AI Doom vs Boom, EA Cult Returns, BBB Upside, US Steel and Golden Votes | All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

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All right It's allowed in the docket but there's kind of a very unique thing going on in the world David everybody knows about AI Dumerism basically people who are concerned Rightfully so that AI could have some you know significant impacts on the world Dario Amodei said he could seek employment spike to 10 to 20 percent the next couple years the 4 % now is where he's talked about here.

He told access that AI companies and government needs to stop sugarcoating what's coming.

He expects a mass elimination of jobs across tech finance, legal and consulting.

Okay, that's the debate we've had here.

And entry level workers will be hit the hardest. He wants lawmakers to take action, and more CEOs to speak out.

Polymarket thinks regulatory capture via this AI Safety Bill is very unlikely us enacts AI Safety Bill in 2025, currently stands at a 13 % chance but Now, Sax, you wanted to discuss this because it seems like there is more at work than just a couple of technologists with, I think we'd all agree, there are legitimate concerns about job destruction or job and employment displacement that could occur with AI.

We all agree on that, where we're seeing robotaxies start to hit the streets, and I don't think anybody believes that being a cab driver's gonna exist as a job 10 years from now.

So there seems to be something here about AI doomerism, but it's being taken to a different level by a group of people, maybe with a different agenda, yeah?

Well, first of all, let's just acknowledge that there are concerns and risks associated with AI.

It is a profound and transformative technology and there are legitimate concerns about where am I lead.

I mean, the future is unknown and that can be kind of scary.

Now, that being said, I think that when somebody makes a pronouncement that says something like 50 % of white -collar jobs are gonna be lost within two years.

That's a level of specificity that I think is just unknowable, and is more associated with an attempt to grab headlines.

And to be frank, if you go back and look at Anthropic's announcement or Dario's announcement, there is a pattern of trying to grab headlines by making the most sensationalist version of what could be a legitimate concern.

If you go back three years ago, they created this concern that AI models could be used to create bioweapons.

And they showed what was supposedly a sample, I think, of clod generating an output that can be used by a bio terrace or something like that.

And on the basis of that, it actually got a lot of play.

And in the UK, Rishi Sunak got very interested in this cause, and that led to the first AI safety summit at Bletchley Park.

So that sort of concern really drove some of the initial AI safety concerns, but it turns out that that particular output was discredited.

It wasn't true. I'm not saying that AI couldn't be used or misused to maybe create a bioweapon one day.

But it was not an imminent threat in the way that it was portrayed.

There have been other examples of this.

Obviously people are concerned about, could the AI develop into a superintelligence that grows beyond our control?

Could it lead to widespread job loss?

I mean these are legitimate things to worry about but I think these concerns are being hyped up to a level that there's simply no evidence for and the question is why and I think that there is an agenda here that people should be concerned about.

So let's start with maybe Freiburg Things that we all agree on here.

There are millions of people who drive trucks and and Ubers and lifts and door dashes.

You would I think agree, the majority of that work in but five to 10 years just to put a number on it will be done by soft driving, robots, cars, et cetera.

Trucks, yeah, Dave?

I think that might be the wrong way to look at it or I wouldn't look at it that way and maybe I'll just frame it a different way.

Please. If I'm deploying capital, let's say I'm a CEO of a company and I can now have software that's written by AI, does that mean that I'm gonna fire 80 % of my software engineers?

Basically it means one software engineer can output call it 20, 50 times as much software as they previously could by using that software generation tool.

So the return on the invested capital, the money I'm spending to pay the salary of that software engineer is now much much higher.

I'm getting much more out of that person because of the unlocking of the productivity, because of the AI tool that I previously could.

So when you have a higher ROI on deployed capital, do you deploy more capital or less capital?

Suddenly you have this opportunity to make 20 times on your money versus two times on your money.

If you have a chance to make 20 times on your money, you're deploy a lot more capital.

And this is the story of technology going back to the first invention, of the first technology of the caveman.

When we have this ability to create leverage, humans have a tendency to do more, and invest more, not less.

And I think that's what's about to happen.

I think we see this across the spectrum.

People assumed, oh my gosh, software can now be written with one person.

You can create a whole startup.

You don't need to have venture capital anymore.

In fact, what I think we're gonna see is much more venture capital flowing into new tech startups, much more capital being deployed because the return on the investment capital is so, so, so much higher because of AI.

So generally speaking, I think that the premise that AI destroys jobs is wrong because it doesn't take into account the significantly higher return on invested capital, which means more capital is gonna be deployed, which means actually far more jobs are gonna be created, far more work is gonna get done.

And so I think that the counterbalancing effect is really hard to see without taking that Zoomed out perspective.

To respond to Sax's point, I do think any time you see a major change socially, societally, there's a vacuum.

How is the system gonna operate in the future?

And any time there's a vacuum in the system, a bunch of people will rush in and say, I know how to fill that vacuum, I know what to do, because I am smarter, more educated, more experienced, more knowledgeable, more moral.

I have some superiority over everyone else, and therefore, I should be in a position to define how the new system should operate.

So there's a natural kind of power vacuum that emerges any time there's a major transition like this, and there will be a scrambling and a fighting and a whole bunch of different representation.

Typically fear is a great way of getting into power, and people are gonna try and create new control systems because of the transition that's underway.

Okay, Shammoth. You're gonna see this around the world.

Yeah. Shammoth, it's pretty clear.

You know, Freeberg didn't answer this question specifically so I'm gonna give it to you again.

And you would agree jobs like driving things are gonna go away if we had to pick a number, somewhere between five and 10 years, the majority of those would go away?

He's positioning, hey, a lot more jobs would be created because there'll be all these extra venture capital and opportunities, et cetera.

But job displacement will be very real.

And we're seeing, I think, job displacement now.

You had a tweet recently, you were talking about entry level jobs and how that seems to be going away in the white collar space.

So where do you land on job displacement?

Freeburg's already kind of given the big picture here, but let's step back to, for people who are listening who have relatives who drive Uber or a truck or are graduating from college and want to go work at, you know, I don't know, the Magnificent Seven or in tech, and they're not hiring.

And we know the reason they're not hiring, because they're leaning into AI.

So let's talk about the job displacement in the medium term.

I'm going to ignore your question, Great.

Why not, why should you be any different than the other now -contents on this podcast?

Hi, hi. There's two people not wanting to answer the question about job displacement, an interesting trend.

Hold on, no, no, no, no, we'll go back to that.

Let me start by just saying that it seems that these safety warnings tend to be pretty coincidental with key fundraising moments in Anthropic's journey.

So let's just start with that.

And if you put that into an LLM and try to figure out if what I just said was true, It's interesting, but you find it's relatively accurate.

I think that there is a very smart business strategy here.

I've said a version of this about the other companies at the foundational model layer that aren't meta and Google, because meta and Google, frankly, sit on these money gushers where they just generate so much capital that they can fund these things to infinity.

But if you're not them, so if you're OpenAI or if you're Anthropic, you have to find an angle.

And I think the angles are slightly different for both But I think what this suggests is that there's a pattern that exists and I think that that explains some of the framing of what we see in the press Jason and why we get these exaggerated claims perfect, so There are people who are doing this for nefarious reasons is I guess where you're sort of getting out here It's a way to it's not a very good.

It's smart. It's smart if you fall short of you Yeah, okay.

Well, there's also an industrial complex according to some folks that are Backing this if you've heard of effective altruism that was like this movement of a bunch of I don't know, I guess they consider themselves intellectual sacks and they were kind of backing a large swath of of organizations that I guess we would call in the industry, AstroTurfing, or what do they call it when you make so many of these organizations that they're not real in politics and flooding the zone perhaps?

So if you were to look at this article here, Nick, I think you have the AI existential risk industrial complex graphic there.

It seems like a group of people, according to this article, have backed to the tune of 1 .6 billion, a large number of organizations to scare the bejesus out of everybody and make YouTube videos, TikToks.

And they've made a map of it.

There's some key takeaways here from that article where it says here that it's an inflated ecosystem.

There's a great deal of redundancy, same names, acronyms, logos with only minor changes, same extreme talking points, same group of people, just with different titles, same funding source.

There's a funding source called Open Philanthropy, which was funded by Dustin Moskowitz, who is one of the Facebook billionaires.

Jonathan, you worked with him, right?

I mean, he was wasn't he like Zuck's roommate at Harvard or something?

And he's one of the first engineers made a lot of money.

So he, he's an EA and he funded this group called Open Philanthropy, which then has become the feeder for essentially all of these other organizations, which are almost different fronts to basically the same underlying EA ideology.

And what's interesting is that the guy who set this up for Dustin, Holden Karnofsky, who is a major effective altruist and was doling out all the money.

He's married to Dario's sister and she's, I guess, associated with EA and she was one of the cofounders of Anthropic.

So these are not coincidences.

I mean, the reality is there's a very specific ideological and political agenda here.

Now, what is that agenda?

It's basically global AI governance, if you will.

They want AI to be highly regulated, but not just at the level of the nation state, but I'd say internationally, supernationally.

To what end? Well, if you just do a quick search on global compute governance, it'll tell you what the key aspects are.

So number one, they want regulation of computational resources.

This includes access to GPU use.

They want AI safety and security regulation.

They want international, you call them globalist agreements, and they want ethical and societal considerations, or policy built into this.

Now, what does that sound like?

That sounds a lot to me, like what the Biden administration was pursuing.

Specifically, we had that Biden executive order on AI, which is a hundred pages of.

Burnson regulation that was designed to promote AI safety, but had all these DEI requirements.

So, you know, it led to WokeAI.

You remember when Google launched Black George Washington, so forth?

They had the Biden diffusion rule, which created this global licensing framework to sell GPUs all over the world.

So extreme restrictions on proliferation of servers of computing power.

They created what's called the AI Safety Institute, and they again fostered these international AI summits.

So if you actually look at what the Biden administration was tangibly doing in terms of policy, and you look at what EA's agenda is with respect to global compute governance, they were pushing hard on these fronts.

And now if you look at the level of personnel, they were a very, very powerful Biden staffers who now all work and enthropic.

So probably the most powerful Biden staffer on AI over the past four years was a lawyer named Tarun Chhabra, and he now works at Anthropic for Dario.

Elizabeth Kelley, who was the founding director of the AI Safety Institute in the government, now works at Anthropic.

Like I mentioned, Dario's sister is married to Holden Karnofsky, who doles out all the money to these EA organizations.

So if you were to do something like create a network map, you would see very quickly that there's three keynotes here.

There's the effective altruist movement, of which Sam Bankman free is the most notable member but which I think Dustin Moss, which is now the main funder, there's the Biden administration and like the key staffers, and then you've got entropic.

And it's a very tightly wound network.

Now, why does this?

Yeah, because also the goals I think is Yes, well, So the goal like I said is global compute governance.

It's basically establishing national and then international regulations of AI.

Now, here's the - But they would claim, let me just pause here for a minute, they would claim the reason they're doing it, and so we'll save if we believe this or not, but they are concerned about job destruction in the short term.

They're also concerned as science fiction as it is that the AI when we get to a sort of generalized super intelligence is going to kill humanity, that this is a non -zero chance.

Elon has said this before, they've sort of taken it to almost like a certainty.

We're gonna have so many of these general intelligences - Isn't it odd that they only believe that when they're raising money?

Well, that's what I'm sort of getting at.

I think they believe it all the time, but maybe the press releases are timed for the fundraisers.

But yet, they're building really great products.

Let me answer that.

So Jake, look, I mean - It is a great product, Claude kicks ass.

I'm more interested in the political dimension of this.

I'm not bashing a specific product or company.

But look, I think that there is some non zero risk of AI growing into a super intelligence that's beyond our control.

They have a name for that.

They call it x risk or existential risk.

I think it's very hard to put a percentage on that.

I'm willing to acknowledge that is a risk.

You know, I think about that all the time.

And I do think we should be concerned about it.

But there's two problems, I think, with this approach. Number one is x risk is not the only kind of risk.

I would say that China winning the AI race is a huge risk.

I don't really want to see a CCP AI running the world.

And if you hobble our own innovation, our own AI efforts in the name of stomping out every possibility of x risk, then you'll probably end up losing the AI race to China because they're not going to abide by the same regulations.

So again, you can't optimize for solving only one risk, while ignoring all the others.

And I would say the risk of China winning the AI race is, you know, it might be like 30%.

Whereas I think x risk is probably a much lower percentage.

So there are there there are other risks to worry about.

And I do think that they are single mindedly focused on scaring people with some of these headlines around first it was the bio weapons, then it was the super intelligence now it's the job loss.

And I think it's a tried and true tactic of people who want to give more power to the government to scare the population, right.

Because if you can scare the population and make them fearful, then they will cry out for the government to solve the problem.

And that's what I see here, is that you've got this elaborate network of front organizations which are all motivated by this ideology.

they're funded by a hardcore leftist. And by the way, I became aware of Dustin's politics because of the Chase Aboudin recall.

I found out that he was a big funder of Chase Aboudin.

Remember this? Dustin Mossimus and Kerry Tuna, his wife.

Also Reid Hastings, just joined the board of Anthropic.

Remember when he, back in 2016, tried to drive Peter Thiel off of the board of Facebook for supporting Trump?

So these are like committed leftists, they're Trump haters.

But the point is that these are people who fundamentally believe in empowering government to the maximum extent.

Now, my problem with that is I actually think that probably the single greatest dystopian risk associated with AI is the risk that government uses it to control all of us.

to be like you end up in some sort of Orwellian future where AI is controlled by the government and out of all the risks we've talked about that's the only one for which I've seen tangible evidence.

So in other words if you go back to last year when we had the whole Woke AI there was plenty of evidence that the people who were creating these products were infusing their left -wing or Woke values into the product to the point where it was lying to all of us, and it was rewriting history.

And there was plenty of evidence that the Biden EO was trying to enshrine that idea.

It was basically trying to require DEI be infused into AI models, and it wanted to anoint two or three winners in this AI race.

So I'm quite convinced that prior to Donald Trump winning the election, we were on a path of global compute governance, where two or three big AI companies are going to be anointed as the winners, and the quid pro quo is that they were going to infuse those AI models with woke values and there was plenty of evidence for that.

You look at the policies, you look at the models, this was not a theoretical concern.

This was real. And I think the only reason why we've moved off of that trajectory is because of Trump's election, but we could very easily be moved back onto that trajectory.

If you were to look at all three opinions here and put them together, they could all be true at the same time.

You've got a number of people, some might call useful idiots, some might call just people with God complexes who believe they know how the world should operate.

Effective altruism kind of falls into that.

Oh, we can make a formula, that's their kind of idea, where we can tell you where to put your money, rich people, in order to create the most good and wear these enlightened individuals with the best view of the world.

They might be, who knows?

Maybe they're the smartest kids in the room, but they're kind of delusional.

The second piece I'll do here is I think you are absolutely correct, Chamath, that there are people who have economic interests who are then using the who's useful idiots and or delusional people with God complexes to serve their need, which is to be one of the three winners and then sac inherent to all of that as they have a political ideology.

So why not use these people with delusions of grandeur in order to secure the bag for their companies, for their investments and secure their candidates into office so that they can block further people from getting H100s because they literally want to - By the way, that's the part that's very smart about what they're doing because it's not like they're illiquid.

They're full of liquidity in the sense that you're bringing in people that are very technically capable and you're setting up these funding rounds where a large portion goes right back out the door via secondaries.

And so there's all these people that are making money having this worldview.

And so to your point, Jason, it's going to cement that worldview and then they are going to propagate it even more aggressively into the world.

So, I think the threshold question is should you fear government over regulation or should you fear autocomplete?

And I would say, you should not be so afraid of the autocomplete right now.

It may get so good that it's an AGI, but right now it's an exceptionally good autocomplete.

Yeah, and I just think that, again, it's a tried and true tactic of people who want to give immeasurably more power to the government to try and make people afraid and they stampede people into these policies, right?

It gives them power.

Exactly. Now, why do I think this is important to talk about?

On last week's show I talked about the trip to the Middle East and how we started doing these AI acceleration partnerships with the Gulf states, who have a lot of resources, a lot of money, and they're intensely interested in AI.

And the Biden administration was pushing them away.

It basically said you can't have the chips, you can't build data centers, and it was pushing them into the arms of China.

The thing that I thought was so bizarre is that the various groups and organizations and former Biden staffers who wrote this policy have been agitating in Washington, and they've been trying to portray themselves as China Hawks, and I'm like, wait, this doesn't make any sense, because this policy, again, there's basically two camps in this new Cold War.

It's US versus China.

You can pull the Gulf States into our orbit or you can drive them into China's orbit, so this, to me, just didn't make any sense, and what's happened is that, frankly, you've got this EA ideology that's really motivating things, which is a desire to lock down compute, right?

They're afraid of proliferation.

They're afraid of diffusion.

That's really their motivation.

And they're trying to rebrand themselves as China Hawks because they know that in the Trump administration, that idea is just not going to get much purchase, right?

And your position as czar is a level playing field.

people compete and the good guys you know the West should be supported to hit artificial general intelligence as fast as possible so the bad guys China don't get it first that that's a well open competition I don't know if I would frame it around a GI specifically but what I would say is that look I think our policy should be to win the AI race because the alternative is that China wins it and that would be very bad for our economy and our military how do you when they are race, you got to out innovate, you got to have innovation.

That means we can't have over regulation red tape, we got to build out the most AI infrastructure data centers, energy, which includes our partners.

And then third, I think it means AI diplomacy, because we want to build out the biggest ecosystem, we know that biggest app store wins biggest ecosystem wins, right.

And the policies under the Biden administration were doing the opposite of all those things.

But again, you have to go back to what was driving that and it was not driven by this China Hawk mentality.

That is now a convenient rebranding it was driven by this EA ideology this doomerism and So this is why I'm talking about it was I want to expose it because I think a lot of people on The Republican side don't realize where the etiology is really coming from and who's funding it They're obviously Trump haters and they need to be rumored quite frankly They need to be lumbered.

Freeburg, I want to come back around again because I respect your opinion on how close we are to turning certain corners, especially in science.

So I understand big picture.

You believe that the opportunity will be there.

Hey, we got people out of fields in the agricultural revolution, we put them into factories, industrial revolution, then we went to this information revolution.

So, your position is we will have a similar transition and it'll be okay.

But do you not believe that the speed, because we've talked about this privately and publicly on the pod, that this speed, the velocity at which these changes are occurring, you would agree, are faster than the Industrial Revolution.

Much faster than the information revolution.

So, let's one more time talk about job displacement and I think the real concern here for a group of people who are buying into this ideology is specifically unions, job displacement.

This is something the EU cares about.

This is something the Biden administration cares about.

If truck drivers lose their jobs, just like we went to bat previously for coal miners and there were only seventy five thousand or a hundred fifty thousand in the country at the time, but it became the national dialog.

Oh my God. The coal miners.

How fast is this going to happen?

one more time on drivers specifically.

Okay, coders, you think there'll be more code to write, but driving, there's not gonna be more driving to be done, so is this time different in terms of the velocity of the change and the job displacement in your mind, Friedberg?

The velocity is greater, but the benefit will be faster.

So the benefit of the Industrial Revolution, which ultimately drove lower -price products and broader availability of products through manufacturing, was one of the key outputs of that revolution, meaning that we created a consumer market that largely didn't exist prior.

Remember, prior to the Industrial Revolution, if you wanted to buy a table or some clothes, they were handmade.

They were kind of artisanal.

Suddenly the Industrial Revolution unlocked the ability to mass produce things in factories and that dropped the cost and the availability and the abundance of things that everyone wanted to have access to but they otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford. So suddenly everyone could go and buy blankets and clothes and canned food and all of these incredible things that started to come out of this industrial revolution that happened at the time.

And I think that folks are underestimating and under -realizing the benefits, at this stage, of what's going to come out of the AI revolution, and how it's ultimately going to benefit people's availability of products, cost of goods, access to things.

So the counterbalancing force, JCal, is deflationary, which is, let's assume that the cost of everything comes down by half.

That's a huge relief on people's need to work 60 hours a week.

Suddenly you only need to work 30 hours a week, and you can have the same lifestyle or perhaps even a better lifestyle than you have today.

So the counterargument to your point, and I'll talk about the pace of change and specific jobs in a moment.

But the counterargument to your point is that there's going to be this cost reduction and abundance that doesn't exist today.

Give an example, let's give some examples that we could see.

Automation and food prep, so we're seeing a lot of restaurants install robotic systems to make food.

And people are like, oh, job loss, job loss.

But let me just give you the counter side.

The counter side is that the cost of your food drops in half.

So suddenly, all the labor costs it's built into making the stuff you want to pick up.

Everyone's freaking out right now about inflation.

Oh my god, it's eight dollars for a cup of coffee, it's eight dollars for a latte.

This is crazy, crazy, crazy.

What if that drops down to two bucks?

You're gonna be like, man, this is pretty awesome.

with good service and good experience and don't make it all dystopian, but suddenly there's going to be this like incredible reduction or deflationary effect in the cost of food.

And we're already starting to see automation play its way in the food system to bring inflation down.

And that's going to be very powerful for people.

Shout out to Iza, CloudKishen, and CaffeX, we all took swings at the bat at that exact concept is that it could be done better, cheaper, faster.

One of the amazing things of these vision action models that are now being employed is you can rapidly learn using vision systems and then deploy automation systems in those sorts of environments where you have a lot of kind of repetitive tasks that the system can be trained and installed in a matter of weeks.

And historically, that would've been a whole startup that would've taken years to figure out how to get all these things together and custom program it, custom code it.

So the flip side is when Uber hit, those people were not drivers.

Think about the jobs that all those people had prior to Uber coming to market and then the reason they drove for Uber is they could make more money driving for Uber or now driving for Uber Eats or DoorDash and the flexibility.

So their lifestyle got better, they had all of this more control in their life, their incomes went up, and so there's a series of things that you are correct won't make sense in the future from a kind of standard of work perspective, but the right way to think about it is opportunity gets created.

New jobs emerge, new industry, new income, costs go down.

And so I keep harping on this that it's really hard today to be very prescriptive to Sacks' point about what exactly is around the corner.

But it is an almost certainty that what is around the corner is more capital will be deployed, that means the economy grows, that means there's a faster deployment of growth of new jobs, new opportunities for people to make more money, to be happier in the work that they do.

And the flip side being things are gonna get cheaper.

So I mean we're waxing philosophical here, but I think it's really key because you can focus on the one side of the coin and miss the whole other.

and that's what a lot of journalists and commentators and fear monger is doing, they miss that other side.

Got it, well said, Friedberg, well said.

I think I've heard Satya turn this question around about job loss, saying, well, do you believe that GDP's gonna grow by 10 % a year?

Because what are we talking about here?

In order to have the kind of disruption that you're talking about, where, I don't know, 10 to 20 % of knowledge workers end up losing their jobs, AI is going to be such a profound force that it's going to have to create GDP growth like we've never seen before.

That's right. So it's easier for people to say, oh, well, 20 % of people are going to lose their jobs, but wait, we're talking about a world where the economy is growing 10 % every year.

Like, do you actually believe that's going to happen?

That's more income for everyone.

That's new jobs being created.

It's an inevitability.

We've seen this in every revolution.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, 60 % of Americans worked in agriculture.

And when the tractor came around and factories came around, those folks got to get out of doing manual labor in the fields, where they were literally, you know, tilling the fields by hand, and they got to go work in a factory where they didn't have to do manual labor to move things.

Yeah, they did things in the factory with their hands, but it wasn't about grunt work in the field all day in the sun, and it became a better standard of living.

It became new jobs, and today we think about.

It became a five -day work week, went from a seven -day, six -four seven -day work week to five.

Yeah, and from seven -day, and today, And now, I think the next phase is we're gonna end up in less than 30 hours a week with people making more money and having more abundance for every dollar that they earn with respect to what they can purchase and the lives they can live.

That means more time with your family, more time with your friends, more time to explore interesting opportunities.

So we've been through this conversation a number of times.

I know I'm not being too prescriptive.

No, it's important to bring it up, I think, and really unpack it because the fear is peaking now, Sachs.

People are using this moment in time to scare people that hey, the jobs are gonna go away and they won't come back.

But what we're seeing on the ground, Sachs, is I'm seeing many more startups getting created and able to accomplish more tasks and hit a higher revenue per employee than they did in the last two cycles.

So it used to be you tried to get to a quarter million in revenue per employee than 500.

Now we're regularly seeing startups hit a million dollars in revenue per employee, something that was rarefied air previously, which then speaks to your point, Freeburg, that there'll be more abundance.

There'll be more capital generated, more, more capital deployed, because what capital deployed for more opportunities, but you're going to need to be more resilient, I think, yeah, I think it's actually very hard to completely eliminate a human job.

The ones that you cited, and Jake, how you keep signing the same ones?

Cuz I actually don't think there's that many that fit in this category, the drivers, and maybe level on customer support.

Because those jobs are so monolithic.

But when you think about even like what a salesperson does, right?

It's like, yes, they spend a lot of time with prospects, but they also spend time negotiating contracts and they spend time doing post -sale implementation and follow up, and they spend time learning the product and giving feedback.

I mean, it's a multifaceted job and you can use AI to automate pieces of it.

But to eliminate the whole job is actually very hard. And so I just think this idea that boom, 20 % of the workforce is going to be unemployed in two years.

I just don't think that it's going to work that way.

But look, if there is widespread job disruption, then obviously, the government's come to react and we're going to be in a very different societal order.

But my point is, you want the government to start reacting now before this is actually Yeah, we don't need to be pre cogs and predicted.

Yeah, it's a total power grab.

It's a total power grab to give the government and these organisations more power before the risk is even manifested.

And let me say this as well.

With respect to all these regulations that were created, the 100 page by neo and the 200 page diffusion rule, none of these Regulations solve the x -risk problem.

None of these things actually would prevent the most existential risks that we're talking about.

They don't sign for alignment.

They don't sign for the kill switch. Yeah, when someone actually figures out how to solve that problem, I'm all ears.

You know, look, I'm not cavalier about these risks.

I understand that they exist, but I'm not in favor of the fearmongering, I'm not in favor of giving all this power to the government before we even know how to solve these problems. Chamath, you did a tweet about entry -level jobs being toast, so I think there is a nuance here and both parties could be correct.

I think the job disruption is happening as we speak.

I'll just give one example and then drop to you, Chamath.

One job in startups that's not driving a car or super entry -level was people would hire consultants to do recruitment and to write job descriptions.

Now I was at a journal last night talking to a bunch of founders here in Singapore and I said, how many people have used AI to write a job description?

everyone's hand went up, I said, how many of you with that job description, was that job description better than you could have written or any consultant?

And they all said yes.

So 100 % AI is better at that job.

That was a job, a high -level HR recruitment job or an aspect of its act.

So that was half the job, a third of the job to your point.

The chores are being automated.

So I do think we're gonna see entry level jobs, Chamath, the ones that get people into an organization.

Maybe they're going away.

And was that your point of your tweet?

Which we'll pull up right here.

If a GPT is a glorified autocomplete, how did we used to do glorified autocomplete in the past?

It was with new grads.

New grads were our autocomplete.

And to your point, the models are good enough that it effectively allows a person to rise in their career without the need of new grad grist for the mill, so to speak.

so I think the reason why companies aren't hiring nearly as many new grads is that the The folks that are already in a company can do more work with these and I think that that's a very good thing So you're generally gonna see OpEx as a percentage of revenue shrink naturally and you're going to generally see Revenue per employee go up naturally But it's going to create a tough job market for new grads in the established organizations And so what should new grads do, they should probably steep themselves in the tools and go to younger companies or start a company.

I think that's the only solution for them.

Bingo. The most important thing for whether there are jobs available for new grads or not is whether the economy is booming.

So obviously, in the wake of a financial crisis, the jobs dry up cuz everyone's cost cutting.

And those jobs are the first ones to get cut.

But if the economy is booming, then there's going to be a lot more job creation.

And so again, if AI is this driver and enabler of tremendous productivity, that's going to be good for economic growth, and I think that that will lead to more company formation, more company expansion, and at the same time that you're getting more productivity.

Now, to give an example, one of the things I see a lot discussed online about these coding assistants is that they make junior programmers much better, because if you're already like a 10X programmer very experienced, you already knew how to do everything, and you could argue that the people who benefit the most are the entry -level coders who are willing to now embrace the new technology, and it makes them much more productive.

So in other words, it's a huge leveler.

And it takes an entry level coder and makes them 5X or 10X better.

So look, this is an argument I see online.

The point is just I don't think we know how this cuts yet.

I agree. And I just think there's like this this doomerism is premature and it's not a coincidence that it's being funded and motivated by this hardcore ideological element.

I'll tell you my hiring experience.

we have about 30 people at 80 90 and the way that I have found it to work the best as you have senior people act as mentors and then you have an overwhelming corpus of young very talented people who are AI native and if you don't find that mix what you have instead are L7s from Google and Amazon and meta who come to you with extremely high salary demands and stock demands and they just don't thrive and part of why they don't thrive is that they push back on the tools and how you use them they push back on all these things that the tools help you get to faster this is why I think it's so important

for young folks to just jump in with two feet and be AI native from the jump because you're much more hireable frankly to the to the emergent company and the bigger companies you'll have a lot of these folks that see the writing on the wall people may not want to adapt as fast as otherwise.

Another way, for example, that you can measure this is if you look inside your company on the productivity lift of some of these coding assistance for people as a distribution of age, what you'll see is the younger people leverage it way more and have way more productivity than older folks.

And I'm not saying that as an ageist comment.

I'm saying that as an actual reflection of how people are reacting to these tools.

What you're describing is a paradigm shift. It is a big leap.

is you know it's like when i went to college when i took computer science it was object oriented programming it was like c++ it was compiled languages it was gnarly it was nasty work and then you have these high level abstracted languages and i used to remember at facebook i would just get so annoyed because i was like why is everybody using php and python this is like not even real but i was one of these old light lights who didn't understand that i just had to take the leap and what it did was it grew the top of the funnel of the number of developers by 10x, and as a result, what you had were all

of these advancements for the internet.

I think what's happening right now is akin to the same thing where you're going to grow the number of developers upstream by 10x, but in order to embrace that, you just have to jump in with two feet.

If you're very rigid in how you think a job should be done technically, I think you're just going to get left behind.

Just a little interesting statistic there.

Microsoft announced 6 ,000 job layoffs, about 3 % of their workforce, while putting up record profits while being an incredible cash position.

Total confirmation bias, it's like now every time there's a layoff announced when people try to tie it to AI to feed this doomer story, I don't think that's an AI story.

Well, actually I think...

I don't think it's an AI story.

I think it is, because the people they're eliminating are management.

I think the management layer becomes less necessary.

Five seconds ago you were saying it was entry level employees.

Now you're saying it's management.

This is total confirmation bias.

No, no, I think those are two areas that specifically get eliminated.

at entry level it's too hard it's too hard to give them the grunt work and then for the managers who are online it's that I've been there for 20 years hold on let me finish though for those people I think they are unnecessary in this new AI what are you talking about what is the AI agent that's doing management right now in companies oh when you really doesn't even make sense oh no it totally does there are tools now that are telling you this is these are the most productive people in the organization from off just outlined Who's shipping the most etcetera who's using the tools and then people

are saying? Well, why do we have all these highly priced people who are not actually shipping code?

Who are else? Totally following for some sort of narrative here.

This makes no sense.

I don't think I am.

Yeah Let me be very clear what I'm saying.

What I am saying is AI natives are extremely productive.

They use these tools.

They're very fast with them.

I Think it's very reductive But what you see is, the older or more established in your career you are, in technical roles, what I see is that it's harder and harder for folks like that to embrace these tools in the same way.

Now, how does it play out in terms of jobs?

I think that just these tools are good enough where the net new incremental task -oriented role that would typically go to a new grad, a lot of that can be defrayed by these models.

That's what I'm saying very clearly specifically.

And I don't think that speaks to management.

And I agree with Sacks, it does nothing to do with management.

But if Sergey said, Freeburg, when he came to our F1, that management would be the first thing to go, I was talking to some entrepreneurs last night, again, here in Singapore, and they are taking all the GitHub and Jira cards and things that have been submitted, plus all the Slack messages in their organization, and they're putting them into an LLM and having it write management reports of who is the most productive in the organization.

And in the new version of Windows, it's monitoring your entire desktop, Freeburg.

management is going to know who in the organization is actually doing work, what work they're doing, and what the result of that work is through AI.

That is the future of management.

And you take out all bias, all loyalty, and the AI is going to do that.

I couldn't disagree with you more, Sax on that, but Freiburg, you wanted to wrap this up here on this topic?

That wasn't my point.

My point is that AI, managers are not losing their job because AI is replacing them.

I didn't say that AI wouldn't be a valuable tool for managers to use.

Sure, AI will be a great tool for managers, but we're not anywhere near the point where managerial jobs are being eliminated because they're getting replaced by AI agents.

We're still at the chat bot stage of this.

Literally, Sergey said he took their internal slack, went into like a dev conversation said, who are the underrated people in this organization who deserve a raise?

And it gave him the right answer.

Right. That doesn't allow you to cut 6 ,000 people.

I think it's happening as we speak.

It's just not over.

You've fell for this narrative.

You grasped onto this Microsoft restructuring, where they eliminated 6 ,000 roles, and you're trying to attribute that to AI now.

I think it has to do with AI.

I think management is looking at it saying, we are going to replace these positions with AI, we might as well get rid of them now.

It is in flux, we'll see who's right in the coming months.

Can I make another comment?

Freebird, let's open this up here so we can get onto the next topic.

This is a great topic.

This has been awesome.

I wanna make one last point, which I think, And Sax, you may not appreciate this, so we can have a healthy argument about this.

I think in the same way that all of this jobs are gonna get lost to AI fear mongering, there's a similar narrative that I think is a false narrative around there's a race in AI that's underway between nation states.

And the reason I think it's false is if I asked you guys the question, who won the Industrial Revolution, the Industrial Revolution benefited everyone around the world, there are factories, and there's a continuous effort, and continuous improvement in manufacturing processes worldwide that is a continuation of that revolution.

Similar if I asked who won the internet race.

There were businesses built out of the U .S., businesses built out of China, businesses built out of India and Europe that have all created value for shareholders, created value for consumers, changed the world, et cetera.

And I think the same is gonna happen in AI.

I don't think that there is a finish line in AI.

I think AI is a new paradigm of work, a new paradigm of productivity, a new paradigm of business, of the economy, of livelihoods, of pretty much everything every interaction humans have with ourselves and the world around us will have in its substrate ai, and as a result I think it's going to be this continuous process of improvement.

So I'm not sure look there are different models and you can look at the performance metrics of models, but you can get yourself spun up into a tizzy over which model is ahead of the others, which one's going to quote get to the finish line first, but I think at the end of the day the abundance and the economic prosperity that will arise from the continuous performance improvements that come out of AI and AI development will benefit all nation states and actually could lead to a little bit more of a less resource constrained world where we're all fighting over limited resources and there's nation state

definitions around who has access to what and perhaps more abundance which means more peace and less of this kind of resource driven world.

Sax, your thought on the Kumbaya Theory?

Yeah, exactly. I'll partially agree in the sense that I don't think the AI race is a finite game.

It's an infinite game.

I agree that there's no finish line, but that doesn't mean there's not a race going on.

So for example, an arms race would be a classic example of a competition between countries to see who is stronger, to basically amass power, and they might be neutralizing each other.

The balance of power may stay in equilibrium, even though both sides feel the need to constantly up -level their arms, their power.

And so I think that, to use the term that Meir Schimer used at the All In Summit, we are in an iron cage.

The US and China are the two leading countries in the world economically, militarily, technologically.

They both care about their survival.

The best way to ensure your survival in a self -help world is by being the most powerful.

And so these are great powers who care a lot about the balance of power.

And they will compete vigorously with each other to maintain the greatest balance of power between them.

And high tech is a major dimension of that competition and within high tech AI is the most important field.

So look, there is going to be an intense competition around AI.

Now, the question is, how does that end up?

I mean, it could end up in a tie or in, it could end up in a situation where both countries benefit, maybe open source wins, maybe neither side gains a decisive advantage, but they're absolutely going to compete because neither one can afford to take the risk that the other one will develop a decisive advantage.

Percenor's dilemma.

Nuclear proliferation is a good analogy.

I would argue nuclear deterrence led to a more peaceful world in the 20th century.

I mean, is that fair to say, Sax, that ultimately ...

What happened with nuclear is that the actual underlying technology hit, you know, an asymptote.

Right. They plateaued, right.

And so we ended up in a situation where in the case of the United States versus Soviet Union, where both sides had enough nukes to blow up the world many times over and there wasn't really that much more to innovate.

So, you know, the underlying technological competition had ended, the dynamic was more stable, and they were able to reach an arms control framework to sort of control the arms race, right?

I think AI is a little different.

We're in a situation right now where the technology is changing very very rapidly and it's potentially on some sort of exponential curve.

And so therefore being a year ahead, even six months ahead could result in a major advantage.

I think under those conditions both sides are going to feel the need to compete very vigorously.

I don't think they can sign up...

But this is a system of productivity, right?

For an agreement to slow each other down.

But nuclear was not a system of productivity.

It was not a system of economic growth, it was a system of literally destruction.

and this is quite different, this is a system of making more with less which unleashes benefits to everyone in a way that perhaps should be calming down the conflict between nation states.

You've gotta admit that there is a potential dual use here.

There's no question that the armies of the future are gonna be drones and robots and they're gonna be AI powered.

And as long as that's the case, these countries are gonna compete vigorously to have the best AI and they're gonna want their leaders or national champions or starps and so forth to win the race.

What's the worst case, Sax, if China wins the AI race, what is the worst case scenario?

Ask what it means first. That's literally what I'm asking.

Like, what would that scenario be?

They invade America and they dominate us forever, and we're a Chinese citizen.

What does it mean to win?

To me, it would mean that they achieve a decisive advantage in AI such that we can't leapfrog them back.

And an example of this might be something like 5G, where where Huawei somehow leapfrogged us, got to 5G first and disseminated it through the world.

They weren't concerned about diffusion.

They were interested in promulgating their technology throughout the world.

So if the Chinese win AI, they will sell more products and services around the globe than the US.

This is where we have to change our mindset towards diffusion.

I would define winning as the whole world consolidates around the American tech stack.

They use American hardware in data centers, that again are fundamentally powered by American technology.

And just look at market share, okay?

If we have like 80 -90 % share, that's winning.

If they have 80 % share, then we're in big trouble.

So it's very simple.

It means like... Yeah, but if the market grows up by 10x, it doesn't matter, because the world will have...

Every individual in every country will now have more.

They will have a more prosperous life.

And as a result, it's not necessarily the framing about if we don't get there first, we are necessarily going to lose.

I get that there's an edge case of conflict or what have you, but I do think that there's a net benefit where the whole world suddenly is in this more prosperous state.

And this is a classic example of a dual use technology where there are both economic benefits and there are military benefits.

Yes, GPS would come to mind in this example.

My summary point is just that it's not all about a losing game, with respect to this quote, race, with other nation states.

But at the end of the day, yes, there is risk, but I do think that if the pace of improvement stays on track like it is right now, holy shit, I think we're in a pretty good place.

That's just my point.

Okay, some positivity.

Okay, I like it. Look, I hope that the AI race stays entirely positive, and it's a healthy competition between nations, and the competition spurs them on to develop more prosperity for their citizens, but as we talked about, at the AI summit, there's two ways of looking at the world.

There's kind of the economist way that Jeffrey Sachs was talking about, and then there's a balance of power way or realist way, which Mira Shire, I was talking about, and when economic prosperity and survival or balance of power come into conflict, it's the realist view of the world that it's the balance of power that gets privileged.

And I just think that's the way that governments operate is that prosperity is incredibly important we want economic success but power is ultimately privileged over that and this is why we're going to compete vigorously in high tech that's why there is going to be an AI race.

Okay perfect segue we should talk a little bit about what was the topic of discussion yesterday I had a lunch with a bunch of family offices and capital allocators government folks here in Singapore and they were talking about our discussion last week about the big beautiful bill and the debt here in the United States.

It's permeating everywhere.

The two conversations at every stop I've made here is the big beautiful bill and the balance sheet of the United States as well as tariffs.

So we need to maybe revisit our discussion last week.

Chamath, you had, and Freiburg did an impromptu call with Ron Johnson over the weekend, which then spurred him going on 20 other podcasts to talk about this.

Steven Miller from the administration has been tweeting some corrections or his perceived corrections about the bill.

And Saxxah, I think you've also started tweeting this.

Where do we wanna start?

Maybe, Chum €4 ,000?

Well, I think there are just a couple of facts that should be cleaned up because - Okay, so facts from the administration, their view of our discussion.

Well, even though I was defending the bill last week, on the whole, I wasn't saying it was perfect, I was just saying it was better than the status quo.

Yeah, you were clear about that.

Yeah, but even even I in doing that was conceding some points that I think we're just factually wrong.

And the big one was I said, I was disappointed that doge, the doge cuts weren't included in the big, beautiful bill.

What Stephen Miller's pointed out is that reconciliation bills can only deal with what's called mandatory spending, they can't deal with what's called discretionary spending.

And since the Doge cuts apply to discretionary spending, they just can't be dealt with in a reconciliation, but they have to with separately.

There can be a separate rescission bill that comes up, but it can't be dealt with in this bill.

And just to be very clear, look, if the Doge cuts don't happen through rescission, I'm going to be very disappointed that I really want the Doge cuts to happen, but it's just a fact that the Doge cuts cannot happen in the Big Beautiful Bill.

It's not that kind of bill, and I think it's therefore wrong to blame Big Beautiful Bill for not containing Doge cuts when the Senate rules don't allow that.

You know, it all goes back to the Byrd rules, there are only specific things that can be dealt with through reconciliation, which is this 50 -vote threshold.

And it has to be quote, unquote, mandatory spending.

Discretionary cuts are dealt with in annual appropriations bills that require 60 votes.

Now look, this is kind of a crazy system.

I don't know exactly how it evolved.

I guess Robert Byrd is the one who came out with all this stuff and maybe they need to change the system, but it's just wrong to blame the big beautiful bill for not containing the DoSCH cuts.

That's just a fact.

So the other thing is that the BBB does actually cut spending.

It's just not scored that way.

Because when the bill removes the sunset provision from the 2017 tax cuts, the CBO ends up scoring that as effectively a spending increase.

But tax rates are simply continuing at their current level, in other words, at this year's level.

So if you used the current year is your baseline, okay, and then compared it to spending, next year.

It would score as a cut in spending.

So it's just not it's not correct to say this will increase the spending it does actually result in a mandatory spending cut.

But it's not getting credit for that because we're continuing the tax rates at the current year's rates.

Do you believe sacks that this administration which you are part of in four years will have spent will have balanced the budget, will it have reduced the deficit or the deficit continue to grow at 2 trillion a year?

What is your belief?

Because there's a lot of strategies going on here.

My belief is that president Trump came into office inheriting a terrible fiscal situation.

I mean, that he created and that Biden created, they both put 8 trillion on the debt.

It's a big difference.

It's a big difference to add to the deficit when you're in the emergency phase of COVID.

And there's emergency spending.

Sure. It's emergency spending.

It was never supposed to be permanent.

And then somehow, Biden made it permanent.

And he wanted a lot more.

Remember Build Back Better?

He wanted a lot more.

So it's tough when you come into office with a $2 trillion annual deficit.

To my original question.

Look, hold on. Would I like to see the deficit eliminated in one year?

Yeah, absolutely. But there's just not the votes for that.

Well, I asked you for three years.

There's a one vote margin here in the House, and the Democrats aren't cooperating in any way.

So I think that the administration is getting the most done that it can.

This is a mandatory spending cut.

And I think the Doge cuts will be dealt with, hopefully through rescission, in a subsequent bill.

I'm asking you about four years from now, will we be sitting here at four years?

Will Trump have cut spending by the end of this term?

In another three and a half years, when we'll be looking at a balanced budget, potentially is that the goal of the administration or will we be at 42, 44, forty five trillion dollars at the end of Trump's second term.

David, listen, if you want that level of specificity, you're gonna have to get Scott Besson on.

Okay, this is just not my area.

I'm not going to pretend to have that level of detailed answers.

But what I believe is that the Trump administration's policy is to spur growth.

I think that these tax policies will spur growth.

I think that AI will also be a huge tailwind.

It'll be a productivity boost. I think let's stop being doomers about it.

We need that productivity boost. And I think that the net result of those things will be it to improve the fiscal situation.

Do I want more spending cuts?

Yeah. But look, we're getting more than was represented last week.

Let's put it that way.

OK, fair enough. Sachs, thank you for the cleanup there.

Chamath, our bestie, Elon, was on the Sunday shows and he said, hey, the bill can be big or it can be beautiful.

It can't be both. He seems to be, I'll say, displeased or maybe not as optimistic about balancing the budget and getting spending under control.

but he still believes in Doge, obviously, and hopefully Doge continues.

You seemed a little bit concerned last week.

A week's passed. You've heard some of Stephen Miller's opinions.

Where do you net out seven days from our big, beautiful budget bill debate last week?

A week later? I mean, I think Stephen's critique of how the media summarized the reaction to the bill is accurate.

I think it's probably useful to double click into one thing that Sacks didn't mention but that Stephen did.

A lot of this pivots around the CBO, which is the Congressional Budget Office and how they look at these bills.

And there's a lot of issues with how they do it.

In one specific case which Sacks just mentioned and Stephen talked about is that they have these arcane rules about the way that they score things and And what they were assuming is that the tax rates would flip back to what they were before the first Trump tax cuts, which obviously would be higher than where they are today.

What that would mean in their financial model is we were going to get all that money.

Now, to maintain the tax cuts where we are, they now then would look at that and say, Oh, hold on that's a loss of revenue.

Why are all of these things important?

I Downloaded the CBO model went through it and what I would say is at best it's Spartan Which means that I don't think a financial analyst or somebody that controls a lot of money Will actually put a lot of stock in their model.

I think what you'll have happen is people will build their own versions it just bottoms up.

Do you trust it, the CBO's version of this, or do you largely trust it?

I don't think the CBO really knows what's going on, to be totally honest with you.

Okay. I think that there are parts of what they do which they're also opaque on.

Nick, I sent you a tweet from Goldman Sachs.

So here's what Goldman put out.

Now, the point is, when you build a model, what you're trying to do is net out all of these bars, okay?

You're trying to add the positive bars and the negative bars, and you figure out what What is the total number at the end of it?

Now, in order to do that, when you see the bars on the far right, that's a 2034 dollar.

That's very different than a 2025 dollar.

The CBO doesn't disclose how they deal with that.

They don't just disclose the discount rate, so you can question what that is.

The CBO makes these assumptions that, as Stephen pointed out, are very brittle with respect to the tax plan.

That's not factored in here.

So those are the issues with the way the CBO scores it.

So you have to do it yourself.

Now Peter Navarro published an article which I think is probably the most pivotal article about this whole topic.

Peter Navarro of Tariff fame.

Here I think he nails it right in the bullseye, which is the bond market needs to make a decision on one very critical assumption when they build their own model.

Okay so let's ignore the CBOs kind of brittle math and the Excel that they post on their website, people are going to do their own, because they're talking about managing their own money.

But Navarro basically points to the critical thing, which is listen, those CBO assumptions also include a fatal error, which is they assume these very low levels of GDP.

What you're probably going to see in Q2 is a really hot GDP print.

If I'm a betting man, which I am, I think the GDP print's going to come in above three.

Not quite four, but above three.

And so what Peter is saying here is, hey guys, you're estimating 1 .7 % GDP.

Why don't you assume 2 .2, or why don't you assume 2 .7 or any number, or really what he's saying is why don't you build a sensitivity so that you can see the implications of that?

And I think that is a very important point.

Okay, so where do I net out a week later, Jason?

It's pretty much summarized in the tweet that I posted earlier today.

So, over the last week, as people have digested it, I think that there are small actors in this play and big actors.

The biggest actor is obviously President Trump, but the second biggest actor is the long end of the bond market.

These are the central bankers, the long bondholders, and these macro hedge funds.

Why? Because they will ultimately determine the United States' cost of capital.

How expensive will it be to finance our deficits, irrespective of whatever the number is.

It could be a dollar, or it could be a trillion dollars.

That doesn't matter right now.

The point is, what is going to be our cost of capital?

And what's happened over the last little while is that they've steeped the curve, and they've made it more expensive for us to borrow money.

That's just the fact.

So how do we get in front of this?

I think the most important thing, if you think about what Peter Navarro said, is this plan and the bill can work if we get the GDP right, okay?

So how do you get the GDP right?

And this is where I have one very narrow set of things that I think we need to improve, and the specific thing that I'll go back to is today, America is at a supply -demand trade -off on the energy side.

What does that mean?

We literally consume every single bit of energy that we make.

We don't have slack in the system.

We are growing our energy demands, on average, about 3 percent a year.

So, I think the most critical thing we need to do is to make sure the energy markets stay robust, meaning there's a lot of investment that people are making.

On Tuesday, I announced a deal that I did, building a one -gigawatt data center in Arizona.

This is a lot of money.

This is little old me, but there are lots of people ripping in huge, huge, huge checks, hundreds of billions of dollars.

I think the sole focus has to be to make sure that the energy policy of America is robust and it keeps all the electrons online.

If there's any contraction, I think it'll hit the GDP number because we won't have the energy we need and that's where things start to get a little funky.

So I think where I am is I think President Trump should get what he wants.

I think the bill can work, narrowly address the energy provisions, and I think we live to fight another day.

So, Friedberg, cynical approach might be, we're working the refs here, the CBO is not taking into GDP, this GDP has a magical unicorn in it, AI and energy is going to spur this amazing growth.

But the bond markets don't believe it either.

So are we looking at just a GOP, a party, I'll put the administration aside, that is just as recklessly spending as the Democrats and they want to change the formula by which they're judged in the future that there's going to be magically all this growth and growth solves all problems. And what we really need to do, to your point, I think two weeks ago, that this is just disgraceful to put up this much spending, and we have to have austerity, and we need to increase maybe the discipline in the country, and both parties have to be part of that.

I'm asking you, from the cynical perspective, maybe to represent or steel man, the other side here.

We had a conversation with Senator Ron Johnson after we recorded the pod last week, and he was very clear in a key point, which is that this bill addresses mandatory spending.

Just to give you a sense, 70 % of our federal budget is mandatory spending.

30 % falls into that discretionary category.

The mandatory spending is composed of the interest on the debt, which is now well over a trillion dollars a year on its way to a trillion five, almost a trillion a year.

Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and some other income security programs. And as Ron Johnson shared with us, over the years, more and more programs have been put into the mandatory spending category.

And so you can get past the filibustering in the Senate to be able to get budget adjustments done.

The key thing he's focused on and Rand Paul is focused on, and I've talked about, is the spending level of our mandatory programs. The big beautiful bill proposes a roughly 70 billion dollar per year cut in Medicaid, okay?

And that sounds awful.

How could you do that to people?

In 2019, the year before COVID, Medicaid spending was 627 billion dollars.

2024 it was 914 billion.

So the 70 billion dollar cut gets you down to 840.

You're still roughly, call it 40 % above where you were in 2019.

So it's at the right level.

And fundamentally, the opportunity to cut those mandatory programs, which I know sounds awful to cut Social Security and cut Medicaid, but the reality is they're not just being cut from a low level.

They're being cut from a level that's 60 plus percent higher than they were in 2019.

I gave you another example which is the SNAP program, the Food Stamp program.

Again, 15 billion dollars of the 120 a year that we spend on food stamps is being used to buy soda.

And a whole another chunk of that 120 is being used to buy other junk food.

So they've proposed in this bill to cut SNAP down to 90.

And it was 60 in 2019.

So it's still 50 % above where it was in 2019.

So the key point that's being made by Ron Johnson and others is that the spending on and these mandatory programs, which account for nearly three quarters of our federal budget, are still very elevated relative to where we were in 2019, and we are not gonna get out of our deficit barring a massive increase in GDP without changes to the spending level.

Now, I don't put the blame on the White House.

This bill passed with one vote in the House, one vote.

And so, a key point to note, and I've said this from day one and every time I've gone to D .C.

and every time we've talked about Doge, I've said there's no way any of this stuff's gonna change without legislative action from the Congress.

And here we are seeing Congress for whatever reason, you can listen to Ron Johnson, you can listen to Rand Paul, you can listen to others say, you know what, we can't cut that deep, it is going to be too harmful to our constituents.

We need to keep the programs at their current levels or make no changes at all, or only modest changes.

And that's where we are, that's the reality.

Now I do think that Navarro did an excellent job in his op -ed for whatever criticism we may want to lay on Navarro for many other things.

He pointed out that the CBO projections in 2017 for the next year's GDP growth numbers was 1 .8 to 2 percent and it actually came in at 2 .9 percent, a full one point higher because of the Tax and Jobs Act that was passed by the Trump administration in 2017.

So the additional money that goes into investments because lower taxes are being paid fueled GDP growth.

This is what some people call trickle down economics.

People ridicule it, they say it doesn't work, it's not real.

But in this particular instance, they cut taxes and the GDP grew much faster than was projected or estimated by the economists at the CBO.

So the argument that's being made is that we are not capturing many of the upsides in the GDP numbers that are being projected.

And I will be honest about this, I don't think anyone knows how much the GDP is going to grow.

We don't know the economic benefit and effects of AI.

We don't know the economic benefits and effects of the work that's being done to deregulate.

Another key point which is not talked about by Navarro or anywhere else, there's a broad effort to deregulate.

Standing up new energy systems, deregulate industry and pharma, deregulate banking.

Besson talked about this in our interview with him.

All of those deregulatory actions theoretically should drive more investment dollars because if you can get a biotech drug to market in five years instead of 10, you'll invest more in developing new biotech drugs.

If you can stand up a new nuclear reactor in seven years instead of 30, you'll build more nuclear reactors, money will flow.

If you can get a new factory working because it's a lot easier and faster to build the factory and cheaper, you'll build more factories and production will go up.

People were really taken by the way by your comment that you would shut up about the deficit if we had like a really great energy policy, we were dumping a lot on top of it.

I want to build on the point that both Jamatha and Freiberg made about growth rates.

So there's a very important chart here from Fred, this is the Federal Reserve, St. Louis, this is federal receipts.

So basically, it's federal tax revenue as a percent of GDP.

And this goes all the way back to, you know, the 1930s 1940s.

So if you look in the post World War Two period, you can see just eyeballing it, that there's a lot of variation around this but the line is around 17 and a half percent, plus or minus 2%.

And the interesting thing is that this chart reflects radically different tax rates.

So for example, during some of these periods, we've had 90 % top marginal tax rates, we've had 70 % top marginal tax rates.

So yeah, under Jimmy Carter, the top marginal tax rate was, I think 70 percent.

We've had tax rates, you know, under Reagan or Clinton in the 20s.

So the point is that the the tax rate that you have and what you actually collect as a percent of GDP don't correlate.

The most important thing by far is just how the economy is doing.

If you look at the top tick, it's around 2000 there.

If you just mouse over like 99 to 2000.

Yeah, we get like just under 20 percent of federal receipts, a percent of GDP and tax rates were quite low back then.

The reason why is we had an economic boom.

So look, the point is the most important thing in terms of tax revenue is having a good economy.

And this is why you don't just want to have very high tax rates, because they clobber your economy.

So this point that Navarro was making in that article, it actually makes sense.

I mean, one point seven percent is a pretty tepid growth assumption.

We should be able to grow a lot faster.

And if we have a favorable tax policy, you can grow a lot faster.

Now, if you go to spending people off the Fred chart on spending, what you see here is that it has been kind of going up.

But let's say that since the 19 mid 1970s or so federal net outlays as a percentage GDP.

So basically spending was around 20 percent of GDP.

And then what happened is during covid, it went crazy, went all the way up to 30 percent.

And now it's back down to low 20s, but it's still not back down to 20.

And what we need to do is grow the economy.

We have to grow GDP to the point where federal net outlays are back around 20%.

If you could get tax revenue to the historical mean of around 17 .5 % or 17%, you get spending to 20%.

Then you have a budget deficit of 3%, which is much more tolerable.

And I think that's Besson's target under his 333 plan, right, is you get GDP growth back up to 3 % and you get the budget deficit down to 3%.

Jamath, you had some charts you wanted to share?

Well, I think what's amazing is if you take last week and now again this week, we're all converging on the same thing.

The path out of this is through GDP growth, and I just want everybody to understand where we are, and this is without judgment.

This is just the facts.

what this chart shows, in gray, is the total supply of power in the United States, and the blue line is the utilization.

So what you build for is what you think is a premium above the demand, right?

You'd say if there's one unit of demand, let's have 1 .2 units of supply, we'll be okay.

But as it turns out, historically, in the United States, we've had these cycles where we didn't really know what the demand curve would look like.

And so over the last number of years, we've stopped really building supply in power.

But what happened with things like AI and all of these other things is that the demand just continued to spike.

And so, what this chart shows is we are at a standstill sitting here today in 2025.

On margin, we're actually short power, which is to say sometimes there are brown -outs.

Sometimes there's lack of power because we didn't add enough capacity.

So, that's where we are today.

So then, we talk about all of these new kinds of energy, and this is just meant to ground us in the facts.

If you tried to turn on a project today, sitting here in May of 2025, here's what the timelines are.

We all talk about SMRs, small modular reactors.

The reality is that if you get everything permitted and you believe the technology can be de -risked, you're still in a 2035 plus timeframe.

You're a decade away.

Today, if you have an unplanned Nat gas plant, today the fastest you could get that on is four years from now.

If we tried to restart a mothballed nuclear reactor, of which there are only three we can restart, that's a 27 to 20 -30 timeframe.

So let's give us the benefit of the doubt.

That's two years away.

If we needed a planned Nat gas plant, there's already 24 gigawatts in the queue, which can't turned on.

So where does this end up?

And this is where I think we need to strip away all the partisanship and understand what we're dealing with.

We have ready supply of renewable and storage options today.

It's the fastest thing that you can turn on.

It allows us to turn on supply to meet the demand and utilization.

So I just think it's important to understand that we must not lose energy.

We cannot lose the energy market because that is the critical driver of all the GDP.

All right. Nippon steel and the U .S. steel merger got cleared by President Trump.

This was something that was being blocked by Biden, obviously, for national security reasons.

Nippon is going to acquire your steel.

Fourteen point nine billion, Biden blocked that, as we had discussed on Friday.

Trump cleared the deal to go through, calling it a partnership that will create 70 ,000 jobs in the US and on Sunday Trump called the deal an investment saying it's a partial ownership but it will be controlled by the USA.

Tramoc, there seems to be a reframing of this deal, and that the United States is going to benefit from it, but it's not a sale.

Let's... Let's set some context.

Yeah. Let's set some context.

Please. The United States is always on the wrong side of these deals, okay?

We've been on the wrong side for 20 years, meaning we show up when an asset is stranded or completely run into the ground.

For example, we did the auto bailouts at the end of the great financial crisis.

If it's not a company and there's toxic assets, we set up something called TARP.

What do we get? Not much in return.

In this, it's the opposite.

And I think that this strategy has worked for many other countries really well.

So, if you look at Brazil, companies like Embraer and Vale, which are really big Brazilian national champions have a partnership, a pretty tight coupling, with the Brazilian government, the Brazilians have a golden vote.

If you look inside of the UK, there's a bunch of aerospace and defense companies including Rolls -Royce that have a very tight coupling with the UK government, they have a golden vote.

If you look in China, companies like ByteDance and CATL have a very tight coupling with the Chinese government, and the Chinese government has a golden vote.

And so what are all of those deals?

Those deals are about companies that are thriving and on the forward foot.

And so I think this is a really important example of things that we need to copy.

I've said this before.

The one part of China that I think we need to pay very close attention to is Hu Jintao in 2003 laid out a plan and he said, we are going to create 10 national champions in China in all the critical industries that are going to matter for the next 50 years, including things like batteries and rare earths and AI.

And they did it. but for those companies that allowed them to thrive and crush it.

And I think that we need to do that and compete with those folks on an equal playing field.

In all industries or in very specific strategic ones?

Because that would seem like there's corrupting capitalism in free market would be the steel man.

There's 10 industries that matter.

And you could give us one of them.

Steel is one. I think the precursors for pharmaceuticals are absolutely critical.

Got it. I think AI is absolutely critical.

I think the upstream lithography and EV deposition and chip making capability, absolutely critical.

I think batteries are absolutely critical.

And I think rare earths and the specialty chemical supply chain, absolutely critical.

If you have those five, you are in control of your own destiny, in the sense that you can keep your citizens healthy and you can make all this stuff for the future.

So, I think if the president is creating a more expansive idea beyond U .S. deal with this idea of U .S. support, maybe there'll be preferred capital in the future to U .S. deal, but if he creates a category by category thing across five or six of these critical areas of the future, I think it's super smart and we should do more of it.

Sachs, what do you think?

Interventionism, putting your thumb on the scale, golden votes, a good idea for America in very narrow verticals or let the free market decide what your thoughts on this golden vote having a board seat, etc. Well, it depends what the free market, so to speak, produced.

And the reality is over the past 25 years is we exported a lot of this manufacturing capacity to China.

And I don't think it was a free market because they had all these advantages under the WTO that we talked about in a previous podcast, they were able to subsidize their national champions, while still remaining compliant with the WTO rules, because supposedly they were a developing country.

It was totally unfair.

And what they would do is through the subsidies, they would allow these national champions to essentially dump their products in the global market and drive everyone else out of business, they became the low cost producers.

I think that as a president just said recently, not every industry has to be treated as strategic, clothes and toys, we don't necessarily have to reach or in the United States, but steel production is definitely strategic steel, aluminum, and I'd say the rare earths.

We have to have that capacity.

We cannot be completely dependent on China for our supply chain.

So some of these industries have to be reassured.

And if you need subsidies to do it, I think that you do it for national security reasons.

First and foremost, there are other sense.

Yeah, there are other industries where the private market works just fine.

And what we need to do to help those companies is simply not get in their way with unnecessary red tape and regulations.

So I would say empower the free market when America is the winner.

and then in other areas where they're necessary for national security, then you have to be willing to basically protect our industries.

Freberg, it seems like the great innovation here might also be the American public getting upside when we gave loans to Celintra and Tesla and Fisker and a bunch of people for battery -powered energy under Obama.

We just got paid back in some cases by Elon.

Other people defaulted but we didn't get equity.

What if we had instead of getting our 500 million back on the loan from Elon, which he paid back early and with interest, if we got half back and we got half in equity, RSUs, whatever, stock options, warrants.

This would be an incredible innovation.

So what are your thoughts here?

Because people look to this podcast as, hey, the free market podcast, but this does seem to be a notable exception here of maybe we should get involved and do these golden share votes, board seats, you know, maybe more creative structures in order to win faster.

What are your thoughts, Friedberg?

I don't like it. I don't like the government markets.

Keep the government out of the markets.

It creates a slippery slope.

First of all, I think markets don't operate well if government's involved, it gets inefficient.

And that hurts consumers.

It hurts productivity.

It hurts the economy.

Second, I think it's a slippery slope.

You do one thing now… though, if government nonintervention results in all of the steel production moving offshore, if it results in all the rare earth processing and the rare earth magnet casting industries moving offshore, in fact, not just moving offshore, but moving to an adversarial nation such that they can just switch off our supply chain for pretty much every electric motor, is that an outcome of the quote -unquote free market that we should accept?

Well then I think that's where the government can play a role in trade deals to manage that effect.

So you can create incentives that'll drive onshore manufacturing by increasing the tariff for restricting trade with foreign countries so that there isn't a cheaper alternative, which is obviously one of the plays that this Trump administration is trying to do.

I'd rather have that mechanism than the government making actual market -based decisions and business decisions.

You know how inefficient government runs.

You know how difficult it is to assume that that bureaucracy is actually ever going to act and pick any best interest or any good interest at all they're just going to get all up.

So I'd rather keep the government entirely out of the market create a trade incentive where the trade incentive basically will drive private markets private capital to build that industry onshore here because there isn't one and there's demand for it because you've restricted access to the foreign market that I think would be the best general solution.

And then I think it's a slippery slope because then you can always rationalize something being strategic, something being security interest in the United States, so then every industry suddenly gets government intervention and government involvement.

And then the third thing is I don't want the government making money.

The Congress then says, hey, we've got more money, we've got more revenue, let's spend more money because then they'll create a bunch of waste and nonsense that'll arise from having increased revenue.

One side, and I will say one thing where I do think we do a poor job, is we don't do a good job, to answer your question, Jake, Hal, of investing the retirement funds that we've mandated through social security.

We should be taking the four and a half trillion dollars that our social security beneficiaries have had deducted from their paychecks over many many years, and those social security future retirees or current retirees are getting completely ripped off because their money is being loaned to the federal government.

It's not being invested.

It's being loaned to the government to spend money and run a deficit, and ultimately inflate away the value of the dollar.

We should have been investing those dollars in some of these strategic assets.

So if ever there were to be shares or investment that the government does, it should be done through strategic investing through the Social Security or retirement program.

Similar by the way, to what's done in Australia, where these supers are, have created an extraordinary surplus of capital, same in Norway, same in all the Middle East countries.

Incredible sovereign wealth funds that benefit the retirees and the population at large.

That's where the dollars should be invested from.

I do think the fundamental focused priority right now should be reforming Social Security while we still have the chance.

We have until 2032 when Social Security will be functionally bankrupt and everyone's gonna get overtaxed and kids are gonna end up having to pay through inflation for the benefits of the retirees of the last generation.

Preeberg's right, we're on a seven year shot clock to when Social Security is not funded.

And by the way, this opportunity to fix mandatory spending, it was an opportunity to introduce some structural reform in Social Security.

Another reason why I think that there is a degree of discraziad in this bill, particularly with how Congress enacted and not addressing what is becoming a critical issue because everyone wants to get reelected in the next 12 months, 18 months, they've got elections coming up.

So everyone's scrambling to not mess with that because you can't touch it.

It's like, you know what, guys this is bankrupt in seven years.

It's gonna cost us 5, 10 times as much when we have to deal with it when everyone runs out of money.

Deal with it now. It's the problem, and by the way, we should flip all that money, four and a half trillion dollars, into an investment account for the retirees where they can own equities And they can make investments in the markets, and they can participate in the upside of American industry and the GDP growth that's coming.

Instead, they're getting paid 3 .8%, or 4 .5 % average from treasuries that they own that, by the way, now have a lower credit rating than they've ever had.

You know, it's crazy.

I'm in complete agreement with you, and I think it's a lack of leadership on Trump's part.

If Trump is going to criticize Taylor Swift and Zelensky and Putin and everybody, you know, all day long on Truth Social, he can criticize Congress and the Democrats and Republicans are not cutting spending, I think he should speak up.

I think he was elected to do that.

It was a big part of the mandate.

And he should tone down the tariff chaos and tone up and lean into intelligent immigration, you know, recruiting great talent to this country.

And he should be pushing to make these bills control spending.

That's just one person's belief.

For the chairman dictator, Tromati Palihapitiya, your czar, David Sachs in that Chris Brione white shirt, very beautiful.

And the Sultan of Science, deep in his Wall -E era.

I am the world's greatest moderator and as Friedberg will tell you, executive crusher for life here at the All In Podcast. We'll see y 'all next time.

Bye -bye, Jason at AllIn .com.

Love you, boys. Bye -bye.

We'll let your winners ride.

Rain Man, David Sachs.

Oh, yeah. We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy.

Why don't we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy.

We open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy.

That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway.

Oh We should all just get a room and just have one big huge or because they're always like this like sexual tension but they just need to release You

[AI Doomerism, Economic Growth, and the Future of Fiscal Policy]-[AI Doom vs Boom, EA Cult Returns, BBB Upside, US Steel and Golden Votes]

📋 Summary

The AI Doomerism Debate: Strategic Power or Existential Risk?

The Geopolitical AI Arms Race

Fiscal Policy and the "Big Beautiful Bill"

The Role of Government and Industrial Policy

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript