Trump's First Week: Inauguration Recap, Executive Actions, TikTok, Stargate + Sacks is Back! | All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

We had a dinner where me and Friedberg and J.

Cal were invited to have dinner with the folks from and their other top podcast.

It was an off -the -record dinner.

Let's talk all about it.

There was an interesting moment, which even Friedberg had to recognize, which was we went around and said, hey, what podcast are you listening to?

Which ones are your favorites?

We went out in the room, and I got to tell you, you know what your podcaster's favorite podcast is?

Bingo. All -in podcast.

Well, the funniest thing is my wife thinks I'm bullshitting all the time.

I say this is a - Mine too.

Pretty reasonably successful in wellness.

She doesn't believe it.

She thinks we're all bullshitting.

Why do you think I waited to make my world podcast premiere for All In?

All the ankle biters called and I said, no, I'm just going to wait.

I'm going to wait to the besties call.

Can we just say it, Nick?

You got to beat it up.

When the podcast called, you're like, nope, can't do it.

I'm waiting for the real deal.

I don't need JV. all right everybody welcome back to the number one business finance technology science podcast in the world this is the place where we call balls and strikes where we tell the truth where there is zero censorship.

Every week, we tell you about the truth behind the most important stories.

We point out who the heroes are and who the villains are, who are the delightful ones, and who are the disgrazia.

With me again on this week's program, the cackling chairman dictator, my guy, Moth Polly.

How are you doing? How was your victory lap?

how was your victory really really really fun you look like you were in your afterglow and i have to say that was looking pretty good uh we have some pictures don't worry we're going to go through behind the scenes in a second that's our money came through for amore the amore collection from armani

coming this fall by the way i mean armani couture is like firing on all cylinders the the other the other one which you'll see is a great picture of this incredible jacket, Luisa Beccaria.

Two shout outs, Armani and Luisa Beccaria.

You know, I was just thinking that Armani really has been making it happen.

Now that we've talked about that, we'll talk about my wardrobe when the time comes.

Can they just get through the rest of the interest?

All right, all right.

And of course, here he is, your sultan of science, David Friedberg.

Move along, J. Cal, let's go.

Wonderful. He's very bitter today.

He's got a lot of anger.

He is the barista of bitterness today.

He's serving up bitterness all day long, and he had a great time at the, maybe he's a little upset about the Lex Friedman triangle we're in right now.

I think that could be part of it.

And we have a special guest here.

Thomas Lafont is the co -founder of Cotoo Management.

They got a 50 billy under management, public, private, yada, yada.

Before that, he worked at Creative Artist agency for seven years after he he went to college so he does have the college degree he signed captain america which is freeberg's favorite avenger chris evans chris evans chris and um has freeberg a client by the way yes and you're still in touch with him

i am not you're not but i i've watched with wonder at uh what he's achieved after i left being his agent It's been incredible.

Great career. Now, behind you, we see this incredible view.

No, but wait, you're missing the one part, which is that Thomas was one of the highest rated speakers that we had at the Allen Summit.

Yeah. That's true, actually.

He did really great last year.

Really crushed it. Crushed it.

Crushed it, of course.

And I think I'm in the seventh bestie position and hoping potentially after the podcast to at least move up by one.

Okay. Let's see what happens here.

Now, what's this view behind you?

This is Los Angeles.

i definitely put you ahead of jcal thomas so you're wow you're up the spot oh my god he really is serving up the bitterness today yeah so bad he's so bad you know why you know why he's mad i'll tell you why because okay what did i do this time this is for the audience jason is complaining all week in the group

chat that he has influenza a he's sending pictures of him getting ivs and so freeberg the conscientious guy and co -founder of the pod that he is says i will moderate and then he invests his time okay he's got he's got a lot of things going on he's got does three kids plus strawberries he's running a company

strawberries he prepares and then you wake up after a dose of tamiflu and decide no i'm ready to moderate of course And you can't just do that because it's not nice.

All right. Hey, Madam Producer, can you come on the horn for a second here?

Are we really going to do this?

Yes, we are. We're going to do it.

We're doing it, Madam.

This is so stupid. This is so stupid.

Did I tell you to get Friedberg involved?

No. No. I did it myself.

Okay, you went rogue.

Can I say why? You can go rogue.

I'm fine. I said, hey, Jason, how are you feeling?

You said, horrible.

I have the flu. I'm getting an IV tomorrow morning.

To me, that was like, oh, okay.

There's like a 50 % chance he misses the show.

So I reached out to Freebrook.

I said, hey, Jason's really sick with the flu.

Maybe you should just prepare yourself to moderate tomorrow.

Okay. Now, when did I find out about this?

I think that was a smart decision, but you, sir, are a small bitter man.

And so what you did was you wanted to just blow up Freebrook's preparation.

I found out about this this morning.

I found out about this like an hour ago.

How are you feeling?

I feel 80 % of a normal J -Cow, which is 110 % of any other moderator.

Get yourself Andrew Vorsorkin.

Oh, I'm sorry. He's genuflecting at Davos to a bunch of mids.

Well, we're going to get Lex soon, so we're going to get Lex soon.

Oh, that'd be great.

Hello, I am Lex Friedman.

Welcome to the number one podcast in the world.

Today on the program, we have Thomas Lafon, investor in such great companies as...

All right, listen, enough shenanigans.

We had so much fun.

We tore DC apart. Let's start with actually just, Thomas, did you watch any of that on TV?

Did you think about going?

It was really like there were so many tech people in Washington this weekend.

I saw the live stream.

I talked to Sachs last night to get the download.

My takeaway just from watching especially the executive orders was democracy in action.

Democracy is self -correct.

and dictatorships double down.

And to watch in real time a country of our scale and a democracy decide to make a change, I think that's why we've been great for 250 plus years and we'll remain great.

So it was fun to watch.

I'm really curious to see what your takeaway was.

Okay. Well, we'll just go behind the scenes.

First of all, it's hard to see that this was me dressed up for Saxe's ball.

I really brought the heat.

This is, by the way, Luca Rubinacci is the tailor here.

It's hard to see my jacket.

Blue coat? So this is what I'm saying.

I think the picture is very hard to see, but it's a very refined green paisley.

Subtle. Hard to bring it out.

Now, I will say, this was the most popular shirt over the entire weekend.

This is just a simple Brioni tuxedo shirt.

It was 200 versions of it.

I felt bad when I saw, because normally I don't like to wear things that other people are wearing.

What did Michael Saylor think of this?

When you saw Michael Saylor at the...

You know, I met Michael's CFO, wonderfully nice guy.

So this is us at the crypto ball.

I went for white tuxedo on the first night.

I've never had three tuxedos before.

David looked really great.

I really love this.

And Saks had this incredible tux, which was more crypto themed.

It sort of looked like the opening scene from The Matrix.

so there was like this cool print you can see my green in there a little bit Thomas okay yeah yeah got it there's Sky and new money Sonny the president of Grok Sandeep Madra x .com slash Sandeep here are the besties here are the besties I was let's be honest guys even in all your bitterness freeberg

you felt the love at this moment when we were all back together did you not well in about five minutes before this when the three of us took a video a photo it was great yeah yeah okay great He's so good.

He's so good. Do you want to let you moderate?

You can moderate if you want, if you're that perfect.

No, no, you're doing a great job, Jake.

You're keeping us our track.

We're 18 minutes into this and we're doing fashion still.

Vinny, Sky, Diego Burdekin, the co -founder of Cloud Kitchens.

Oh, so handsome, that Diego.

This was the crypto ball.

This was like, this was Sax's event.

It was incredible. It was a large number of people there.

I was shocked at the number of people at the crypto ball.

Oh, it was huge. Next level.

Poker. Poker. Oh, behind the scenes.

With Pinkus, TK. TK, Travis Klein, the co -founder of Uber.

Oh, look, that's the founder of Uber.

Hold on, we got to see.

Who's got the biggest stack?

Look, it's the founder of Uber next to the third investor in Uber.

And the founder of Cloud Kitchen next to the investor in Cloud Kitchen.

This is at Peter Thiel's house.

This is Katie Hahn and Kyle Samane, my wife and Kyle's wife.

Amore. This is at Peter's house.

Peter Thiel had this person going around taking pictures.

Bad lighting. Not good lighting for you.

Good lighting. This was great.

Also at Peter Thiel's house.

Yeah, that was great.

I have to say, Shamath, putting aside, Jason likes being a Republican.

Here's a dinner that we had.

There's Lex Friedman, Julius Jenachowski, who's the former chairman of the FCC.

You see? Little known.

The former roommate of Obama.

By the way, following this dinner, all those streets were blocked off and there was no way to get around.

You can see it there.

Look, you see the barricades in the right there?

It was like 10 degrees Fahrenheit.

So we walk out. Yes, it's terrible.

It was like you were going to die after two seconds out there.

It was so cold. Vinny and I are walking to try and get our car.

And after walking for like half a mile, we're like, dude, there's no way out of this downtown area.

And Vinny was shaking.

He's like, I'm going to die.

I'm going to die. I'm going to die.

he turns around he goes running back to the restaurant jumps in and basically like huddles down in the restaurant and then after about 10 minutes there's no way out he's like you know it's sort of like you're in a military zone he's like I'm gonna go for it he runs out jumps on a scooter and he disappeared

into the distance and I swore I would never see Vinny again I'm like that's it I think it's very smart that Lex wears the same outfit the black suit with the white shirt with the black tie I really like the consistency of it actually it looks really good it was incredible he was getting style.

Here's Armani. Every two minutes.

Oh my God. It was unbelievable.

Here's the jacket. This is Luisa Beccaria.

And then here's the box from Armani.

Thank you, George. Hey, the unboxing.

Whoa. Wawa weewa. Oh, look.

There's a little side boob there with that.

I didn't notice that.

That's a... I'm wearing Tom Ford.

Shout out, Tom Ford.

Shout out to you. Perfect male for us.

Here's a huge shout out to two guys that I really wanted to meet in person.

I finally got the chance to meet.

This is at Zuck's party.

This is Brendan Carr, who's the incoming chairman of the FCC.

Actually, this picture was taken right after he had gotten confirmed.

So this was his first day as the chairman.

And then this is a guy who I've been following for a couple of years, Jared Isaacman, who is now going to run NASA.

He's the founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments.

But both of these guys are pretty epic.

You should follow them on Twitter.

He did a spacewalk, the first civilian spacewalk.

He did. He's really, really incredible.

Brendan was really nice.

I met him at Peter's event and he told me he's a big fan of the pod.

He listens to the show everywhere.

Brendan's amazing. I mean, by the way, if you want to see like some really amazing tweets, he had some real bangers.

He's a very smart guy.

I've had Brendan on This Week in Startups a couple of times.

He's the guy who fought for Starlink over wasting $5 ,000, $10 ,000, $20 ,000 per home to install broadband.

I mean, this guy's a hero.

And he did that when he was in office under Biden and all that crazy corruption and grift.

This is a picture of Mike Johnson and his wife.

This is a crazy story.

So there was a G7 summit in Italy, and Mike and his wife was seated beside my father -in -law, that's dad, at a dinner.

They got to know each other.

He, as a proud grandpa, showed Mike and his wife pictures of Nat and myself and our kids and how we actually met in this moment was his wife was like, oh my God, I recognize you.

You're Sergio's son -in -law, you're Sergio's daughter.

It's amazing. And then we had a cool conversation, so that was cool.

And then this is Bill Pulte, who is nominated to run FHFA, which for folks that know will be in control of the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and really great guy.

Also a co -investor with me and Mr.

Beast. Nat. Oh, you're an investor in Mr.

Beast. There you go.

This is Mr. I did the Series A.

This is the first time I think you've set on the line.

Oh, here's this thing.

So this is where J -Cal is at his peak.

Go ahead and just play the video.

I don't even know what this is.

What is that? What did you order?

Alright. I've given you some thought and I'm going to order the $95 Dover Soul.

Ordering the $95 Dover Soul.

i mean this is having such a great time uh tearing it up i did order the 95 dollar to over this is a oh sorry oh that's that's me and bobby canady but this is uh this is walking into the capitol for the inauguration oh wow so you basically you have to get off all these buses were taking us in because of the security

and then you walk underneath and underground to get into them And this is it, Bobby.

And the guy right there, Callie Means, another great American, make America healthy again.

All right, here's a couple of my picks.

This is me with somebody who's going to be in the administration.

I'm not big on politics, but - Tulsi Gabbard is so - Tulsi Gabbard.

She's so strong. She came to our party.

I like her. This is the picture of our party.

She is incredible. Well, she came up to me and she, you know, you can always tell who a real fan is.

And she came up and she said - I love Tulsi Gabbard.

I just want to tell you, Jake, how I am a huge fan of the pod.

I love what you do.

I love the, you know, balance you bring to the program.

She really liked new details about the podcast.

And so I wanted to get a picture with her.

So as a joke, I said to her, do you want to take a selfie?

I said, I'm okay with this.

She goes, I was going to ask.

I was like, no, I'm preemptively asking.

She's such a star. I think she's going to be great.

I like her a lot. She's such a star.

Oh, well, yeah, this is.

Hello, I am Lex Friedman.

today with love and peace in my heart I am interviewing dictator Idi Amin who has eaten after his enemies we will share love kindness and a fatty liver enjoy so yeah that was us just tearing it up after the YouTube party where we hung out with Sundar and Neil from YouTube they've been very good to us

and then here's one more I guess and golfer Bryson DeChambeau oh there's me and the Presidente twitter and yeah this is the podcast crew at the free press party okay let's talk about key takeaways chmav what is your big takeaway from the weekend i think my biggest takeaway is that if you look in the past

there was a very tight coordination i guess i would say between private industry and the private sector and the public sector meaning the president and then people who were in charge of managing huge, vast swaths of resources in America.

And somewhere along the way, that became either unfashionable and uncool, particularly under Democrats.

And what I saw was a very broad -based embrace of business people, because I think that the president understands how important it is to make sure that economically, basically america is just firing on all cylinders the one thing to remember like for example in the inauguration i know that you saw the picture

and it was basically like meta google apple amazon tesla kind of ceos etc founders arno was there mukesh ambani was there so it's just business people from the entire world were there and so i think what it says is america is going to basically turn a totally new page.

We're not going to ostracize people.

We're not going to play favorites.

That's the other thing.

Elon was there right at the beginning, but if you saw all the CEOs of the major companies were there, it's not like he excluded Zuck because of his past issues or anything.

Or Sam Altman. Or Sam Altman.

That was the biggest takeaway.

That would be the more notable one, yeah, to exclude, yeah.

That the president doesn't play favorites, that this is like Team America kind of thing, and it was a projection of tremendous power to the rest of the world.

This is what America's about.

I loved every minute of it.

And I think that this is exactly how the American government should be working, which is hand in hand with private industry to basically set the pace for the rest of the world.

Thomas, did you have a takeaway after the weekend?

I did. I'm curious what you guys thought, but to me, what was notable from Scott Besant, the new Treasury Secretary, he was asked in one of the exchanges about the green energy race with China.

And he reframed the debate, I thought incredibly well, where he said, we're not in a green energy race with China, we're in an energy race with China.

That's right. Right.

And he made the point that China is adding 100 coal plants, it's adding nuclear.

And to me, it was kind of 137 gigawatt hydro facility, which is unbelievable.

And it was such a good framing of the debate, because I think, Chamath, to your point, it's about reframing the right issues, right?

And I think that just that little piece of dialogue to me is exemplified, you know, and was a really important takeaway, and I think more of what we'll see over the next coming year.

Freberg, did you have a takeaway coming out of this?

There was just so much.

It was so impressive to be there.

I definitely echo the sentiment about seeing the strength of America represented between the entrepreneurial engine that has driven this country for 250 years and the government that's meant to serve the people working together to try and take America forward.

It was just really inspiring.

The one thing that was the biggest kind of observation for me, which was a bit of a disappointment, unfortunately, is I feel like doge and cost cutting is going to be a lot harder to realize than folks assume.

Nearly everyone I met with who works in government or is entering government had this, if not disdain for doge, a concern that it doesn't really align interests with the political objectives of politicians, that they need to get more stuff for their constituents in order to get reelected, and that they're

not going to vote programs away.

They're not going to vote themselves out of a job, which is effectively what they would do if they cut programs.

In fact, I was watching Brooke Rollins' Secretary Ag confirmation hearing this morning, and Mitch O 'Connell was given the opportunity to ask her questions.

You know what his question was?

He said, in the last farm bill, I was able to get $60 million to build an ag research lab at university of kentucky and it hasn't started being built yet it's been four years what are you going to do about that this is literally the intention of so many of these conversations if you sit and watch and i

watched a similar conversation with a senator from minnesota who you know i i won't get into all the statements but every single conversation you hear and we even talked with ted cruz about this is all about great by the way i love ted cruz it's all about it's all about what can I get for my constituents?

How do I get more jobs?

And how do I get more money?

And ultimately, that incentive is what gets people elected.

And I don't think it's going to change.

And so that was the biggest kind of shock for me.

I thought that there was a moment of the importance of cost cutting, the importance of deficit reduction, the importance of debt reduction.

And I was just a little saddened to kind of see that that there's no stop in the train.

So that was my takeaway.

It's a little bit bitter.

I hope I'm wrong. I really do hope Doge is effective.

And I really do hope that policymakers start to recognize the importance.

By the way, Ray Dalio has a new book coming out.

We'll talk more about his book once it's released publicly, but it speaks very clearly to the challenge the United States is now facing with respect to spending.

I know I've talked about this.

I know we all felt like there was a big reprieve with this election, but for me, it was a little bit bittersweet.

Can I say a little bit on that first topic?

I just want to double down on that because one of the things that some folks said, and I guess it makes sense now that you think about it, but when you look at the confirmation hearings, there are certain folks for whom the resource allocation is relatively modest inside of America.

They tend to just do much better in general.

And if you saw Marco Rubio's confirmation process, there was, you know, it was like 99 to zero.

And to your point, what they say is that folks that actually allocate the internal spending in the United States gets a lot more scrutiny because there's all of this horse trading because they want some of this money to get allocated into their specific area.

It is going to be a very complicated thing.

The one thing though that changed, I don't know if you saw, but Doge was meant to be outside the auspices of the government and it wasn't actually a government department.

And it'll be interesting to understand when it's explained, but in the 11th hour, the EO that established Doge established it actually as a governmental agency.

Yeah, we're going to get into that in just a moment.

And, you know, to build on your point there, Dave, Senator Sanders had a tweet today, Nick, I just sent it to you.

Already the discussion of like, who should take the brunt of these cuts is starting to happen.

And he's pointing out, you know, as he should, and, you know, hey, what's going to happen with the VA?

And you're putting a freeze on hiring people, we have to make sure our vets are taken care of, we have a shortage of doctors, a shortage of nurses.

But we do have people, you know, responding to them saying, hey, how are we going to pay for all this?

So, even if it's going to be hard to do, it's going to take courage because you're going to be faced with situations like this, where does anybody want to see VA's budget cut?

And these veterans who are coming back, they should get all the services in the world.

And these hard discussions are now happening, and it's not taboo.

So, the Overton window is wide open now to discuss even the budget of the VA.

And where is the money going to come from?

So I think we're actually going to make progress on it.

This was like a sacred cow and now we're talking about it.

To Bernie Sanders' point, I don't know if you saw there was a note on there, Nick.

Community notes pointed out that Trump put that none of the cuts should impact vets.

And so I thought that was a good use of community notes there.

The one comment I'll say about Bernie Sanders is when Russ Vogt, who is the nominee to run OMB, went through his confirmation yesterday, Sanders asked a similar question around Medicare and Medicaid.

And what was interesting is Russ tried to actually answer the question and give the details around where there can be waste, fraud, and abuse.

Sanders really didn't want to hear it.

He just wanted a soundbite.

Right. So I think these confirmation processes are...

Performative? They're hugely performative.

Yes. I do think that, and this applies, I think, to both sides, Democrats as well, when they are eventually in power.

I think that when you're given a very clear mandate as a president, I think you should be able to get to pick your team.

Because it's clear that the American people have voted an agenda.

It's not like he hid that agenda.

And so the people that then want to implement that agenda should be put on the field it seems like the point of these should be if somebody could get compromised or there was something really gnarly in their background like but otherwise yeah let people build their team and then they have to own their

results tell us about your feelings and takeaways about the weekend well you know it's obviously mixed i was a never trumper and uh now i'm rooting for him wholeheartedly to do great work be honest you kind of like him come on you do kind of i mean anybody just say anybody who's interacted with trump

like before you go your diatribe just say it just say you like him there are aspects i like about the platform i like probably 80 on the platform you want to say and i will tell you today that 20 i don't like i'm always going to call balls and strikes no no but you i'm just saying you kind of like him

just say you kind of like him you do like him i like 80 percent of his platform this time around no him him as a person you know i there's things i really don't like and i'll talk about him today but anyway let's put it aside the personal thing doesn't matter what matters is what he does for the american people

because you like him you i know you can't say it but they're deep down inside you like jake you were happy to be there until you had a lot of i have to say i had a lot of fun the republicans are fun republicans are fun i will say publicans are fun fashion was off the hook off the hook a lot of great fashion and and it

was a great party. Make America beautiful again.

My gosh. I mean, listen.

No more jogging pants and white fox.

Get rid of it. Burn it to the ground.

What I'll say my takeaway was, as somebody who had concerns, and I'm not going to make the show about me, but the important thing for me is who is Trump going to lead with this time around?

Is it going to be the people from the 1 .0 movement or the 2 .0 movement?

there was not a 1 .0 person couldn't be found and so like on the margin one or two and they were not the focus and who you put in the front row speaks volumes who do you put in the front row Sundar, Elon Zuck, Lauren Sanchez he's got his priorities straight Lauren Sanchez as well the priorities were very

clear as to what's important for this administration and i'm fully behind all of his priorities both of those priorities all those priorities seem incredibly important to me you're such a troll i mean i don't want to troll too much but that's the big takeaway for me and if that is you know indicative

of where he wants to go with this which is business first we're proud of our leaders we're proud of innovation i think he's sticking it to it did you see him on at davos today he did a i mean this guy's got you know just crazy energy who malay trump zoomed into davos and just dunked on them for 45 minutes

he did yes and he just destroyed everybody at their dying conference in their irrelevance as they genuflected begging him to come next year did you see the photo of the half empty conference room to yes you know most of the events were were just empty chairs it's crazy it's irrelevant i mean these people

are irrelevant now thomas you guys remember when davos used to be a really big deal is it dead i think it's worse chamath i think it's a counter indicator now it is and there was a good conversation yesterday graham allison who spoke at our summit was on this panel and they basically said, we lost,

they won. Like, our group here at Davos lost.

It's over. And they're no longer, to your point, on the right side of history.

They said, we had a point of view on the future.

We believe we were going in the right direction.

And everyone told us in this last couple of months that we were wrong.

The gentleman, by the way, that spoke after Graham Allison was also very good.

This is incredible.

This is the greatest comeback in political history of a politician.

And then, therefore, he thinks he can do anything.

We need to also factor in not only who's won, which is Trump, but who's lost, which is to say us.

And then he has a whole, the guy has a whole long monologue on why they lost and what they lost, which I think is pretty relevant that that, you know, kind of elite, if you will, has been replaced with a populist vote and a populist leader.

All right, let's get to our docket today.

And I just want to give a special shout out.

We did our inauguration live stream and it was awesome and fun special thanks to air call abra and hymns thomas if you've ever got an issue with weight or you know other issues that men have you can go to hymns and use the code all in to get something hymns .com slash all in i want you to write that down

thomas okay in case you ever have any any issues uh that's what makes you think i haven't already well it's anything's possible like i mean i maybe we could talk i mean are you on the chews or the pills which one anyway we'll talk about it offline but that's a full head of hair it is a really incredible

head of hair thank you all natural baby great it's great but what product do you put it yeah do you put sea salt or you got promise what are you doing all -in -one all -in -one pearl shampoo plus conditioner one bottle easy no but you don't you don't use any product afterwards none do you blow yourself

or do you have it blown it's a question both but in this case it's you know like cuba gooding in jerry mcguire i air dry baby oh air dry gotcha so when you're driving to that santa monica office you just put the top down on whatever convertible living that full lifestyle okay yeah this is where i i

do have to admit unfortunately after the after you appeared on the summit i had all these women And they were like, oh my God, Thomas Lafont is so good looking.

And I was like, no, he's not.

Because I'm very competitive in zero sum when other men around me get.

But you were the smash hit.

And then I figured out it must be the hair.

And also the glasses.

I think the glasses were a huge hit.

It looked very Clark Kent -ish.

Are they real glasses, or you just wear the clear ones to get the extra intelligence points?

By the way, only time I've ever been stopped in the street in my life, in the Presidio, a very nice lady tapped me in the shoulder and said, I loved your all -in talk.

It's never happened before.

So that says more about All In than me.

But the reach is increasing.

It's a little bit too much.

By the way, shout out to Akash Singh who joined us on the live stream as well.

Oh, yes. Akash was hilarious.

Thank you, Akash. Filling in our DEI department.

We lost Chamath, and they sent Akash.

So he did great. Get him back to guesses.

Absolutely. Yeah, there's a moderator slot open, so he's going to be.

Yes, absolutely. If you know anybody who knows science.

All right. in our first topic, President Trump smashed the record for day one executive orders, 26 in all, beating the prior record of nine by Uncle Joe Biden.

No other president signed more than one EO on day one since the Federal Register started tracking this in 1937.

Let's go through them.

If you want to comment on one, we'll stop and pause, or we can just run through them, gentlemen.

Doge officially was established, and people are making note of the Doge SWAT team.

Doge will assign an agency head to each federal agency.

The agency head will build a four -person team.

This will include an engineer, an HR specialist, and an attorney.

It was separately announced that Vivek was leaving Doge to run for governor of Ohio.

Fascinating. Interesting.

I don't know if anyone's got a take there.

they suspended the tiktok ban for 75 days there's a lot more to get into this so we're going to break that down a little later yeah okay we'll go right to that in a minute the january 6 pardons they pardoned 1500 january 6 participants including some that savagely beat cops very controversial we'll

get back to that in a moment ending birthright citizenship this is a controversial one that is being fought legally.

Those born in the US to illegal immigrants would no longer be considered citizens.

If this holds up, the birthright citizenship is codified in the 14th amendment and 22 state attorney generals have already sued over this executive order.

So it might be a performative one.

Energy, unleashing American energy.

We're going to jump into that one for sure.

And then federal employees, a hiring freeze and a full return to office.

and the hiring freeze doesn't apply to military immigration enforcement or public safety and then a regulatory freeze on regulations gentlemen where do we want to start jan 6 tiktok doge tom is your our guest where do you want to start i'm happy to chat about tiktok okay as we mentioned earlier trump

extended tiktok's grace period by 75 days trump said he wants to get a deal done he also said at a press conference that he'd like the u .s to own 50 of tiktok and that it could be trillion dollar asset that's unique and interesting he was also positive about the idea of elon possibly buying it or maybe

larry ellison or anybody so he wants to make a deal what are your thoughts thomas on what should happen with tiktok and what will happen i don't know what will happen but i do think it'd be interesting um to share you guys we were we are investors in TikTok.

We invested back, it was obviously just a Chinese company and investing in China was very different back then.

But what resonated to me when I met the founder, and he just had a very simple idea, which is his view was, if I have a piece of content, and it's a great piece of content, how can I have it be shared?

And his view was that if you share it on Instagram, the only way people see it is if you had, you know, a lot of followers.

And so he just had a really simple idea.

And he said, what if I take every piece of content that's uploaded into the system, and I show it to at least one other user.

So no matter what that content is, at least one person will see it, even if you have no followers.

And then based on whether that person views it or how long I might show it to another user.

And then a third and a fourth.

And it was such a revolutionary idea.

And it really resonated with me at the time.

And it just goes to show how we're in an idea business.

And when you have a truly revolutionary idea, it can get really big.

And so the whole genesis of TikTok came from that really simple concept of your content will be shown.

And if people like it, it will be shown to a lot of people.

So obviously, I mean, if you look at TikTok in the US, we can just kind of very back of the envelope, look at the math, right?

Right. So if we look at DAUs, Mother Blue, or Meta, as we love to know, the Facebook hat, roughly has about 200 million DAUs in the US.

Daily active users for folks who don't know the terminology.

Yeah, correct. So if you look at Facebook, Lynn's Instagram, you'll see it's about 200 million DAUs.

And you can look at the time spent.

What's interesting about TikTok's time spent is the DAUs are about half of combined Meta and insta so we get about 100 million dau's in the us but the time spent on the platform is the equivalent of facebook plus instagram so obviously incredible not just scale in terms of dau's but also on time spent

so if we think about okay well what what would that mean the business is worth so if we look at meta today the market cap is roughly one and a half trillion I think internet investors generally assume about roughly half the market cap is US.

So if we take the 1 .5 trillion, maybe that's 750 billion.

Now, we know that the time spent is equivalent, but the DAUs are half.

So maybe we cut the 750 in half.

That would tell you that if you monetize the way Meta does and ran it the way Zuck does, it might be 375 billion for the U .S.

asset alone. I think from that point, you know, you kind of start to apply a couple discounts, right?

One is, if that's my kind of long term value, what kind of return would an investor want potentially to get to that 375?

You know, is it 50 %?

So maybe you cut that by 50%.

And then I think the devil would be in the details.

What are exactly are you getting?

Are you just getting users?

Are you getting the algorithm?

Are you getting data?

right so maybe you also want to apply kind of a more kind of severe discount to that but I think you put it all together you know is a hundred billion a reasonable scenario you know I think the math proves it and then could it be a trillion dollar asset the way Trump has mentioned I mean in a world

where Facebook's one and a half right and the penetration of TikTok in the U .S.

is 50 percent of what meta is I don't think it's unrealistic.

So let's see what happens.

I don't have any particular insight on what will happen.

But what I do know is that it's an incredibly valuable franchise.

So let me ask you the obvious question.

People are looking at this and saying, you're going to take 50 % of your shares.

And in this case, we actually have somebody who has shares.

So are you comfortable with the government seizing 50 % of your shares, I guess, is one way to frame it?

well i don't know i mean first of all there's there's kind of no deal so it's a little bit hard i can tell you that's the deal he proposed so if in that scenario would you yeah we never attributed much value to the you know the tiktok u .s asset in the sense of our our analysis was always based on the value

of the chinese business specifically because it's just hard to know what the TikTok asset X China would be worth, right?

Is it worth zero because it's so compromised regulatorily?

Is it worth a lot more?

It's just very, very difficult to know.

So we always took a very kind of conservative view of really looking at kind of the Chinese and some of the other assets as the core value of ByteDance, the holding company.

Ultimately, what TikTok happens, I mean, it's the classic when you try and sell a company, what's the value?

Well, it depends. Is there one bidder or five bidders?

Right? Is the government the only bidder for that asset?

In that case, it kind of will indicate a value of x.

Or are there other companies that potentially could be an acceptable bidder to both sides?

Well, the Trump deal, though, is he's saying the government, the United States government, the citizens of America, we get half of the company.

So that would be the equivalent of you giving half your shares.

The US company. Yeah.

So So what do you think of this proposal?

Because this seems like unique in all the world.

So if in order to have it spin out and maintain half your shares, would you be willing to give all of us, the government, the citizens of the United States, half your shares?

Well, I mean, if you think about it, what did we learn a couple of days ago?

We learned that it might just get shut down and be worth zero, right?

Right. So in one sense, anything that's greater than zero by definition is kind of better.

Right. I think ultimately it will kind of come down to does the government want to be the only bidder for the asset or with a comfortable with the government be comfortable with either Elon owning it and merging it to X or Microsoft owning it or, you know, what?

Well, Thomas, let me ask you a question.

can you just tell the audience a little bit about, because you guys have been involved as investors in China for a long time, I would love for you to share behind the scenes what has gone on with respect to being an investor in China in technology over the last couple of years?

What has changed and why and what goes on today?

You guys made a fantastic investment in ByteDance, which is the parent company of TikTok.

You've made other incredible investments in China.

are you still investing in china if not walk us through what happened and why i think if you look david most of our virtually all of our investments in china were chinese companies catering to the chinese market right right and there was a massive trend of a very significant economy that was adopting

technology right and so we can think about whether that be smartphones, companies like, you know, Huawei, whether it was companies like Meituan that were doing food delivery or Tencent that were doing gaming.

And so, you know, all our approach was basically based on these companies.

And by the way, a lot of them were public, which is what people don't remember.

Chamath, you may remember, but Tencent at one point was a public company listed in Hong Kong.

The market cap was 200 million.

So what was interesting about it, a lot of that played out.

Baidu was an early IPO.

A lot of that trend of Chinese companies catering to the Chinese market really kind of played out across public and private markets for over 20 years.

I think to me, what significantly changed over the past five years is technology really became a matter of national security.

I don't think that when we were early investors in Meituan, right?

That we necessarily viewed that as a national security threat as an example, right?

And I think as, you know, companies got bigger, as AI kind of came to be, it became pretty obvious that there were national security implications.

And, you know, our view as investors is we don't set the rules of the road.

We rely on government and regulators to do so.

It was pretty clear, I think, to obvious that the regulatory regimes were changing in both countries and so for us as investors you know we were just well we're just going to follow what what the rules are and what the governments are so my only kind of regret through this whole thing is and I don't

know any you know if you guys had kind of some exposure to this but the quality of the entrepreneurs that came out of that era was unbelievable that's a strong covert yeah absolutely when you think about the the founder of Meituan Wangsche and just how brilliant he was, and what he's done with that franchise,

and not just doing food delivery, but also the software operating system for restaurants, right, is truly incredible.

Pony Ma from Tencent, right?

It was such an incredible group of entrepreneurs.

They were a lot of fun to be around.

They were excited and passionate about bringing technology to their country.

And, you know, is it over?

Yeah, hard to know.

I mean, if you look at the capital markets, I mean, you can see, we've not seen a tremendous amount of innovation, right?

Or new companies kind of coming out.

So I think the key question is, you know, is it a pendulum?

And, you know, does the Chinese regulatory regime kind of move one way, and then it kind of moves another way?

Or is it kind of fixed in this state?

Is it your read, is it correct to say that the CCP wanted to stop this extraordinary wealth creation by a subset of individuals in the country, that this was kind of becoming too much of a capitalist enterprising system and challenge some of the foundations of the CCP?

Is that what was going on and why this all got throttled back?

I mean, is there or is there something something else, some other kind of, you know, security reason?

I don't really know, Dave, because as an investor, it's, you know, it's not a regulatory regime that you have any interaction with, right?

You're really talking to the entrepreneurs, and you're kind of reflecting off of their energy and their business ideas, right?

So we would meet businesses, and we would meet founders.

And if the idea was kind of interesting to us, we would kind of fund it, right?

So it's a black box in some ways, you know, in terms of a market to invest in, you only have a limited amount of information.

And after Jack, I mean, you got to think after Jack Ma kind of disappeared for a couple of years, if you're an entrepreneur and you want to like, the message was sent the message was sent message received and then you start thinking about chamov you know what trump just did and what xi jinping just

did you put those two things together trump put all of our top guys top dogs on stage here they are it's the exact opposite of china the message is very clear and it's what thomas said like technology is a national security imperative and so we're going to embrace these guys we're not going to play

favorites we're not going to pick one and not the other.

We're not going to have summits and have the founder of an entire category not be invited.

That's just, honestly, it's patently stupid and immature.

And that's what the Biden administration did.

Picked favorites. And that is dumb based on the implication and importance of technology.

I just want to go back to the TikTok thing.

I want to make three points.

One is from the past.

I'll give you my sense of the TikTok thing, and I'm going to make a prediction for the future.

In 1984, the way that LVMH began was through a deal that Bernard Arnault architected.

There was a business owned by the French cotton king, Marcel Boussac, and inside of that empire was Christian Dior.

Long story short, his empire was crumbling, and Arnault did a deal where he bought that dying business essentially from the french government for one franc fast forward now 40 years of very hard work and tremendous execution that's a 350 billion dollar public company now imagine back then in 1984 if the french

government actually had done a deal where they said we'll sell it to you for 50 of whatever you build take it for a dollar but we're going to own 50 % of the upside, and they would have an extra $175 billion today.

I think that that's very important in terms of what is possible today.

I like Thomas's math.

I believe it. I do think it's about $100 billion asset, but at the end of the day, the president was very clear that it is completely and entirely worthless without his permit, and he wants to own 50 % of this asset.

Now, if you're a buyer of something, you're not going to pay $100 billion if you control whether it can exist or not.

You're basically going to pay today's equivalent of one franc, which would be $1.

Now, I'm not saying that it is going to be $1, but if the United States Treasury wants to hold 50 % of an asset that could be worth $100 billion or $500 billion or maybe a trillion, it would make sense for the United States Treasury and the United States people to own that at effectively zero.

So I think that the incentive is there, and I think he has essentially said that he is going to do the best deal in his interests, which is the United States' interests, which I suspect means a price that is as low as possible approaching $1.

And ultimately, won't this be Chinese government's decision?

Because they could always say, you know what?

Let it die. Maybe. But my point is, it may not be $1.

Maybe it could be $25 billion.

Maybe it could be $10 billion.

But my point is, I find it very hard to see how it gets to the actual value that it is today.

So then, I think, let me just make a prediction for the future.

There's a question that this raises, which is, does it make sense for the American government to be a little bit smarter going forward about how it allocates incentives and resources?

The American government is still the largest single landowner in America.

We give concessions to private companies to drill, to build things.

And it just turns out that if you apply this example more broadly, wouldn't it make sense where when you create incredible economic incentives and upside for private investors and investment, for some portion of that gain to go back to the American people?

Is that a bad thing?

I don't think so. For example, if you said we're going to accelerate permitting for all these data centers, we're going to make any form of energy, which was the opposite of what the Biden EO said on his way out the door.

He had all these conditions.

But if the President Trump's CEO on data centers has any kind of energy, but we want to own a 5 % royalty and we'll allow you to put it on federal lands or 10 % or 15%.

Would it really change the underwriting that Blackstone and all these other companies will do?

I don't think so. Would it enrich America?

I think so. Would it make it easier for people to feel like they're participating in all of these incredible gains, I also think so.

So my prediction is that this becomes more of a template for the future.

It'll be less about permitting.

It'll be more about creating incentives and allocating those incentives for a share of the upside.

And I think that there is a really strong economic argument for America to do that.

You know, Chamath, to build on that, people don't remember, but Tesla got $465 million from the department of energy that was called the ATVM program which was the advanced technology vehicles manufacturing that was a very visionary program at the time visionary but it but it took no equity but it didn't take

equity and that was dumb so dumb they should have gotten some portion of equity some portion of a loan Tesla did so well thanks to Elon but I think the president They paid it back early.

They paid it back early.

That's how well they did.

If they had owned 10 % of Tesla, but 10%, my lord.

I think the president has sniffed this out, by the way.

And you may not think that these are related, but when he said that he's considering eliminating federal income tax and funding this thing from tariffs, and he just had a press conference today where he's inviting every single company to come and make things in the United States because he will create

economic incentives to make it here cheaper.

But if you make it abroad and bring it in here, he's going to charge money and a tariff.

All of this are part and parcel of I think this broader economic realization.

And unlike 2008, 9 and 10, when we were allocating money, or 2020 and 21 and 22, where we were just sending money out the door with, frankly, no consequence and no accounting this time around i think he's got some incredibly sharp business people this is by the way the upside of having folks that have actually

been successful in the real world working inside of government is they're going to help him get to this realization and i think it's a really good one i don't think tim tim waltz i mean my way back to chamath on that would be i just think it's a dangerous game for the government to start picking winners

you know i wouldn't for example if it owns 50 % of a TikTok does it disadvantage a meta as an example, right?

And I do wonder is the value capturing mechanism for the government taxes, essentially, right?

So the way you capture the portion of the value creation of these companies is through a tax system.

And I do think we just have to be careful of the government all of a sudden, picking different companies to win.

You know, I do think having a good set of incentives, a level playing field, let the competitive dynamics of different companies fight each other, and then capture the value through taxes.

I think you're right.

And I think that that part is absolutely fundamental.

But I think there is a way to architect this.

For example, you have these RFPs that by design have to be published in the open source and available for anybody to bid on.

My only point is just to say that when there is an ultimate winner, why not have a small stake in the upside?

Look at the amount of money that the DOE gives in grants.

I'll give you an example.

One of these companies that I helped start a few years ago to make advanced battery materials, we got $150 million grant.

I'm very appreciative of that grant.

But if they also asked for 5 % or 10 % of the equity, I would have still said yes.

Of course you would have.

Yeah, it's a great deal.

And why not give a little upside to the taxpayers?

I agree with that. By the way, a parallel to that would be spectrum, right if you think about wireless right kind of got built the government auctioned off spectrum and then allowed public you know private companies to kind of come and bid on it and you know so there's a lot of different interesting

mechanisms you can bring to that yeah freeberg which eo would you like to go to next well i'll just wrap on the tick tock sure i do worry a lot about the precedent being set here with respect to foreign government actions on US companies in their local countries.

Imagine the CCP tells Tesla they have to sell their Chinese operations and give 50 % of the Chinese operations to the Chinese government because of their concerns about security where Tesla is now able to track Chinese citizens driving around and where they are.

And you can see very quickly how this whole kind of overall, I think, presentation of the security risk that we face with TikTok and therefore we will shut it down or own it creates, I think, a counter that could really hurt American companies.

You could see this going to Google, to Apple, to Tesla, even food manufacturing companies that have operations overseas where local governments say, hey, we need to, for local security purposes, we need to take ownership of your business.

I think one of the things that's really benefited Americans in global trade is our ability to sell and export our technology, our goods, and our services around the world through open trade.

And I do think that we've used this kind of TikTok security thing to say, this is a rationale for us doing this as a one -off.

But it also opens up a lot of other people to say this is a one -off.

And so I'm just generally very wary about this whole TikTok situation, opening up a can of worms.

You're 100 % right. And by the way, the CCP has done it already.

They did it to Apple.

And if you follow what happened when they introduced iCloud, I don't know if you remember GCBD, GCBD, is the Chinese state -owned.

data company the cloud provider there and they just told apple we get all the data and they just had to roll over and all citizens in china who use an iphone in order to use an iphone in china your data is owned by the government period full stop and apple had no choice but to do that so if you want

to play in a certain market you got to play by the rules the thing the thing to keep in mind here is i hear all of these kind of like theoretical qualms about how it's unfair, but this stuff happens all the time.

And it's just that we don't benefit from it.

So Jason brought up an excellent example with Tesla.

The other example, just to remind you guys, is during the pandemic, the Federal Reserve stepped in and started buying commercial corporate bonds.

They own a ton of like Ford bonds so that these things wouldn't default.

There's all kinds of action all the time where the federal government is involved in private companies.

My point is, if you're going to be involved, have some legacy ownership on the back end of it so that in case this stuff really works, that it's broadly value creating for more Americans.

I think it would create a way to deescalate the sensation that a few people are winning and everybody else is just kind of staying still.

We should talk about Stargate and the AI project because I do think it tees off on one of the most - I want to talk about Jan 6th though.

Okay, but it does tee off of one of the other kind of key things that I heard a lot about in DC.

And I know Thomas is passionate about like I am, which is energy, electricity capacity build out in the United States, because it's critical.

Like building AI infrastructure means that we need to build energy infrastructure.

all right and so anyway let's yeah we'll go we'll go right to that after we wrap up these um we wrap up these executive orders and i too wanted to talk about january 6th uh just to give people the update here jd vance had said that the people who committed violence on january 6th quote obviously shouldn't

be pardoned and this is a parade of people who are on the republican side who are coming out against how president trump handled this i think you all know where i would fall on the side of it what are your thoughts on this do you where do you fall on them you know i come from a family of cops and i

feel like he's betrayed the blue on this one and you know if there are people who i think he should have taken his time with this it is possible that some people had sentences that were too long uh the justice system you know is imperfect in our country and the pardon power is theirs i think specifically

to do a very granular job of looking at each case right and so i think we have to look at pardon power generally after what we saw the biden family do and now we see trump doing this so i think the the pardon power is not being used as it's intended it's being used politically now by both parties so i'm

trying to call balls and strikes here but you know as somebody who's in law enforcement a family that's in law enforcement and my chosen career was to be a cop and an fbi agent and you know just looking at it it's just heartbreaking to see people beat cops and then be treated as heroes, treated as heroes.

And some of these people are very dark people, you know, the, the, the Oath Keepers, and some of these people are extremely violent and they're coming out now after this has all been said and saying that they're going to double down, they're going to buy more guns and that they're going to get their

retribution. And so I think you have to be really careful with violent people that you give them, you know, this coronation and that they were justified because they'll go do more violent things.

And so I understand he made this promise to people.

I think he should have been very granular in doing this.

I totally understand there could be people who got sentences that were too long, and I would have liked to see him do this thoughtfully.

This was not done thoughtfully.

I have a certain amount of goodwill towards the new president, and this has lowered it.

I knew that this would be really important to you, so I took a few minutes to try to collect my thoughts.

I've been kind of walking myself through it since yesterday.

This is not an explanation other than to you, Jason, my friend, about how I think we got here, okay?

So I just wanted to take a few minutes to explain that to you.

I think that before you can look at January 6, I think you got to go back to what happened during the COVID lockdowns and what we started to see in a bunch of these liberal cities.

Talking about BLM riots?

The BLM riots, the Antifa riots, what happened in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, the lawlessness that you see in places like New York, the decarceration movement.

And I think that what started to happen was a sensation that for me, The same weight, there were different measures.

So, for example, if you start to look at some of the deportations that are happening now, it's really quite shocking.

I sent Nick a clip of them.

Nick, you can just maybe show the first few seconds.

But you are talking about some incredibly, incredibly violent offenders that were just walking randomly down the street.

I'm not going back to Haiti.

One of those threats is this illegal alien from Haiti.

ICE says he's a gang member with 17 criminal convictions in recent years.

So you feel me? Yo, Biden forever, bro.

Thank Obama for everything that he did for me, bro.

There's more after this, but there was like a rapist that they picked up in Boston.

There's a person that was charged with assault.

So there was this sensation, Jason, that was building up for a long time that all of a sudden the law was being applied in very odd ways, where depending on what you did, you would get adjudicated in totally different ways, based on your political affiliation, or your leaning, or based on the desire

of a district prosecutor to go after one thing or another.

Let me just pause. So that's sort of like the thing that was sort of building and cascading.

I do agree with you that I think January 6th is kind of like a stain.

I think there's nothing to be proud of there.

But I think what we found out since January 6th is somewhat important.

I think the first thing we found out was that there was a bunch of these folks whose convictions were very speculative.

I think the Supreme Court already ruled that in June of last year, it was like a 63 vote that said, at least 350 of these convictions should probably just be thrown out.

So there was one body that was that.

Then there was a whole bunch of them where, to your point, you took a misdemeanor, you trumped it up to a felony, you had all kinds of things where procedural motions were denied for the defense, approved for prosecution, and you had sentences that didn't match the crime.

And then you have a president who frankly was the subject of lawfare himself.

So I think that what would have been better was a more methodical approach to this.

I agree with you. But I do think that what's happening here is essentially a moment where we can close this entire chapter and we can get back to a focus on observing the law and adjudicating it equally for everybody.

And I think that that's probably the best way that we can all deal with this because I think that there was a bunch of pardons that were 100 % obvious.

And then there was a bunch that were just, you know, had to be done because the court was perverted in how they dealt with some of these folks.

Then there was a small number, and i don't know the exact number to be fair jason where these folks did some really bad stuff now it's also mixed in with this thing where there was a bunch of informants then there was a bunch of folks that were yeah the informants stuff you have to wait for that to

come out because that's in conspiracy for no one is i just went and i collected that as a way to try to explain to you how i appreciate you understanding my passion on it and and wanting to how we got here i think it's sort of like i'm well aware of it yeah i think we got to put a pin in this and say,

both sides should now have enough experience to say, we're going to apply the law equally to everybody going forward from this moment out.

Let's just go forward and not look back.

I think that's the best thing that we can all do.

Let's hope. I'll just leave you with this.

The proud boy leader, Enrique Tarrio, this is his quote on getting out.

I'm happy the president's focusing not on retribution and focusing on success, but I will tell you that I'm not going to play by those rules.

They need to pay for what they did.

These are some seriously bad hombres, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

And so don't be surprised if they do something worse.

I also want to talk about the citizenship thing, and I just want to just provide a little color for people.

I'm sure that there's a lot of folks that are listening who have people that work for them that may be - The birthright thing.

If you came here illegally and had a child, you get to be a citizen, just to be clear.

This is going to the Supreme Court.

And just to put a little bit of color on it, in the 14th Amendment, there's this very important part that says birthright citizenship is applied to people who are subject to the jurisdiction of America.

And for a long time, that phrase was not really considered in how the Supreme Court administered the 14th Amendment.

I think what this EO did and the lawsuits that happened almost instantaneously as a result, we'll now send this back to the Supreme Court very quickly, and people will opine on what that means.

So if it means nothing, it means that if you are here, however you're here, and if you have a child, they're going to be a citizen of America.

If that qualifier is now part of the administration and the interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

I think what President Trump has written is what will happen, which is if you are here illegally, it doesn't apply.

If you are here under a visa that necessarily means you're still subject to the jurisdiction of somebody else, it may not apply.

But I think the Supreme Court is going to get to decide this in pretty short order.

Okay. A couple more issues I want to get to on the docket.

Sorry, let me just make a quick comment on the um oh sure do the uh january 6th i'm i just generally don't like this power of pardon agreed we saw what biden did he gave i mean how many thousands nick you could pull the number up but eight thousand eight thousand pardons and i feel like the original

intention of the power of pardon which is in the constitution was meant to kind of protect the union, the civility in the union at times of, you know, we need to kind of come back together and realign ourselves.

And it has been so far abused beyond that original intention.

It's almost like feels like an extraordinary injustice.

It almost gives the president the ability to rewrite the law that many of the kind of actions from the executive branch can simply supersede the actions of the judicial branch, which is really meant to protect and execute the laws of the nation.

And I think it's gone too far.

It feels like there's a necessary amendment to address this, that these presidents can come out and preemptively pardon people for things that might be found in the future because they're close with them.

It has nothing to do with the original intention.

If you go back to the arguments for the pardon being in the Constitution, you can see that Alexander Hamilton wrote deeply about it in Federalist paper number 74.

And in that paper, he talked a lot about and emphasized that the justice system, which is designed to be fair, may occasionally result in overly harsh or unjust outcomes.

And the pardon allows for acts of mercy to correct these situations.

A lot of these sorts of actions that we saw happen with Biden do not fit the bill for that definition.

I will tell you there's a quote from Federalist paper 74 from Hamilton, it goes as follows.

In seasons of insurrection or rebellion, there are often critical moments when a well -timed offer of pardon to the insurgents or rebels may restore the tranquility of the Commonwealth.

So to counter my point, Hamilton's argument is that when the nation is divided, the act of the pardon may actually help bring the nation back together, as may have been the case with respect to the January 6th.

But it may not necessarily be about or Nixon justice or Nixon and it may not necessarily be about justice but as much more about restoring tranquility of the union and allowing the nation to move forward even though it may not seem just it may be the right thing for the nation so I'm not trying to defend

the action or defend the pardon I really don't like the act of pardoning as a kind of tool that's being used a hundred different ways and it certainly seems like it requires change so yeah and just um programming note here research note 6 500 people of those 8 000 seem to be convicted of marijuana possession uh

possession uh or you know what's needed and they were pardoned and then then the law should have been changed and the courts should have overturned all of those convictions it does not necessarily need to fall and it shouldn't fall on the executive branch to take that action the courts need to do their

job and the legislators need to do their job i don't disagree but i think there is some compassion in the pardon concept for how long do they have to wait for that yeah how long do you have to wait for that you know and then like the people who were you know convicted of selling dime bags or having

an ounce of weed on them or black and brown and then all my white friends who started weed companies are now taking them public in canada so shout out trudeau all right let's keep moving here i think we we've we did some good job here on the reconciliation on the pod where do we want to go next stargate

project stargate stargate stargate and energy yeah stargate and energy okay so here we go and i'm gonna go to to our guest here thomas thomas anything on january 6th or controversial topics like smoking weed that you want to jump in on there no okay great sure your lps just breathed oh hey you're coming

on the all in podcast when his lps they're gonna be so happy but then when when they hear the j6 they're just going to be clenched waiting for this oh wait hold on my mic went out oh never mind i missed it okay all right uh it was well said honestly i don't have anything to add you guys okay you guys

something anything on lauren sanchez's uh outfit okay let's continue another big story from week one we are literally not even three or four days into this it's gonna be a crazy four years according to open ai's press release the stargate project is a new company which intends to invest 500 billion over

the next four years building new ai infrastructure for open ai in the united states freeberg we're going to find out what's going on here with the stargate movie and tv series if they got ip permission to do this softbank and open ai are the questions jaco i mean i'm just thinking out loud and we have to

talk about where this ranks on your list Of great sci -fi.

Top 40 sci -fi. Okay, right up there with the Star Trek original series and the next generation.

SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners with Oracle and MJX.

Also participating, Oracle, NVIDIA, and OpenAI will build and operate the infrastructure.

Microsoft is sort of involved, although we'll see about that.

Yoshi -san was at the announcement he's going to be the chairman.

However, Gavin Baker and Elon both called CAP on X, saying they don't actually have the money.

Gavin did some back of the envelope math.

And of course, as always, Sam and Elon have been spicy in the replies.

Sam is hurt. Elon is dunking.

It's just their relationship is so fluid.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella jumped into my thread with Elon, saying he was good for the 80 bill and then he was ready to build other products and services and that was what was important.

What do you think here Thomas is this uh are you an investor in open AI I guess let's get that out there or in xai just so we know where you're coming from here if you're talking your book but uh is I am an investor in open AI and okay so there's three points I want to make here go point number one

going back to the origins of the of this podcast and you know sitting watching both public market investors and venture investors, one notable difference is I think venture investors tend to be very tribal.

So if you're in one tribe, you are by definition, not in another.

And I think there's a lot of kind of domain -specific reasons for that.

For me, as my legacy as a public market investor, I'm very comfortable being both pro -open AI and pro -Tesla and pro -X.

And so I just kind of caveat that kind of as a first point.

my second point is can we do a slight detour on masa for one minute and i'm curious to get your guys's opinion but yeah is masa the goat because when i started in the growth business i met with jerry milner and he said thomas you get in the hall of fame if you can have one deal that gives you a billion dollar

return i .e you know whatever you invest plus what you take out is a billion dollars or more and he actually kept a tracker in his mind of who had made those deals and what share he had and et cetera.

So let's go to Massa for one minute.

Massa is the $100 billion club.

Okay, and not only that, he's actually done it twice.

He did it the first time with SoftBank and Alibaba, which at its peak was a $200 billion win and I think he ultimately netted like 80 plus billion out of it, so that's one.

He did it again with Arm that he bought for 30 and now is sitting on a gain of $135 billion and he could have done it a third time with Nvidia if he hadn't sold.

I mean, guys. There's nobody like him.

Incredible. Incredible.

You're 100 % right. You got to give the man his flowers.

He is the good. So I'll tell you what, Chamath.

I am never betting against Masa, ever, because you got to give the man credit for what he's done.

And so now let's go to kind of OpenAI.

You guys mentioned we do own some OpenAI.

I am bullish on OpenAI, which I guess is now a counter against the grain kind of view.

But guys, my point of view on OpenAI and the reason I'm so bullish is really kind of ChatGPT.

And I do think when OpenAI gets, you know, we do, it does have different businesses, right?

It's got the model business, it has the API business, and then it has the ChatGPT business, right?

And if you look at the downloads, maybe Nick, bring up the charts, but it is really interesting to watch the market share of ChatGPT versus Google, uh gemini and grok this is both in the u .s and international it really is a dominant kind of franchise right it is maintaining 80 percent plus market share you

know jcal if this was ride sharing right we would say wow this this company is the winner right so to me i think that the quality of the chat gpt franchise right i think they disclosed 300 million weekly actives over a million enterprise users it has become a core part of my own workflow you know I

have it on my phone I have it on my desktop I use it all the time I can't even quantify the value that it brings it's so important for what it does for me so and I do think that it just keeps getting smarter every query that I ask it learns more about me it learns more about our system so I do think

the chat GPT franchise inside of OpenAI is one of the great, most successful, fastest growing kind of stories.

So that's kind of the underpinning of my kind of OpenAI thesis.

On Stargate specifically, look, I think the real question to me isn't whether they have the $500 billion, right?

Because we know that the $500 billion could come from equity.

It could come from Masa, if you look at Gavin's tweet, by the way, he does caveat it, right, saying that assumes that Masa doesn't want to sell ARM and SoftBank, right?

So I'm not sure. Or just lever it up and use debt.

Correct. So you have debt.

I think to me, the real question, guys, is do we ultimately believe that you can get an ROI on that 500 billion?

Because if you can, there will be people that will want to fund it, right?

You can do a data center by data center, you can do it actually at the GPU level.

So the financing is there.

To me, the $500 billion doesn't scare me from an absolute number.

I think the question we really have to ask ourselves is, do we believe that the market is big enough, that the opportunity is big enough, that investors can get a return on the $500 billion?

So to me, that's the real question.

I think you framed it perfectly.

And since you bring up ride sharing and the 80 % there, I really think that's an important thing to, to take a moment to, um, to settle on because in that case you didn't have Uber being challenged by Google, Microsoft and Elon Musk, you know, at the same time in a digital product as opposed to a real

world product. And so, you know, when I use Gemini or XAI and chat GPT and I use them all daily and Claude, the difference, the difference between the products right now is really narrow and i think you know if the equivalent would be somebody who had 100 million cars on the road already competing against

uber which you know doesn't exist or didn't exist at the time so that i think is the the way i look at this as a slightly different type of race i do believe the chat gpt franchise has some is worth something but i think enterprise folks when i talk to them want the open source product most of all so anyway

i think it's still anybody's um i think it's anybody's game right now and i don't know how you get a return on 500 billion invested in this that that's the other thing and i don't know if that's the real number freebrooke what do you think i don't know this is out here in some crazy i think guys the way

these things happen right is you don't you don't fund it all equity up front right i think these things get funded facility by facility data center by data center across four years right and to chamas point it's not just equity it's you know site level debt and etc right it's a complex capital structure to

these things but look we live also in a world right where i was just kind of looking at this chart the kind of cloud capex chart right and we know that in total 2025 capex for the top five players in the US is going to be 312 billion, right?

So that's this year, that's in one year.

So we can also kind of frame this in saying, hey, does that number make any sense versus what others are spending?

It's at least kind of in the order of magnitude, right?

When you think about it's over four years.

By the way, another really interesting kind of corollary on this point is the US internet companies spend 20x what the Chinese companies spend on CapEx.

really interesting as we think about our competitiveness right uh dave to your point it's not just power it's also kind of compute i mean pretty powerful that you're spending 20x what your competitor is on these kind of advanced technologies chamath how do you how do you how do you look at this i think

that value and money are correlated in some industries like real estate or heavy industry, but I don't think that it's very correlated in tech.

And I tried to say this in my tweet, I don't know, Nick, can you find this tweet where I was just talking about the DeepSeq model?

So what did we see last week?

We saw a model that got released by the Chinese under, by the way, a totally open source MIT license that you can run on a laptop.

And it turned out to be as good as OpenAI's O1 model, so a couple of versions old.

But the point is that this model cost millions of dollars and was able to compete with a model that took billions of dollars to train.

So my takeaway from that was that these costs are falling really precipitously.

So that's sort of my one observation is spending more money doesn't necessarily get you further along if the goal is progress.

And I think that that's very true in what we're learning about AI, because we're learning as we go along.

So then I think it just brings up this question of what is the point of saying all these grandiose numbers?

And this is where if you look at a different industry, like if an oil company came into the Oval and said they were about to spend 500 billion, you kind of know that it's real because you know what these things cost and you know what the entire infrastructure will be and you know, it's all directly

correlated. So we know what goes on.

Yeah. So the deeper the oil is in the ground and the harder the rock is that you got a breakthrough to get there, the more you have to spend.

So those numbers become very grounded in reality.

If you were a rocket company and you wanted to build a rocket and send it to Mars, you can also be very detailed in what the costs are.

And you can assume some amount of reductions of scale.

If somebody said you'd have to spend 500 billion.

The thing is that when in this world, it seems that there are these advances that are happening that allow you to do things cheaper and cheaper almost overnight by spending one one -thousandth of what you spent even six months ago.

I think the spending money part, to be honest, is more of a gimmick than it is a technical commitment.

So I guess if they want to spend the money, go ahead, but it doesn't actually tie to whether they're going to be able to make custom vaccines, whether they're going to cure cancer.

So I kind of thought that these things were just joint.

And so my takeaway was entirely different.

It was not a commentary on Masa or Larry or Sam.

I think all of those three companies are frankly very good.

It was more a comment that you have to be very careful to protect the president's legacy, if I were them, to make sure that the things that get announced are actually further down the technical spectrum and are actually going to be real.

Because if they achieve these things, but it costs you a billion dollars and you only hire 50 people, there's going to be a little bit of egg on the face.

And so that was sort of my own takeaway.

I think that the things were decoupled.

It just seemed more marketing and sizzle and kind of hastily put together.

It was definitely, yeah, put together with haste.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, you got that sense.

I think it would be great if OpenAI builds in another incredible model, whatever comes after 03, 04, 05.

but it's not clear that you have to spend 500 billion to do it you know i think people are playing to what trump likes which is a big number and which is his influence on growing the number so there was specific details where masa said you know you i i told you 100 billion you challenged me to get two

i came back with five right and so this is the sort of trump ethos is hey we're going swing for the fences in a way you know you could be critical of it and be like well trump's a bs artist or whatever or if you're from silicon valley you can say hey listen he's moonshotting it he's going to just shoot

for the stars and get the moon so if these guys wind up spending 50 billion or 100 billion it makes us more competitive more power to the question i had was you know was did elon have any insight that this was happening probably not from from the reaction on i bet he did.

I have no insight either, but I do think if you were going to be critical of Trump that he was putting his thumb on the scale for any one company or individual, this shows that he's not.

It's an open platform.

The Trump administration is an open platform.

Highest bidder gets to come to the White House.

Whoever spends the most, whoever buys the most military, buys the most ammunitions from us you're going to get your time in the white house it's uh this is a capitalist country and this is the greatest one in the world equal opportunity anybody can make one of the obvious the obvious consequence of this data center

and chip infrastructure effort which is obviously going to happen with or without government involvement is an increase in electricity demand thomas i know you've got some slides do you want to pull those up and and show them because i think they're something i've talked a lot about on the show which is the difference

in uh electricity production capacity in the u .s versus china historically and then prospectively going forward ultimately as i've talked about in the past right the u .s today is paying roughly you know call it one and a half to three x the price per kilowatt hour for electricity in the United States

over what China's paying.

We have, I believe, half of the electricity production capacity of China.

They're adding more.

The cost to add is one tenth of what our cost to add is.

Call it one tenth to one half our cost to add per new gigawatt of production capacity.

Everything is in the wrong direction.

And ultimately, if AI and automation are the critical factors for economic growth going forward, and electricity is the critical input to that, we are hugely disadvantaged and aren't going to catch up.

It seems like you've pulled this analysis together, which kind of indicates the same, if you think it makes sense to walk through this now.

Yeah, yeah, I'd be happy to.

I mean, Dave, you're 100 % right.

If you think of the GPU as the atomic unit of the future, right?

And the key competitive advantage and the key kind of ingredient, you can't power a GPU without a data center, and you can't use a data center without power.

So I do think at the end of the day, it really comes down to the grid and it comes down to power.

So I think that's kind of constraint number one.

The other thing, Dave, that I think is really important is in an inflationary era, you do not want to increase or have this industry be perceived to be increasing electricity prices for the consumer right so somehow we need to add capacity we need to make it so the consumer kind of doesn't go bonkers

by having their bills go higher and we can nick run through a couple of the slides but the data shows exactly kind of your point dave right which is we basically did not invest for a very long period of time right in our grid and china did and if you keep going we can kind of run through these a couple

of times but that wasn't always the case you know during kind of like the post -world war ii boom era during the information age you know we did invest and we did a lot of it and then suddenly in 2000 we just kind of stopped and this is globalization you're saying is why we stopped exactly right we start

to outsource of that that we didn't have factories we didn't have factories so we didn't need as much power what's the reason we didn't invest or we didn't need to i think we just outsourced a lot of our hardcore manufacturing the usd industrialized correct okay that's so no factory equals no need for additional

electricity now the new factories are h100 factories we need exactly yeah our ai factories right Hey, and by the way, the way to think about it is almost like a subscription business on a net ad basis, right?

Yeah. So this makes it even more stark, right?

Exactly. Because this is kind of net additions and it just kind of speaks for itself, right?

And just read the numbers out so the audience that's listening can get a sense here.

Yeah, I mean, you can see, I mean, since 1985, right, the delta roughly between China and the U .S.

is almost, what's the quick math?

like it's almost 7x right?

In 2000 the US and China were both roughly a thousand terawatt hours today the US is 1600 terawatt hours and China is 9000 terawatt hours.

Yeah. And this is just an extraordinary ramp up relative to correct.

On the AI side there was a Biden EO last week I spoke about this on Tucker because it happened the day I went on Tucker but the eo basically said we will allow the permitting of power plants on federal lands to power these ai data centers which started off like a very intelligent eo but right in the second

paragraph started to talk about dei and all this other stuff and how you got to have a certain percentage of it from certain sources but just today it looked like president trump overturned it and now it's full steam ahead if you have it permitted then it's all about just get the power however you need

the power which i think is the smart decision back to your earlier point like we are we are in a race here in your analysis toms can we do this without nuclear no can we catch out without nuclear okay in fact we can't and why we buy uranium i think you can speak to that better one of the really interesting

parts i mean you can see by the way just the the percentage of nuclear it kind of needs to go higher i don't know if you guys have been following this stock in the public market, guys, called Constellation Energy.

Oh yeah. It's a really interesting idea.

What's interesting of what Amazon and Microsoft is, they're actually signing deals directly with these companies to do what's called back behind the meter types of deals.

So they have direct energy access.

To your point, Shamath, on the Biden administration, at the end of last year a deal got announced publicly announced that federal agencies were also contracting directly now with CEG to power some of their facilities.

And even though in total, the number was small, we took it, and I think the market took it as a clear indication that the government, even under Biden, was acknowledging that nuclear is the best path forward.

So So, you know, we expect and we think just the trend generally towards nuclear energy is going to continue.

It's been proven in China.

It's been proven in Europe.

I think it will show to be a key part of the AI kind of arms race, you know, over the next 10, 20 years.

This is to me kind of the story in one slide, right, which is if you look at basically the nuclear capacity in the US, it's basically been flat for 25 plus years.

Ridiculous. And so when Scott Besson was asked, are we in a green energy arms race with China?

He was thinking about chart number on the right, which basically shows how much nuclear China has added over that time period.

And so I think it's pretty clear what the answer is.

I think China is leading the way in that measure, and I think we need to follow.

Yeah. And I think what's really important to note is over that same period of time, Thomas, we're in a different era on nuclear than we were when we had Three Mile Island and, you know, prior to that Chernobyl, we have new Gen 4 technologies that are meltdown proof that have a totally different architecture

where there isn't a setup where you have runaway heat and ultimately a collapse of the reactor and a release of the gas.

radioactive material, which is what happened at Chernobyl.

These new systems, which we highlighted on the show a couple of months ago, like the pebble bed reactor that's been in production, making electricity in China, are incredible new technology architectures.

And they're here, and they're running.

And China's rolling out dozens or hundreds of these.

And the United States is rolling out zero.

And that needs to change.

And I think we only have a couple of months to get the engine stood up that will allow us to make the material that will allow us to make the production technology needed to actually deploy these stations to try and have a shot at catching up.

And if we don't, we're going to be hugely disadvantaged on an energy cost basis, we're going to be hugely disadvantaged on an ability to actually deploy AI technology competitively.

That's key. And by the way, you also can look at France, right?

My home country, not known as a technology leader, but 70 % of its energy, of its electricity comes from nuclear.

But France held the line, right?

When Europe tried to really deprecate its use of nuclear, Germany did, but France held the line.

Yeah, it's too important, Jamar.

It's 70 % plus. So I think there's examples, it's doable, and I think now with AI, it's a matter of national security.

National security. We got to get it done.

By the way, that'll doftail into fabs, which is obviously another key component, which is a short term for semiconductor manufacturing facilities, which is another, in my opinion, key strategic area that we need to ramp up in the US.

The thing that I noticed about that chart is the trend line.

I mean, look at how fast they're building these.

And this is where, you know, I don't know what government incentive we need to create or what red tape has to be moved here.

But if we can't build, you know, multifamily housing in some states, like, this nuclear is going to really need to, we're going to have to figure out a way to change that trend line, Freiberg, yeah?

I mean, what would it take to build these nuclear power plants at an accelerated rate?

I will tell you that there is a lot of capital, and we mentioned this last time, a lot of intellectual capital in the United States that's eager, hungry, and ready to get moving on build -out.

The only thing that's challenged and the only thing that's holding it back is regulatory challenges, regulatory roadblocks.

And if those get removed through emergency action.

I view this to be more of a national security threat, frankly, than the border.

I think we need to get energy increased in this country in an accelerated way for the United States to even be in a position to be able to challenge China with respect to manufacturing and AI in the decades ahead.

And the United States needs to consider this an emergency.

Emergency declarations may be needed to drop the regulatory roadblocks that are keeping the proliferation of electricity production in the United States at bay, I think it's time for that sort of action.

So, I think that's the only thing that's getting in the way.

So, we have the tech, we have the physics, we have the will, we have the talent, we have a blocker, and the blocker is regulation, and that regulatory blocker needs to have leadership in government to remove it.

Am I summarizing correctly here?

That's right. And look, you have an energy czar that I think is very aligned with that intention in Doug Burgum.

Obviously, we have this big AI arms race that's underway.

We have an automation and manufacturing demand, which will massively increase energy demand in this country.

And we have, I think, a deregulatory administration.

The stars are aligned, and I think that this is a moment where this could happen.

Shemakh or Thomas, what's the downside to removing the regulation and going for it and building this extra capacity?

Can we define any possible downside?

Yeah. The downside is the amount of time it takes to adequately build these things properly.

The thing that China has had, as Thomas's chart shows, is decades of practice in building things safely and quickly.

We can build things, but we haven't had the practice to build them either safely or quickly because we haven't built any.

So that's a complicated thing to just acknowledge.

That's a valid concern.

If there is any resistance to this, Thomas, what would be on the top of that list?

Just theoretically, how could anybody want to block this?

What would be the resistance?

One other element, guys, I think you know that we are blocking the ability of China to get access to the latest GPUs, right?

And the whole point is we don't want them to use to develop systems that could be used against us.

But if China, if one day China had 10X our power capacity it won't even matter right because they'll just have so many more whether they're not quite the same advanced gpus or not they'll just have so many more of them their industrial ai capacity will be so much larger that even if we have the best

h100s and the latest technology that jensen and others can provide it won't matter so in order to make our strategy effective we need to be able to build this power base.

I think it's a very astute point.

Hey, Chamath, I don't know if you've been watching Netflix, but I am a shareholder and I am delighted.

I don't know what's going on over there, but they seem to be getting their subs right.

And that disgraziad of a fight seems to have somehow driven the stock price up and there's some strategy that's working over there.

Maybe you could just riff on it for a moment.

I have the opposite take.

okay yeah I mean it's obviously a very good company I think it's been incredibly performant but I think it has like a little bit of a dark commentary on American society and productivity so I asked Nick to just put up these three charts I'll show you the first one so this is the Netflix stock price

from 2010 to 2020 and it's only gotten up since 2024.

Okay. And the only reason I did it at 2020 was because the other data, I went to the CDC and I said, well, show me the percentage of people, Americans taking SSRIs over that same period.

For depression, upset, depression, anxiety, et cetera.

And what you see that it's also gone up.

And then the last chart, I went to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and I said, what has happened to the labor participation rate over the same period?

So I'm not blaming Netflix, but i think that this is a bit of a commentary on sort of what's happening in society it's a little bit of a leading indicator where as the company does better and better the reality is that that company wins by being a sync for people's time it's where you go to netflix

and chill it's a phrase that that we all understand but the the the dark underbelly of it is that there's just a lot of people that are a little bit more dejected.

There's a lot of people that just opt out and just don't decide to work.

I think you could graph the fertility rate, and it's gone down ratably as well.

So it's all of this soup that is about people living in a life that unfortunately just doesn't exist.

So I mean, it's a well -run business, and I wish them all the best at some level but at some other level i think it's a commentary that as this company does better and better there are more and more people that are that are living a shell of what their life could be so causing correlation uh aside obviously

correlated these is not causal you know yes netflix is not causing depression but it's just uh it's just the thing and there's other things that obviously you can put on this plate sure but that was my reaction is i i just think that the more time people are sort of detaching and plugging out, the more

that you're going to see these companies that provide ways of distracting yourself do well.

I'm not sure that society benefits.

What do you think, Thomas?

Opioids for the masses or just the golden era of television?

What I'm curious, Chamath, is how much of it is a substitutive effect right away from kind of traditional media.

Right. I mean, I've kind of looked at it as different ways that at least the way it's measured, you know, time spent watching television has not really increased over 20 years.

To me, it's more a reflection of, I could overlay the stock chart of, you know, Fox and Comcast and, you know, CBS and just have all of those have imploded.

I think people have been kind of substituting right away.

I think the question then that you have to ask is, is there a reason that maybe the Netflix product is fundamentally more unsafe or detrimental to someone's health than the prior broadcast?

Well, the one thing that I would say is, and this is not a Netflix commentary, but a general commentary, which is online products versus linear products have the power and the benefit of this algorithmic targeting and personalization.

And I think that what Netflix has successfully figured out, and a bunch of other products have successfully figured out, is that you can hyper tune to what people think they want.

But what people think they want is not necessarily what they need.

I think when you had linear television, you kind of had to take what was given.

You didn't love Cheers, but you watched Cheers.

You didn't love St.

Elsewhere, but you watched it.

now it's that you can go into a place where the thing really feeds you and it gives you a very visceral feedback loop and you can stay there binge watching something for an entire weekend and what didn't i think the question is what didn't you do yes necessarily didn't work out necessarily didn't eat well

didn't spend time with friends and by the way cards laughing i'm not saying that i don't do it i've done it as well like our group chat one of the interesting things when jason like he he's very good about television and stuff he says this series is amazing our other friend rob goldberg does the same

thing it's hard for me to not start to start it and then not end it it's addicting yeah but i have to really check myself because then for those two days i'll be tempted to not leave my bedroom but my pick my kids are like where's my father and so i i think it's it happens to all of us yeah it's just

a thing that again i'm not trying to pick on Netflix.

I'm just trying to say societally, I think we want people that are vigorous and engaged in the real world.

And there needs to be a balance.

Yeah. I wholeheartedly agree.

And I think you have to schedule these things.

You have to make it a permanent part of your life, playing poker on a certain night of the week, doing certain things on the weekends with your kids, having certain rituals.

The real damage to our kids is not that the screens are damaging them, it's that it's replacing time.

I think what you were alluding to there, Thomas, this anxious generation, as Jonathan Haidt, and we had a great interview with him, myself and Freberg in the All In Interview series, that is what's happening.

Kids are substituting, whether it's TikTok or Netflix or YouTube time, for time with their friends, time doing physical activities.

So you really just have to limit the screen time so that those other things and the boredom can emerge.

And we will be having a talk in the coming years about dopamine.

It is something that these algorithms have gotten really good at doing, which is firing your dopamine.

Every time you swipe that TikTok, every time you get to the cliffhanger in a series or a Mr.

Beast video, not singling anybody out.

He's just a master of it as well.

They're just all really good at giving you that hook, that amazing moment.

And musicians are doing this now too with the hooks and then the hooks go on TikTok.

The dopamine addiction, when you get burnt out late at night, getting those dopamine hits, the next day you feel depressed.

Then you go to a doctor and the doctor said, oh, well, you have, you know, depression.

So here's your Wellbutrin or here's whatever the, I don't know what the things are of the moment.

I'll just tell you what I focus on and what I focus on with my family.

Sleep hygiene, diet, exercise, meditation.

Do these four things and you will reverse these trends.

You don't need it. i mean listen i don't want to tell you what meditation it's hard for kids but i get the first three you know what try it get the and listen i'm not talking about book by the way you know what's crazy map it has when i was growing up for kids when i was growing up i grew up buddhist

my father would make us sit there at nine o 'clock every night and my sisters and i would have to say this buddhist prayer and then he would make us close our eyes for 15 minutes and he said meditate and i was like i don't know what meditation is but i was forced to just keep my eyes shut.

And I would just daydream.

But I suspect that there was like some reasonably grounding value in that.

So I get what you're saying.

I just have such a negative connotation from it.

I've never been able to come back to it because of that experience.

But I would just daydream.

And by the way, what I daydreamed was getting out of that house.

I've got to be successful.

So you've got a vision.

A vision came to you.

I've got to manifest some success here because this sucks.

Hey, Thomas, thanks for coming on the show.

Great first appearance here as a bestie.

We'd love to have you back unless the king returns at some point you're the best you should come back and you should also come back to the all -in summit come back yeah for both and i know we saw some some great topics like hock 10 and others that i want to get to someday so well that's actually when you

come back which we will do at some point in the next few months i would love for us to double click into hock 10 so what for folks that are listening wait what we were going back and forth, Hoctan is the CEO of Broadcom.

And the reason when Thomas brought this up, hey guys, let's double click into Broadcom and the CEO, the reason why I was excited is that it is the only trillion dollar company that nobody talks about.

Everybody knows NVIDIA, everybody knows Amazon, Meta.

But Broadcom is a $1 .12 trillion business.

And it started basically through a whole series of roll -ups.

Anyways, we'll double -click into this with you because I think it's so, so fascinating.

No, this is not the Broadcom we're all thinking of from the telecom era, is it?

It is. Yeah, Henry Samueli.

Yeah. Correct. The same one is still around.

I will leave you guys with a teaser to tease the next episode when we talk about it, and I'll tell you the story that when Hawk bought Broadcom, J.

Cal, to your point, Broadcom is the pride of Orange County founded by Henry Nicholas and Henry Samueli, kind of legends and semiconductors, a legendary name.

So it meant a lot to them that the combined company Avago was buying Broadcom keep the name Broadcom.

And so Hawk, being who he is, you know, got a little bit of a price discount to name the company Broadcom.

To him, that was a great deal.

That's who Hawk is.

He's a great businessman.

But what is the ticker of this particular company?

AVGO. And so I said, Hawk, why is the ticker still AVGO?

And you know what he said to me turn to me he said thomas they forgot to negotiate for the ticker oh never forget the ticker interested i mean when when he started it was what was the market cap 3 .5 billion chamath it wasn't not only was it an orphan because it was a it was a spin out of hp it was a spin out

of a spin out of hp it was a double orphan 300x look at this yeah nothing is that in the last five years the market cap's grown by 8x nvidia has grown by 20x but you know intel over the last five years is what down 70 so you know i think there's a big divergence thomas do you think this is a function of well

i don't know if it's directionally investing in the right things or is it about like making long -term investments and thinking down the road.

I mean, obviously the compounding advantages.

He's an M &A master.

This is less about, there was a product that won and more of a portfolio approach and a portfolio construction.

But did he buy well ahead of the curve?

Did he buy over the horizon, Thomas?

Is that where Intel really missed?

I think Intel really missed.

It's a complete abdication of corporate governance at the board level and the CO level.

Hey guys, breaking news story coming across my feed.

I don't know if you can pull this up, Nick, but there's a video trending on the internet.

and apparently an executive order has just gone across the president's desk, and it was delivered by none other than a gentleman named David Sachs.

Now, there's a name I haven't heard in a while.

It's the Crypto EO.

We're going to be forming an internal working group to make America the world capital on crypto under your leadership.

Which is really going up, right?

Absolutely. Here we go.

Whoa. Look at this.

What? He's using a Sharpie there to sign these executive orders?

Oh, Saks gets to keep the pen.

There it is. An executive order.

I love how he holds them up.

It's so great. I wonder if Saks gets to keep that.

They might not be excited, but we're going to make a lot of money for the country.

And so is David. Oh, your reaction, Jamaz.

I think this is great.

So we're going to make crypto great again.

I'll be a little bit more specific.

So I think that there are a handful of ideas that, if we can implement them correctly, are really revolutionary.

I think that gets good to have a stockpile of crypto.

I have less of an opinion on that.

But I think a set of stablecoin rails that makes payments instantaneous and costless is an enormous acceleration to GDP.

It would cut fraud, and I think that David's going to go and figure that out.

And he's going to have - You're talking about stablecoins specifically?

Stablecoins. I talked about this at the beginning of the year as one of my predictions.

But I do think that the United States stablecoin rails will be hugely disruptive and value added.

He's going to have help from the head of the SEC and the head of Treasury to do it.

I just think it's great.

I think Sachs is already off to a hugely fast start.

The entire country knows that we need to win the AI race.

The numbers are the numbers.

You put up a chart like that, Thomas, and there's only one way for us to win, And that's to build more nuclear power plants.

And so I think he's just got to hammer this through and let's see who tries to stop it.

I don't know if AOC or Elizabeth Warren, Pocahontas, Bernie Sanders, who wants to jump in front of this Trump train right now?

But I think you'll get slaughtered.

If only there was somebody who could comment on this executive order.

That's what I need.

You know, Chamath, if I had the bat phone, if I could call somebody, you don't phone a friend.

Who would you call?

I don't know. you know i had my saxipool was always on speed dial we used to hang in between have these great battles here on the pod then we go play chess together we go have some drinks at the battery but you know that was a different era and you know i don't got my boy anymore he's busy oh do we

got everybody thanks for tuning into the all in podcast i'm your host jason calicanis we will see you next time bye sorry what what there he is he's back back to reclaim his seat it's yours we miss you buddy you look so handsome gonna cry 61 days without my bestie we miss you were you just in the oval

office i was just in the oval office first time in the oval office let me ask you a question was that your first time in the oval well technically it was my second but how was it sucks how's it been so far it's pretty incredible yeah it's really been pretty incredible well tell us what are the vibes

and what's it like to go in to the oval office and to have that executive order signed take us tell us what the moment was like and then tell us what's in the executive order well we actually we did three executive orders today so we did one on crypto, one on AI, and then one on PCAST, which is the President's

Council of Advisors for Science and Technology.

The one on crypto, I guess we can start there.

The main thing it does is it forms an internal working group with the goal of making the U .S.

the world leader in crypto.

So it's not one specific action.

It's basically authorizing and creating a working group with the goal of achieving that objective, right?

And the members of this working group are going to be, there's me there's the head of the sec the secretary of the treasury and all the agencies and departments that have an interest in crypto so we formed this working group i'm actually chairing it or i will be and again the goal here is to identify

and make recommendations that the departments would then take back and they could execute and just again with the goal of making america the world capital of cryptos the president said at davos today and then the other two sacks yeah so that's crypto next one's ai so the number one thing that that eo

does is rescind the the biden eo which we talked about on this podcast i don't know how many episodes ago but remember it was this hundred page monstrosity of burdensome regulation and the president had promised on the campaign trail to repeal that and he did so it got rescinded actually there was a master

eo on monday that contained dozens of biden era eos that got mass rescinded this one provided a little more detail on it basically said that that eu wasn't necessarily burdensome it said that we want to be the world leader in ai in fact it uses the word dominate we want to basically have global dominance

in ai and similar to what we're doing on the crypto side it directs the creation of a ai action plan and that study will be led by three people the national security advisor who is mike waltz the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, who will be Michael Kratzios as soon as he's Senate confirmed.

And then the third person is me.

So the three of us are going to work together on this AI action plan.

And the idea is to figure out what is it that the industry actually needs to make us number one globally in AI.

So it's putting a little bit more substance behind what this R -roll means.

And the last one is to build a science council.

I don't know if everybody's familiar with that.

So maybe you could just describe what that is generally for the audience.

Well, PCAST has been around for a long time.

I mean, I think it's been around for decades.

And the goal of PCAST is to assemble a group of top science and technology minds to provide the president with advice.

So this was already announced, but basically me and Michael Kratios, who I mentioned before, is going to be the director of OSTP.

We're going to be co -chairing that.

And this is an EO that provides the authorizing language to set that up.

And then it provides some direction around what PCAST is going to do.

I think some of the language that Freeberg may like is just, it talks about the need to return to kind of truth -telling in science and kind of getting away from woke science.

The AI order discusses this as well.

We don't want AI models to be ideologically biased, have an agenda.

I don't know if it uses the word woke AI, but that's basically what it's talking about.

We want AI models to be as politically unbiased as possible.

Well, if you need a recommendation for somebody for the council, I know somebody who is extremely well versed on science.

He's got a broad array of science knowledge.

Hear, hear. Yeah. I have an idea.

Then we could have two besties in and around the White House.

Hey, well, thanks for including us in so many aspects of the weekend.

And the audience really wants to know, what are the chances we get Sax back on the pod now and again in 2025?

And we do appreciate everything you're doing as a sacrifice.

We're doing it right now, but the audience is, you know, not going to just accept this little drop in here.

They want to know, what's the long -term plan for David Sax and the pod?

And what's happened, like, with media overall in the administration now that confirmation hearings are underway, Sax and closing out?

Does that mean folks are going to be able to get back on social and things that they were kind of restricted by over the last couple of weeks?

Sure. But I think that, you know, if you're working for the White House, there kind of needs to be a reason for you to be out there, because you don't want to be making news that you're not supposed to.

So in the case here today, the president signed these executive orders on crypto and AI.

And they want me explaining them.

So it makes sense for me to go out there, I've got an appearance on Fox Business in about an hour to talk about the EOs as well.

So that might come out before this podcast comes out.

But you guys are the first ones I'm actually talking to.

But so there's a reason for me to come out and do it.

And I think that there probably will need to be a good reason for me to come on the pod.

But I'm going to try and come on the pod every chance I get.

All right. Well, this is our appeal to DJT to let you come on and just chew the fat.

And maybe there's some upside to it for him.

Do you miss being on the pod, Zach?

Oh... Yeah, sure. Of course.

We miss you so much.

Look, I'll be back.

Don't worry. At some point.

Are you a little emotional right now, Zach?

What are your favorite memories from the inauguration weekend?

Well, the inauguration ceremony itself was really pretty spectacular.

You were there in the capital, Chamath.

Yeah. It's funny. Jack and I kind of took our seats in the rotunda, like kind of in the back in the peanut gallery.

And I thought that's where I was going to be sitting.

And then somebody comes up to me and says, Mr.

Sacks, we have a seat for you up front.

And so they put me on the day.

You were with the big boys.

Yeah. It was like the secretary of state, the secretary of treasury, and then me, you know, and then we were just, we were behind the Trump family.

You may not see me because those Trump kids are pretty tall, but the whole family is very tall.

So I kind of disappeared a little bit, but in any event, they put me on the dais, which was really pretty crazy.

I wasn't expecting that.

Wow, I didn't realize that, yeah.

It was a huge honor.

There was a shot where David and Jacqueline were in the front.

They looked amazing and they were kind of looking around for where to sit.

And I was like, this can't be right, because he must have had like a name.

So it's good that it all got sorted out.

But what was the vantage point from your side?

Basically, you're looking out.

Yeah, I mean, I was looking out and, you know, I could see the faces of the democrats as the president came out you know president biden and kamala harris they didn't look too happy no i would i wish they had a fixed camera on them the whole time i wanted to see the reaction shots i've seen some of the reaction shots

you know it sucks just just i mean that was really unique to have uh i mean i thought that that speech was really incredible because well first of all it was completely consistent with everything the president had said during the campaign.

And so you really felt like he has a mandate here, because this is everything he said during the campaign.

It reminded me a lot of, there's that famous quote by Abraham Lincoln, that public sentiment is everything.

With it, you can accomplish anything.

Without it, you can't do anything.

And it really felt like that inauguration speech was full of substance, but it was substance that the president had delivered on the campaign trail.

And so when he won this victory where he only won the presidency, he won the popular vote, he won seven out of seven swing states, he won the House, he won the Senate.

It really feels like he has a mandate and I think he reiterated that mandate in his speech.

And then, of course, just the cherry on top is just that, you know, the losers just have to sit there and listen to it.

Well, kudos to them for coming out and keeping the tradition, yeah.

Well, yeah. And when he's talking about the corrupt establishment that tried to put him in prison through this lawfare, I mean, he's talking about some of those people who are sitting behind him.

I just thought it was remarkable, a remarkable moment.

That was a crazy visual.

Do you want to take us back, Zach, on how you, because you haven't talked about this publicly, but how did you end up, I guess, getting the offer for the role, deciding to take the role?

Anything you want to share anecdotally on the path to get here?

I don't know that there's that much to report, you know.

I was helping with the transition, I got offered the role and decided to do it.

So, I mean, look, it's not something I was expecting or planning, as you guys know.

I didn't even know there was going to be such a role, but when they decided to create it, and they offered it to me, and so I decided to do it.

You know, just one thing I should clarify, just to make clear, is there's still some things I can't do yet in the role, because there's a whole government ethics process that you have to go through, and I'm in the midst of that process.

So we've signed these EOs.

It's given me certain responsibilities and authorized me to do certain things, and that process is going to begin And as soon as I complete this, I guess you'd call it onboarding.

So just to be clear about that, there's things I can do.

There's things I can't do.

I can kind of be in listening mode.

I can't be necessarily shaping policy yet.

So that's all going to be worked through over the next couple of weeks.

All right, Saks, I got to ask.

First time in the Oval.

What's going through your mind?

Yeah, great question.

My head was on a swivel, you know, one of those moments.

You're like, you can't really believe that you're there.

It does feel a little bit like you're on a movie set.

I mean, it's so famous, obviously, to be in that office.

Is it bigger in person or is it smaller in person?

What is it? I thought it seemed about the right size.

I know that's one of the things people say about it is that it's smaller than you expect.

I didn't feel like it was smaller, but it also didn't feel bigger.

It felt like, you know, the Oval Office that you've always seen.

The other people who are in there who've been in there, the staffers who've been in there a hundred or a thousand times, it's obviously it wears off and it's like just where they do their work.

But, yeah, I've got to admit the first time you go in there, you're pretty awestruck.

There was a post that J .D.

Vance, now the vice president, had where he – actually, do you guys see this, Mike Johnson?

I saw the video. Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

He's walking in, and he's in shock.

Because he had never been in there.

I guess he became a senator a few years ago.

And we've had a Democrat president, so he never had been to the mayor before.

Here's the video, yeah.

And he said that he was honored and humbled to be there.

I mean, that's the way I felt as well.

those comments by the vice president resonated with me i think probably every american would feel this way the first time you're in the oval office it is pretty incredible you want me to repeat the words that the president said about you there's nobody like this guy they said how did you get david sacks

how did you do that he's doing it for the country more than anything else we appreciate it david thank you very much he's been he's been really nice to me that's really incredible he's been incredible to me and he he gave me the the pen from the from the signing which is pretty cool but can we see the pen

can we see the pen what's the brand of the pen well it's not branded basically it says the White House on one side and it's got his signature yeah on another and so look I wasn't expecting the trophy case is it like a sharpie what is it is it a sharp it is it is a sharpie you've seen him sign right

yeah yeah so it's what you know I assume it's what what he likes but so he gave me the pen which is pretty incredible have you guys seen that there's all these asmr videos of the president signing where you can just hear i've seen the pen the sign of the marker paper it makes exactly there's like all

these asmrs yeah well freeberg wants to know if you could assign his new tesla he wants you to sign it with that pen he wants you to autograph it so when you get back to the valley you can you can start doing autographs with that all around Oh, no.

I think only the president's allowed to use this pen.

Only the president's allowed to use.

Okay, well, put it somewhere safe, okay?

Don't lose the pen.

You've got to put it in a glass box or something.

And, Sax, there's thousands of commenters who are just begging for you to come back.

Do you have a message to your legions of commenters?

Well, I thank them, and I'm back right now.

I know maybe it's not enough, but— Soak it in.

It would help if you guys could just do a better job on the pod so they weren't complaining all the time.

We'll do the best we can without you.

All right, get back to work.

Get back to work. Come on, this taxpayer, you're on the taxpayer clock here.

Go back to work here and save America.

Make America great again.

Listen, we wish you great success.

We miss you greatly.

And we thank you for the service to the country.

We wish you all the best as you go handle two of the most important issues for our country AI and help advise our president on cryptocurrency as well.

Love you, Sachsen. And PCAST.

Congrats, cara. And PCAST, yes, of course.

And PCAST as well. Boys, love you very, very much.

David, love you. Hopefully, we'll see you on Tuesday.

Yes. Love you. Thomas, thanks for coming in.

See you guys. Thanks for the opportunity.

Thomas, thank you very much.

You were great. Thank you.

Thanks for the opportunity.

Thank you, Thomas. Bye -bye.

Love you, boys. See you guys.

We'll let your winners ride.

Rain Man David Sachs.

And instead, we open -sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy.

love you besties are gone you should all just get a room and just have it one big huge orgy cause they're all just useless it's like this like sexual tension but they just need to release what you're about P -P, wet your feet P -P, wet your feet We need to get merch I'm going all in I'm going all in

[The All-In Podcast: Inauguration Behind-the-Scenes and New Executive Orders]-[Trump's First Week: Inauguration Recap, Executive Actions, TikTok, Stargate + Sacks is Back!]

📋 Summary

The Inauguration Experience and American Renewal

Executive Orders: Crypto, AI, and Government Efficiency

The Energy and Infrastructure Race

The TikTok Dilemma and Economic Strategy

Cultural Commentary and Societal Health

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript