoin for the reserve if those strategies are budget neutral and don't cost the taxpayer anything, okay? It's possible that we could. I'm not saying that we will, but it gives them, it authorizes them to acquire more Bitcoin if they can figure out a way to do it that doesn't impact the federal budget or the deficit or taxpayers, right? Jason Calacanis (01:46:39): Okay, well, I had a very simple suggestion for this, which I'll float up the flagpole here and see what you think. You probably, we've talked about it on previous All-In episodes before. How about a simple crypto tax? You know, crypto wants to be legal, you're the crypto czar. Crypto wants to be regulated, they want the rules, they want the rails. Simple suggestion from your bestie, why don't we charge every transaction in the United States 0.01 percent, just about 1 bp in that native currency. So you wanna trade some Solana for Ethereum, for XRP, whatever, put in whatever names you want there. The government says, hey, you wanna have a great, vibrant system here? We're gonna need to take just the most modest of taxes, de minimis, in fact, in the native crypto and put it in the stockpile. This seems to me like a very David Sacks (01:47:26): easy. how taxes start, is that they're described as being very modest. You know, when the income tax started, it only applied to like a thousand Americans. Jason Calacanis (01:47:34): Yes. David Sacks (01:47:34): And the legislators swore up and down that it would never be applied to middle-class people. So I don't particularly like the idea of new taxes, even if it's promised that they just won't affect people very much. That sounds burdensome to me. Look, we have very successful, well, Jason Calacanis (01:47:48): Well, this would, and just so you know, this would be more like a sales tax that would be handled by Coinbase, would be handled by Robinhood, would be handled by those platforms. They would administer it. It would be a transactional tax, not an income tax. So if you have a bunch, it's not a wealth tax and a seizing tax, but I'll let you percolate on it. David Sacks (01:48:04): you can convince the Secretary of Commerce or the Secretary of the Treasury to run with your idea, then it could potentially happen. I mean, they have the flexibility to figure out budget-neutral ways to accumulate Bitcoin. I don't know what those ways are gonna be, but they're creative, they're very successful businessmen, and if they figure out a way to do this, then it can be considered. That's the point. Jason Calacanis (01:48:25): Okay, well, I'll be in the commissary later having lunch with you. You can introduce me. So let me just give you a fastball here. Well, we'll see if it gets in the strike zone. The appearance of impropriety is what people are concerned with. The picking of winners and losers. President Trump was the crypto president. He went and he gave that famous speech. I'm gonna get rid of Gary Gensler. We're gonna make it legal. And to his credit, he has fulfilled that promise, which means, hey. The donor class on that side said, we're gonna back the crypto president, not the anti-crypto team, which means a lot of people who are on Twitter and the socials have donated a lot. They have a lot of holdings. So this appearance, which you've now, I would give you credit, have cleaned up here. Hey. There's two different things going on here, and we're not using taxpayer money. We get all that. But the appearance here is, hey, maybe somebody's gonna benefit. Of course, they came after you first for that without the facts. You were very clear. You cleared all your positions. You sold everything, you divested. So let's make that clear to the dumb-dumbs who are just trying to say that you're personally David Sacks (01:49:27): benefiting from. can address that. Jason Calacanis (01:49:29): Yeah, yeah, because this is ridiculous, yeah. David Sacks (01:49:31): Well, people came out right away and were saying that somehow I was engaged in a scheme to pump my bags or to basically create exit liquidity for myself and billionaire stuff like that. You have to understand that those accusations, I mean, they're accusing me of a crime. Serious crime. Serious crime. And they're doing it with no evidence whatsoever. So these things are basically it's borderline slander. Jason Calacanis (01:49:52): Slander and death. It's slanderous. Yeah. I would say so. David Sacks (01:49:54): In any event, what they didn't know and what I then proceeded to put out there is that I sold all my cryptocurrency prior to day one of the administration because I didn't want to even have the appearance of a conflict. And by the way, I could have waited. I didn't have to do it like that, but I decided to do it and take it upon myself to do that because you just know that when it comes to crypto, there's gonna be a lot of fluctuations in the market. You never want someone to be able to point at one of those fluctuations and say somehow that the cryptos are benefited from that and create a conspiracy theory, which is exactly what basically happened. So first of all, I got rid of all my cryptocurrency prior to day one. Kraft also sold all Jason Calacanis (01:50:32): of. Kraft is the venture firm that you funded that's done David Friedberg (01:50:34): a lot Jason Calacanis (01:50:35): of great work supporting founders here in David Sacks (01:50:36): Silicon Valley. So we basically sold, I think it was around $200 million of crypto, of which around $85 million was personally attributable to myself. And we cleared that before day one, paid taxes on it, and basically so there wouldn't be a conflict. So then the smear shifted in another direction. Was, okay. Well, maybe he doesn't own crypto. Jason Calacanis (01:50:56): Okay. David Sacks (01:50:57): But he's in crypto funds. Okay? And so they pointed to, you know, Bitwise and Multicoin Capital, and I was also in Blockchain Capital. And so then the fund managers came out and one by one all said, actually, David called us over two months ago and said, he's gonna need to divest from our funds. And so we also did that. So yeah. You know, I think basically they've kinda given up on this. But look, it's very easy for me. Jason Calacanis (01:51:20): But why let the facts get in the way of a good slander? David Sacks (01:51:23): Seriously. You know? Jason Calacanis (01:51:24): Full disclosure. You know? You, when you saw me doing the Sequoia Scouts program said, hey. Why don't you do a fund? I'll be the anchor. I'll be your first LP. And I mean, one of the most generous things you've done in our relationship. And I had to have a call with you, you know, weeks ago and say, hey. Okay, you're gonna divest. Okay, fine, no problem. It's not a problem for me. You sell the assets to somebody else. So the way people understand how this mechanically works when you're in a fund, you have no Sacks cannot tell me what to do in the fund. He just put money in it like I put money in other people's funds. They go and invest, and ten years later you get a return. And hopefully that return in a venture firm or private equity firm beats the markets, the public markets, or whatever. But then you can also sell that interest to somebody else. Mechanically, and this takes and have to sell it at 50%, 25% off. And it's painful. You will lose, I estimate, you're going to lose, I don't want to be gratuitous here, but 8 or 9 figures by serving the country for a couple of years. And not only that, the great irony of this is the one thing holding back the industry is regulation, overregulation of AI, and no clear regulation in crypto. Going in to fix the two things that were number one and two on all of our agendas in Silicon Valley in terms of getting returns the next four years. So the sacrifice you're making is extraordinary, and you're making it a better environment, a regulated environment for the rest of us to do commerce. So I just wanna point out that you're losing like double here. David Sacks (01:52:47): Right. Well, let me just underscore something you said. Jason Calacanis (01:52:49): For your service. And I don't know how much they're paying you for David Sacks (01:52:52): this job? Jason Calacanis (01:52:53): What do you get paid? Like $50,000, a hundred grand? David Sacks (01:52:55): I'm an unpaid consultant to the government. Jason Calacanis (01:52:57): Really? Is that actually accurate? David Sacks (01:52:58): You gave Jason Calacanis (01:52:58): no money. David Sacks (01:52:59): I don't want to, don't want to. It's Jason Calacanis (01:53:00): costing you money. David Sacks (01:53:01): No, of course it is, but it's an honor to serve, and it's an honor to be asked to serve. And in particular, it's an honor to serve this president because he really wants to make the country great again. So that's why I'm doing it. But yeah, look, I think it's a lazy and stupid narrative to say that the reason why someone who's already successful in business goes into government is to somehow make more money. I was making money before. This involves a substantial disruption of my business interests, and I have to divest a lot of those business interests. And in divesting, I have to be either a taxpayer or I have to take a significant discount, and it costs you money. So, you know, just lazy narrative that people create, but there's no truth to it. And just to underscore a point that you made a second ago, you were one of the funds I divested from not because you're a crypto fund but because you might have a crypto position. We went through, I think, the Launch Fund's holdings, and I think there was something crypto-related in there. Jason Calacanis (01:53:57): We have one or two that pivoted into crypto, yes. David Sacks (01:53:59): Right, so I just didn't want to have any problem there, so. Jason Calacanis (01:54:03): Listen, this is the nature of the politics we have. People are, you know, it gets very personal, you know that better than anybody. And so, you know, that's why you're here and, hopefully, we can clean this all up and let people know that, hey, the intent here is good. David Sacks (01:54:18): So just to go back to one other point you said about not picking winners and losers, I think that's a very important comment that you made that I see as fundamental to my job. I mean, I think we do think that Bitcoin is special for the reasons I said. Beyond that, we do not want to be in the business of picking and choosing winners in the space. And again, if some other digital asset could prove that it's as decentralized and as secure and as widely accepted as a store of value as Bitcoin, then maybe it could be elevated in the same way that Bitcoin has. I mean, I'm laying out the criteria for you. But look, beyond that, we don't want to be picking winners and losers in the space, and that's not my job. I mean, my job is not to be a regulator or to anoint which ones are good or bad. It's to basically be a policy advisor for innovation. And I'll just tell you the way that I see all the digital assets in this space is that what's fundamental is disclosure. If you're an issuer of a digital asset, you need to disclose, you know, all the material facts about what you're doing, and those facts have to be accurate. You can't lie. My view is that if you, the issuer, lie about something, the government should come down on you like a ton of bricks because that's fraud, okay? But as long as Jason Calacanis (01:55:28): you David Sacks (01:55:28): do this in an honest way, people should be able to trade these things. I understand that you think a lot of them are garbage. You might be right. You could express that view in a trade. But as long as everyone has been above board in terms of disclosure, people should have the right to trade these things. And some are gonna make money, some are gonna lose money. It's about the freedom to basically trade, to hold these assets. The government doesn't want to get in the way of that. It just wants to make sure that the information is out there, that it's honest. And if people lie in order to profit, I'm all in favor of going after them. Jason Calacanis (01:56:00): Well, and you know, we already have a regulated market as an analogy. And when you tell a lie and you sell a share in a company, whether it's a private or a public company, the SEC has a term for that, it's called securities fraud. And we have this new type of device, it's very innovative. It could be an NFT, it could be a trading card, it could be an actual utility token where you burn it in use of a service, or it could be anything. It could be whatever the person describes it as. But what's important is there's an entity with a group of people, I think you would agree, who have said, we have ownership of this. We're incorporated here in the United States, not in Panama, not in the BVI, not in some other place where maybe they're a little faster or looser with regulations. You gotta be here in the U.S. Maybe you have to be insured in some way. Maybe there has to be a board like there does in Delaware or in an LLC. There has to be some person where the buck stops. And if you lie while committing a transaction or taking money for an asset, it would be securities fraud. And yes, people will come down on you like a ton of bricks. And if you promote things and you don't disclose it, well, we have rules about that as well. We saw many celebrities get pinched last time for tweeting about cryptocurrencies. This is the stuff that I think has to stop. I think it should feel more like what we do in angel investing in the private companies and in public companies. So that's your job. When are we gonna see that framework emerge? Because here, you're only like 40, 50 days into this, I think. When do we see the actual bones of a framework? So if I wanna do J coin and I wanna make an angel investing coin, or I wanna do something fun, an NFT collection for All-In or something, when will we have the actual rules of the road? And that's gonna be multiple agencies, right? David Sacks (01:57:46): Yeah, what you're describing is known in Washington, or the area of policy that you're describing is known as market structure. And market structure is about providing a clear framework for market participants. It would define what is a security, what's a commodity, what's simply a collectible. You know, it's property, but it's not a security. And then what are the rules for each category? That's known as market structure. There is a bill that passed the last Congress in the House, but Biden basically, he didn't veto it, but he basically, he and the Democrats stopped it. The Democrats did. It was called FIT 21. And it was authored by French Hill, who's now the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. So we expect that he will be introducing a new version of his bill probably in the next few weeks. I don't think I'm breaking any news by saying this. I think people expect that's gonna provide the framework for market structure. It's gonna provide a lot of the definitions that you're talking about. Now, I agree with your sentiment, okay, but I will say that I might have a different view than you of what is a security, what's not. I mean, to me, collectibles are not securities, but if it's a collectible, you gotta disclaim that, look, this has no intrinsic value, right? That's a collectible. Think about a baseball card. A baseball card is a piece of cardboard. It has no intrinsic value, but the value comes from basically other collectors being willing to buy it from you. And you could just say that that's irrational or whatever. But so look, I think as long as people disclaim that this coin has no intrinsic value, they should be able to issue meme coins. It's a separate question why people would want to buy them. But look, in my view, that's very different than someone who goes out as an issuer and says, I'm issuing a token or a coin that has lots of functionality and has lots of value. And you'll hear some of these guys even say that, hey, our token is more valuable than Bitcoin. You should value it more. Well, if you're promising that and you're saying that it's gonna have certain functionality, you better be telling the truth about it. Jason Calacanis (01:59:45): Yeah. And then we start getting into the Howey Test and people can go look that up if they want. What I will say is there's an educational process that has to come in here, which we've gone through as the United States when people would buy interest in mines. People would buy interest in gold claims, oil fields, and that's when a lot of these regulations came out in the '20s around accreditation. We've spoken about this before. It's a pet peeve of mine, but I think there should be an educational framework here. And I think there should also be some nuance that you could work on specifically with this group of being clear that when you have a ticker symbol associated with something, or you do charts associated with something, you know, it starts to smell like a duck, looks like a duck, it's quacking like a duck. But then in the terms of service, it says, hey, this is a collectible. I think there need to be some ground rules, which maybe it says, hey, these need to be presented in a certain way at the top level. The nuance of disclosure is so important. When I tweet something, if it was an advertiser or a sponsor of All-In or This Week in Startups or any influencer or you would do this? And you said, I love, you know, this brand. You and I both were, well, were investors in Eight Sleep by Am. If we were to tweet about that, as investors, we don't have to disclose, but if we were paid for that, the FTC has rules. You have to put, this is a paid partnership. You cannot confuse consumers. And I think that's where you're gonna have to do a little bit of cleanup work and structure as well, is the disclosure and how this appears. And then also maybe the educational system. So if you wanna own a firearm, if you wanna drive a car, if you wanna be a beautician, and listen, we can talk about overregulation, you gotta take tests. Man, it would just be so much better if consumers could take a 50-question test just to say, hey, they understand what we're talking about here in terms of diversification so they don't YOLO their entire mortgage and house into one crypto. Jason Calacanis (02:01:38): So what are your thoughts on those two issues? Disclosures, how it's presented, and then accreditation, and maybe a path to accreditation, sophisticated investor test is how I refer to it, for all Americans, because 90% of people can't participate in private companies. Your thoughts? David Sacks (02:01:52): Well, disclosure is the key, like I said, I mean, these projects should have to disclose certain things. I think, for example, the token cap table should be disclosed. David Friedberg (02:02:00): Who are David Sacks (02:02:00): the insiders? How much do they have? When are they selling? You know, that's information the market should always know in opinion. Jason Calacanis (02:02:07): And easily done with the technology lauded by the crypto community, the blockchain. This could just be on the blockchain. This was always the problem we had as venture capitalists with, hey, this is a token project. Who owns the tokens? Where are they? When can I sell? When can you use out the insiders? Yes. David Sacks (02:02:22): Yeah. I don't think you have to disclose everyone who owns a token. That could be hard to comply with. But I think you should Jason Calacanis (02:02:26): have to over 5%. David Sacks (02:02:28): Should have to disclose the insiders and their sales plans and their lockups. I would also say how new tokens get created. I mean, if this is a fully centralized token where they can just mint more, people need to know that because there's no scarcity. Right? But if there's somehow an enforcement mechanism and there's enforced scarcity, then that's a different story. So, yeah, these things have to be disclosed. And by the way, I think the market structure bills won't do that. There's a version of this in FIT 21 last Congress, I think it'll be in the next one. And moreover, the SEC is looking right now at these rules and they're gonna create their own frameworks. They're doing an Joe Lonsdale (02:03:04): excellent what's Jason Calacanis (02:03:04): new SEC chief? I was doing some research on him. He's really pro, actually, more Americans being able to invest in privates, private equity, etc. And he's given speeches on it in the past. David Sacks (02:03:15): So the person who's been nominated for the new chair of the SEC is named Paul Atkins, and he has not been confirmed yet. The confirmation hearings still need to happen. Separately, Hester Peirce, who's a commissioner at the SEC, is in charge of Jason Calacanis (02:03:26): I know Hester. I've had her on This Week in Startups a couple of times. She's great. David Sacks (02:03:29): She's excellent. She's very well informed. And she's taken a very sharp lead on all the crypto-related stuff. So I trust her, and I trust the SEC to produce those detailed frameworks that you're talking about. Yeah. I think that my role as, call it, innovation policy advisor is just to kind of make sure that we have the big picture right. And I'm very confident that the SEC, the CFTC, and the legislators are gonna figure out the balance here. Jason Calacanis (02:03:53): Sacks, you gotta go. Really proud of the work here. Congratulations on fitting this all up and presenting a really thoughtful plan that we could all ask you hard questions on. Appreciate you taking the hard questions here on, yeah, the All-In Podcast. Good luck when you do the rest of the media circus. I wonder if I'm gonna be the hardest questioner of you. David Sacks (02:04:13): I hope so. Jason Calacanis (02:04:14): And for people asking, yes, I'm wearing a suit because I am now joining the administration. Big announcement, I'm the official podcaster, the official moderator of the Trump White House. I'm just kidding. David Sacks (02:04:25): People will actually believe you. Alright, man. Listen, got a lot of jokes. Good to see Jason Calacanis (02:04:30): you. Alright. Love you, brother. We'll see you soon. David Sacks (02:04:32): Cheers. Alright. Bye. Jason Calacanis (02:04:33): Alright, everybody. I'm obviously super conflicted. Sacks is my friend of 20 years plus. We're partners here on the All-In Podcast. And of course, I'm rooting for the administration. But, you know, I got that journalist blood in me. I always want to call balls and strikes. I'm gonna, as you just heard, ask hard questions. So if you're wondering where I'm coming from, I'm gonna ask hard questions to my friends because they're doing important work for the American people and for the rest of the people on the planet, candidly. These are important decisions that Sacks is gonna have to make about crypto, AI, that Elon's making with Doge. I'm gonna ask hard questions. That's the way it's gonna be. And so I'm really excited that they're coming on here. They're gonna take the hard questions from me, but they're done in a certain spirit, which is, yes, they're my friends, but they got important jobs. So they do have to answer the hard questions for the American people. And I'm also curious, and we're all curious where they're coming from. So I feel so privileged that they're choosing to come on All-In to face those hard questions. We'll see you all next time on the Speaker 7 (02:06:04): We should all just get a room and just have one big huge Dorothy because they're all just useless. It's like this, like, sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.