All right, everybody.
Welcome back to your favorite podcast, the number one podcast, in fact, in the entire universe, the all in podcast, with your besties.
We're all here.
It's the original quartet.
Everybody loves when the core four are here and we have a docket for you today.
Guys, we got to start out with Bernie Sanders.
I know this is becoming a bit repetitive, but AI is the topic.
We reached a new level of retardation this week that we cannot avoid.
Bernie Sanders has a major decel pitch, a moratorium on new AI data centers.
Here's his argument.
Number one, the billionaires are pushing AI because they want more money and power.
Number two, it's going to be massive unemployment.
And he cites Gates, Stario, Elon, saying that AI would replace most jobs.
Number three.
He has an interesting point, actually.
AI is harmful to kids because it decreases social interaction.
Actually, we kind of agree with that one, I think, across the board.
But here's his pitch, Sax.
Speak for yourself.
You want your kids using these chatbots?
No, I've talked to my kids about it.
Oh, okay.
We'll get into it.
We can get into it, but I've talked to them about it.
Look, if you actually look at the data, if you look at what kids are doing, It's so much more interactive and engaging for them to talk to their friends on Snap or to watch videos on TikTok.
Those things are super engaging.
Whereas doing research on an AI chatbot is just, it's way less engaging.
And you see this in the data.
So I'm not saying there's not an issue there.
You want to pay attention to the way that these technologies are shaping the minds of young kids.
But I think people get a little bit confused.
What they're really talking about is social media.
And then they attribute... all the ills of social media over to these new AI chat apps.
And they are a little different.
When I ask my kids, like, how much do you use these things?
Are they addictive?
They said, no, they're more just really useful.
It's like Google.
It's like I couldn't do school without it.
Yeah, there's two pieces here.
One, using AI to be smarter and to learn stuff and ask questions.
Absolutely fantastic.
Phenomenal.
I think we'll all agree on that.
There is... And I don't know if this is actually what he was referencing, but there's character AI in a long tail of spicy chats where people... We talked about getting one-shotted and these parasocial relationships.
That's, I think, what he's referring to, but maybe I'm reading it wrong.
But let's get into it here.
His pitch is that we need to slow down so that quote democracy can catch up and that Congress should put a moratorium on new data centers.
That's his solution.
He got roasted, obviously, on social media for this.
It's the most absurd, I think, solution to, you know, what are valid concerns.
Friend of the pod, Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, he I guess, supported a bit.
And then he replied to me and says his concerns are not as acute and that he just wants to make sure we use renewable energy, which I guess is, you know, a fine position to have.
Polymarket put up a little market here.
AI data center moratorium passed before 2027.
Yeah, we'll see if that comes true or not.
But hey, Saks, you are our SGE.
Saks, our SGE, this is your time to shine.
You have framed the AI debate as we can't lose to China.
Bernie framed it as not letting the billionaire class get more power and money by eliminating American jobs.
And last week, on this very program, Tucker framed it as what are Americans going to get out of this right?
That was the framing, you know, as of December of 2025.
So here's your chance, Sax.
Why should Americans who have some concerns about losing their jobs care about beating China?
Why should they care about that, Sax?
Why should they care about beating China?
Because AI is a profound technology.
It's going to have huge economic and national security implications.
And the thing that Bernie gets wrong is that he can't stop the progress.
I mean, he can't stop China from making progress.
We can stop progress in the US, but it's not going to stop China from advancing these technologies.
A lot of this is just math.
And just because we stopped doesn't mean China's going to stop.
So this would be the biggest own goal ever.
If we took our leadership in the AI race and just handed it to China.
But look, I appreciate Bernie's honesty in a way, because he is actually telling the truth about what he wants.
And I remember just a week ago when President Trump signed an executive order to advance a national AI framework, a lot of critics and a lot of Democrats were saying this was a violation of states' rights and we need to support the states in regulating AI.
And here Bernie is acknowledging that this is not about states' rights, because he's saying that there needs to be a moratorium on new data centers, even if the states want them.
So he doesn't support states' rights either.
He just wants all the progress to stop.
And I think this is really the truth of the matter is that all this talk about states' rights or affordability it's all a red herring.
And what's really going on is there's a large and growing contingent of people who just want all the progress to stop.
But again, we can't stop China from making progress.
So all they would be doing is seeding leadership of this AI race to China.
What people like Bernie really want is they want the US to become like Europe.
You know, Europe has half the share of global GDP that they had 30 years ago.
And that's because of their hostility towards innovation and technological progress.
And that's kind of where Bernie wants us to be as he wants us to go down the path of Europe.
And the reason he says is because God forbid someone gets rich.
Well Look, capitalism sometimes results in the unequal distribution of wealth, but socialism always results in the equal distribution of poverty and misery.
And if the US stops developing AI, if we hand this leadership to other countries, it'll make the United States poor, it'll make the American people poor and it will cede our leadership globally.
We will not be the preeminent power in the world anymore.
Okay.
So I'll stop there. no no it's great thank you sge david sacks there seems to be a couple of conversations unfortunately weren't here last week but we had a really nice uh visit from our pal tucker and we talked about this he seemed to think there was a bit of a communication problem with selling to the public the value of these technologies do you agree with that and what do you think is going on here in terms of the cross conversations one group wants to de-sell has some concerns, environmental, job displacement, et cetera.
And then is there an issue where the China beating China doesn't resonate with the American populace.
You've been harping on about the rise of socialism for four plus years on this very podcast.
So, from where you sit, What's the actual disconnect in these multiple conversations that are going on concurrently and seemingly coming to a head here at the end of 2025?
Well, if you ask any of the politicians that are making these proclamations about the quote tech barons and try and actually talk to them about what is happening.
The AI technology delivering.
What is it not delivering?
You kind of typically hit a wall pretty quickly.
It's very hard for folks to articulate what is actually happening.
There's a tremendous amount of capital being put at risk against infrastructure to build out the capacity for many companies, the entire economy, the entire industry, to deliver AI tools.
There of value creation, with the exception of Nvidia, which has really got this 3 trillion market cap creation.
That's happened in the last couple of years.
Peter Thiel said this best.
He's like, look at all the money that's going into AI.
There's really only one company that's making any money.
And that's Nvidia.
Like at this point, the jury's still out.
We don't even know what AI is.
It's sort of like when the internet was happening.
You know, everyone thought these fiber optic switch companies were going to make all the money.
Turns out that was wrong.
It was the end applications that made all the money.
And they competed in many different markets, from Google to to Amazon to Uber you can go down the list of all the beneficiaries of the core infrastructure technology of the internet that was built out.
So what is really going on?
Well, AI is the new lightning rod for fear and for divisiveness that ultimately breeds compliance and control, which is where these politicians are trying to drive the populace and the voting conditions in the United States.
And that's what's going on right now.
There's a lot of fear about oh, putting this data center in my town is going to do X or Y or Z, with no real conversation about the truth of that matter.
There's a lot of fear about wealth creation being aggregated in the hand of a few when, as we saw with the internet, it benefited the many.
And that fear mongering is a very similar tactic that we've seen in the prior generations, where policies were misstated, fear was used and then voting control allowed folks to come to power that were looking for power.
So I think it's just the lightning rod at the moment.
Okay, Chamath, what's your take on this big picture?
What's going on here?
I think it's important to understand that politicians have an incredible sense of self-preservation.
So the question is why would Bernie Sanders think he would not look totally foolish in putting that video out?
And the reason it went viral is not because it sounded so crazy.
It was that to some faction and percentage of people, it sounded rational and reasonable.
And the problem that highlights is that we have a huge perception issue in AI.
We have a handful of companies that All the PR that you see from those handful of companies is a bunch of circular dealmaking, a bunch of capital that flows from one to the other.
It causes these stocks to go up, of which a small percentage of people benefit.
And at the tail end of it, it's accompanied by a completely different set of articles that everybody also reads, about this sort of Damocles that's about to fall on their head, whether it's electricity prices, or whether it's their jobs, or whether it's the jobs of their children or the quality of their education.
So we have a big perception problem.
So the question at hand is, how do we fix it?
How do we get back to the place where a video talking about stopping all progress would seem as laughable as it should be?
And I think you can go back to the.
The industrialist leaders of that era respond through that 1880 to 1920 age of industrialization, when you had all of this technological upheaval, accompanied by a handful of people with incredible success, right?
Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford.
What did they do?
And I think the lesson we can borrow from them is we now need to be on the forward foot as an industry.
Enough of the stupid haircuts, dumb watches, ugly clothes, ostentatious displays of wealth.
We've all done it.
I've been guilty of it.
It has to stop.
Absolutely stop.
And instead we need to start to use a percentage of the balance sheets of these companies in order to benefit as many Americans as possible.
That is the absolute minimum.
Andrew Carnegie built 2500 libraries.
The idea was, as he built the railroads, you're going to scale GDP, you're going to scale education and knowledge.
Those libraries are artifacts that allowed people to feel a dividend from that industrial revolution.
John D Rockefeller took all of his wealth and invested in institutions and universities.
Henry Ford specifically focused on wages.
We need to self-organize better, and we need to be more on the forward foot.
We need to start doing things that are practically measurable by tens of millions of American citizens.
And it starts to beat back the perception problem that we have.
Because Sachs pointed out last week, the data does not support the misperception.
But the problem is and Sachs and I were talking about this last week the misperception is gaining steam.
And so I think we need to use these tools that we have to provide some more practical benefits that every man, woman and child can feel.
Otherwise, this thing is going to build and you'll see crazier and crazier versions of this Bernie Sanders video.
All right.
I think it's well said.
And, you know, as I said last week, I think beating China does not matter to the average American.
It's below their line, Chamath, I think, in many ways.
What they care about is jobs.
They care about their kids getting jobs.
And yeah, they care about costs.
They care about inflation.
They care about energy costs going up.
Our industry has done a terrible job of explaining how this benefits the average American.
And they're seeing all these headlines about, as you mentioned, all the cross-deal booking and all these stocks going up.
Half the country doesn't own stocks, so they're not participating in it.
And they're not blind to seeing self-driving cars or seeing their kids having a hard time getting a job.
And they're hearing everybody talk about job displacement.
And that's a valid concern.
People are scared.
And our industry is scaring them I think, by not meeting where they are.
And then beating China, respectfully, is important.
Sacks, super important.
I can intellectually agree with you on that.
But if you lose your job and your kids can't get a job, that's existentially, yes.
It's not... my child needs a job next year.
They're graduating from school with 100000 in debt and my energy bills going up and my grocery bills are going up and they haven't come down.
That's what Americans are experiencing.
And yeah, maybe giving, I think you also made an interesting point there too about the libraries.
The war with China is existential because if we can keep it on the battlefield of AI and intellectual and economic prowess, we have a very good chance of winning.
If it devolves and all of a sudden becomes a different kind of battle.
That's bad for everybody, especially our children and our children's children.
So we need to win the current game on the field.
But in order to do that, we need to change these misperceptions.
We need to start showing tactical artifacts that show that this is a dividend that can benefit everybody.
And we need to start now.
I'm just putting it out there.
We have so much cash on the balance sheets of these companies.
Wall Street values it at zero.
If you look at the enterprise value of any of these companies and you do some of the parts, nobody cares about that cash.
So we need to start using that cash more effectively.
What's the equivalent of the library metaphor here for you, Jamath?
Do you have any ideas?
I'm not going to front run what's being worked on, except to say that the leaders of these companies have gotten the message.
They are working on a whole host of solutions.
And again, we're fighting misperception, which is a complicated battle, but it's winnable.
And I think you're going to start to see stuff in the new year.
Yeah, I would say education is at the top of that list.
Sax, your thoughts here as we wrap on this first topic?
I'm not sure whether to address the particular hoaxes or the fact that there's a larger effort here to try and discredit AI and get AI development to stop entirely.
Let's talk about some of these particular hoaxes.
So, On the job loss claim, I feel like I do this every week now, but there's a new study from Vanguard where they analyze job growth and wage growth in occupations that are highly exposed to AI automation, versus all occupations.
And they find that both job growth and wage growth is higher, not lower, in the occupations that are exposed to AI.
So if you look at job growth In occupations exposed to AI, it's 1.7% compared to 0.8% for other.
For wage growth, it's 3.8% versus 0.7% for other.
So what you see here is something maybe it's counterintuitive, but it makes sense to me which is as you make workers more productive, the value of their labor increases, not decreases, and they end up getting paid more and you want to hire more of them.
So this is a huge narrative violation.
Again, this is coming from Vanguard. and it's showing that AI productivity is good for workers.
This follows on the heels of that study from Yale Budget Lab which I talked about in a previous show that it said there's no discernible disruption to the job market, based on 33 months of data after the launch of ChatGPT.
Now I understand that you can make predictions as to the future, that this state's going to change, that there will be AI job loss, but what I'm saying is that, If you look at the data, so far there is no AI job loss, quite the opposite.
It's job growth and job gains.
By the way, we have a 2 tailwind to GDP growth right now.
That's coming from this AI boom, this CapEx boom that's happening.
And so this is, I think, a very good thing for the US economy.
Now, why do people want to sabotage it?
There's a really interesting article in Semaphore recently that described how AI critics were funding journalism fellowships at major publications like NBC News, Bloomberg Time, The Verge, LA Times which, by the way I mean I track these things are relentlessly negative about AI.
These fellowships were funded by Future of Life Institute, which is a doomer group that thinks that AI is going to become sentient and replace humans.
And they were funded by a donation by Vitalik Buterin from Ethereum.
It's an interesting story, actually.
He donated his dog coins to Future of Life.
They ended up being worth $600 million.
Doge coins?
Doge.
And then you remember how there was like those other dog coins?
Oh, Shiba Inu.
Oh, Shiba Inu.
Oh, he had a collection of dog coins.
He had a collection of dog coins.
Apparently, people like airdropped them to him as like a promotional thing.
Got it.
I don't think he wanted them.
So he's like, how do I get rid of them?
So he donates them to Future of Life and they end up being worth $600 million.
So by this, almost like this accident, this Doomer think tank ends up with a $600 million war chest.
And they've been funding these journalism fellowships.
They've been funding grants for academics to study AI.
Obviously, that's going to end up being very negative.
And they are funding a lot of these NIMBY organizations that are opposing data centers, because their goal is just to get it to stop.
That's their goal.
They just want the development to stop.
And you can't I don't think underestimate how much of an impact this has had on the public discourse.
But if you look at their actual claims, like, for example, the water use claims, it's a total hoax.
I mean, these AI databases do not use a lot of water.
Yeah, that was one of the things I wanted to get into because yeah, compared to a golf course, they're not using that much or making walnuts and almonds in Central California.
So I think it is worth Jason, they're throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall.
Look, you have to remember, who was Ida Tarbell?
Because it's quite interesting in the context of this.
Ida Tarbell was this American writer, again, in the Gilded Age.
She was part of the Muckrackers, which was a group of journalists that were doing investigative research around the abuses of the Industrial Revolution, labor abuses and the like.
And she took on Sander Dole, exactly.
If you look at that example...
I'm sure that the people in this current generation who have a Tarbell fellowship, what they're living out is this desire to tell a story about exploitation and wrong and misdoing.
The problem is that these things don't factually hold together.
But unfortunately, it adds to the perception problem that we have.
And that has been growing.
As Zach said, like so many of these things have been debunked, but it's playing whack-a-mole Jason, because they'll throw the water thing out.
It'll get debunked next week.
We'll probably something about liquid cooling and all the PFAS and forever chemicals.
We'll have to debunk that.
Then we'll go to like air cooling and how that's a problem.
Then we'll go to something else.
Eventually, it'll be the upper land grouse.
But they're not going to stop.
Sacks, how do you do you have a plan to reframe this to the American public?
You're explaining how these bad things are happening and all the evil forces at work behind the scenes.
Well look, it's not evil forces.
But I don't think people understand the extent to which the discourse has been impacted by a few anti-AI tech billionaires.
You brought it up every week and on your text.
I brought it up.
Hold on.
I brought it up on the show and I tweeted about it way back in November.
And I linked to a writer named Neera Weisblatt who has analyzed this whole Doomer Industrial Complex.
And she has shown that there are hundreds of these front organizations and they're all really just funded by a few big tech billionaires.
It's Dustin Moskovitz, Jan Talen, and Vitalik Buterin.
Well, when I first described this, people thought that this sounds kind of crazy, like conspiracy theory.
And then, sure enough, Semaphore comes out with the article explaining that that all these journalism jobs are being funded by Future of Life, which was the big donation by Vitalik Buterin.
So my point is just you can't underestimate the extent to which a few billionaires, who've donated over a billion dollars to this cause, have distorted the public debate.
And you really see this actually in the relative popularity of AI in the United States versus China.
So there was recently a poll on they call it AI optimism where they asked people do you believe that the benefits of AI will outweigh the harms?
83% of people in China believe the benefits will outweigh the harms.
They're AI optimistic.
In the US, it's only 39%.
So again, the discourse has really been affected by a few of these institutions.
Okay, so let's say that's all true.
Yeah.
My question to you is what's your plan to turn this around and explain to the American people why they should be optimistic about this?
What's your plan, David Sittleson?
Well, look, I mean, you're right that we have to flip the narrative around.
And I do think that the tech companies have done a really bad job explaining the benefits.
We talked about this with Tucker.
I think he brought up some really good points.
And you're right.
Like the AI, companies lean way too much into the whole job loss narrative as a way to explain their value prop.
And I think it's just either what Chamath has said, which is about their next fundraising round, or it's a form of laziness, because it's easier to describe job loss or job replacement than it is productivity right.
Like multi-factor productivity is a difficult concept to explain.
So I do think that they've played into this narrative.
But I think that what we have to do here is just debunk these narratives.
Again, no evidence of job loss yet, no evidence of the water problems.
I think the electricity issues with data centers are addressable.
You have to let the AI companies build their own power.
They don't have to connect to the grid.
In fact, that's what President Trump has called for for the last six months is to let the AI companies build their own power, so they're not drawing on the grid.
So that problem is easily addressed as well.
Talking about the affordability problem.
But you're right.
We have to get the message out how this technology will benefit Americans.
And the bottom line is look, I've always said I'm a techno realist, not a techno accelerationist, because at the end of the day, we don't have a choice.
I mean, China is going to develop the technology if we don't.
So we don't really have a choice.
As I said last week, I think the three most pressing issues Chima education, housing and healthcare.
And our industry is in a unique position to use AI to impact all three of those.
So why don't we, as an industry, collectively explain all the great things going on there?
I gave a shout out to Daniel Ek, Pranovo, all these great companies analyzing our blood.
There's so much going on in healthcare that could massively lower the cost, make people's lives better.
Obviously, in construction, you could have incredible advances and certainly in education.
But we haven't explained those three things.
What's your point?
Is there anything you can think of to add to that list?
We have to understand the president and Sachs.
They're responsible for shepherding the GDP of America.
And, as Sachs said, half of American GDP over the next few years is forecasted to come from all of the capital that goes in to build out our capabilities in AI.
We need this to happen.
There's the existential reason why, but there's also a basic economic reason why.
So Jason, the social license comes when, off to the side, the private companies start to take this perception problem more seriously.
So to your point, Are there things that they can do around housing?
Yes.
And again, not to front run, they're actively working on something that I think could be transformational.
Separately, could they do something on healthcare?
TBD, but we should look at it.
Can you do something in education?
TBD, but we should look at it.
But the point is, if you can have the same companies that are on the forward foot building this revolution for us, recognize that we need to bring some more folks along.
Take some of their balance sheet capital and invest it to create the social license to operate, we will flip this perception on its head.
Yeah, I think it's well said.
And you know there was a really interesting you guys must remember this the ATT commercials.
You Will.
Do you remember those?
By the way, sorry, that's another great example, Jason.
AT&T, at the turn of the century, what did they do?
They took their capital and they created Bell Labs.
What did Bell Labs do?
Bell Labs drove all of modern information theory.
It was the precursor to the internet.
They did so much fundamental research.
I want to be clear.
I don't think that this is a five alarm fire.
This is very fixable right now.
And the litmus test, quite honestly, is in three four five, six months.
Jason, when you see the trickle of progress, if we can get organized, does your perception change?
And does the language that you use and the tone that you've used over these last six months?
Oh, you're blaming me?
No, no, no.
I'm actually thinking that you've actually been quite a good early warning system for what a certain percentage of Americans think.
And so I predicted it perfectly.
Yes.
It's been extremely useful.
But now we got to act on it.
And you have to change your mind.
Oh, no, no.
My mind has been very crystal clear.
I won't let you.
You know, tell me what I'm saying is my opinion has been job displacements.
Jason, let me be fair.
We have to earn you changing your mind publicly on this show.
If we do that, we're back in a good place.
Yeah, no, I think that you're saying that in a very condescending way.
I have brought up.
I have brought up.
OK, unintentionally.
Here, let me try again.
Sorry, let me try this again.
We have.
You're saying as if I'm misguided.
No, no, no.
You have a perception.
Which is what do you think my perception is?
But on the balance it's a coin flip about whether AI is going to be All good for all people or very good for a small subset of people.
That's what I would roughly summarize.
I would say that's accurate.
Job displacement.
I have concerns about job displacement.
I understand.
So let me finish.
So if we can execute this plan again, meaning marry all the stuff we're doing on the forward foot within investing with some of the stuff that we also need to do to bring a broader swath of the American population along
Yeah.
You will have a different perception if we are successful.
And what I'm saying is you've had this one perception and our goal would be to shift you and people like you.
Okay.
Is that fair?
I think it's completely fair.
Yeah.
I have been trying to bring up that as an industry we have not recognized people's valid concerns about job displacement.
That's all I've brought up on this program.
I'm not saying I think it's going to be cataclysmic or we can't handle it.
But I think if we constantly talk about hey, winning the AI race in China, that's abstract for people.
And if we deny the fact that robo taxis and human robotics are coming and intelligent people like Elon or other leaders are saying yeah, we're planning on replacing those jobs.
We're doing a terrible job communicating this.
And I do think part of this is communication.
And part of it is, hey, these are valid concerns.
So I think great resolution.
Yeah, sure.
I'll be the litmus test.
Do you guys know what the Mott and Bailey fallacy is?
No, explain it to the audience.
I mean, I think I've heard of it, but The Mott and Bailey castle is an early medieval fortification where there's like a very protected area, the keep or the Mott.
And then the Bailey is kind of this looser area that's hard to defend, right?
So what happens is if they need to retreat, they'll go into the Mott.
Okay.
Yeah, Lord of the Rings.
Right.
So this has become known as a debating trick or fallacy, where people will make a really outrageous claim, which is they'll basically run to the Bailey.
And then when you prove that it's false, they'll run back into the Mott and say something very unobjectionable.
So, in the context of, like the AI job loss fallacy, the Bailey is, people will say this is causing massive job loss, massive disruption.
It's already here.
You can see it.
And then when I point out well actually, if you look at the Yale Budget Lab study, or you look now at the Vanguard study, there is no job loss.
Then they'll retreat into the Mott and they'll say no no, no.
I'm talking about what's going to happen in the future, which is a position that's fundamentally irrefutable.
And then when I point that out, well, wait, you just totally changed what you're saying.
You're like, no, no, no, I was only talking about the future.
And then, as soon as we sort of seem to have agreement, then the people in the Mott will race out to the Bailey and basically saying well, look at what's happening with Uber drivers or what have you.
So there is this Mott and Bailey thing happening all the time on this job loss question.
And I just want people to be straight about, or honest about it, which is look, if your claim is that this will cause job loss in the future, it's true.
I can't refute that, because none of us can prove what's going to happen in the future.
But be honest about what's happening today.
And in the first three years after the launch of AI chatbots, there's been no discernible disruption to the labor market.
And the early studies and data are showing wage increases and actually job increases.
And there's definitely job increases in blue collars because of the construction boom.
This has been our first debate club corner.
Every week, we're going to teach you how to debate better here.
No, it's, you know, I appreciate that.
I have really tried to say here, like, I'm not a doomerist at all.
The statistics I look at, I talk to Dara.
I have, actually, sincerely.
That's why I use displacement.
I really use refined language.
I do.
I do.
And when I talk to Dara, he told me in areas where robo-taxis like Waymo are occurring, what they did specifically to deal with this issue was they stopped trying to hire drivers in Los Angeles and And in San Francisco because there are so many Waymos.
They don't want them to have a bad experience.
So wherever in the castle we're talking about this, I don't have a horse in this race.
I'm not part of this cabal of Destin Moskovitz's people.
I just know from talking to Uber and Waymo and these other companies and other companies that are building software, where they're trying to eliminate jobs.
And so I'm just bringing that up as a really interesting example.
Uber and waymo, elon with tesla they are actually making plans right now to deal with this displacement of drivers.
And they're coming up with new products and services for those drivers.
So one of the things they're doing is data labeling at Uber.
They bought a data labeling company and they're taking the drivers and saying hey, you want to do some data labeling over here and actually creating AI jobs for them.
So this is, you know, something that the whole industry is working on.
Look, there's going to be a spectrum, right?
Some jobs are going to change.
Some jobs will be eliminated.
The question is with respect to job eliminations, will that be more than offset by the net new job creations?
If you're looking at things like Uber drivers and we go to full self-driving, then obviously there's going to be some category of job loss there.
So I'm not claiming that there's not going to be any elimination of certain types of jobs, but I believe that, on the whole, what we're seeing is that when you improve the productivity of workers, their wages go up and there's more demand for their labor, not less.
That's what the data is showing so far.
And I just don't think you get that from the media right now, because they are promoting this Doomer narrative.
And a lot of that is astroturfed by these enormously deep pocketed organizations that have been funded by a few effective altruists.
All right.
Topic number two, economic numbers are out.
It's a mixed bag.
Unemployment rate is up.
And government payrolls are down, inflation somewhere in between.
Let's get into the numbers here, fun with numbers.
Unemployment rate rose to 46, from 44 in September and 4 in January of 2025, when President Trump took over.
US economy added 64000 new jobs in November October, so about 104000 job losses.
But 162000 of those job losses came from the federal government.
You remember the Doge buybacks.
A friend of the pod, Elon Musk, was involved in, those all took effect at the end of September.
So there was a little bit of a balloon payment that occurred.
An analyst from Moody's says, quote, it's a frozen job market.
There's not much hiring.
There's not much firing happened.
That tracks with what I'm seeing on the ground.
Meanwhile, inflation came in better than expected at 27, beating the 31 expectation, but still far away from the 2 target for the Fed.
Trump gave an 18-minute, very loud, emphatic address to the nation last night.
And it was not that we're invading Venezuela.
It was mostly him talking about his accomplishments in terms of prices and affordability.
And a little bit of admonishing Biden.
Here's a 20 second clip.
The last administration and their allies in Congress looted our treasury for trillions of dollars, driving up prices and everything at levels never seen before.
I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.
Sacks, your thoughts on the economic data?
Well, you're painting the economic data as mixed.
I don't know how you have an economic report that's better than what we just had today.
So first of all, we saw that CPI came in at 2.7%, like you said, but the expectations were 3.1%.
That's why the market is rallying today in a big way.
Core inflation is down to 2.6%.
These are significant beats, and this puts core CPI inflation down in the US at its lowest level since March of 2021.
So since the whole COVID thing.
And if you listen to Kevin Hassett, he said that over the past three months, core inflation has been running at 16.
So the trend line is going down even further.
So it looks to me like inflation is rolling over.
And that's just about a solved problem, which is really good news for what it implies for interest rates, because it implies that interest rates are coming down.
And that's going to bring down things like mortgage costs and the costs of financing a car payment and things like that.
Now, you talk about unemployment.
I think the unemployment news is very, very good.
So if you look at the data from September to November, the overall employment is down 41,000.
But why was that?
Private employment was up 121000, but government employment in the last two months has declined by 162000.
So this is what the media was focused on as they were trying to claim that unemployment was up.
But actually, it's just that the government jobs decreased.
Why did the government jobs decrease?
Well, you remember that when Doge went in and made their cuts at the beginning of the year, they offered people a buyout as of October 1st.
Now, some people took the buyout right away, but a lot more waited until the last possible day, which was October 1st.
And that's why you saw this big spike in October unemployment.
But those are government jobs. that are being cut.
And moreover, there are people who voluntarily wanted to take the buyout and they took that deal.
So again, I think the employment picture is looking actually quite good.
And if you believe what we believe, you don't want an excessive number of government jobs.
And President Trump has presided over, I think the first decrease in the federal workforce in decades.
We've seen a 10.7% decrease in federal workers in 2025.
Basically, the number has gone from 2.4 million to 2.15 million.
I know that'll make Freiburg very happy.
But look, what we had during the Biden years is we had 9% inflation.
We had a very weak economy.
We did have a recession.
It was that two-quarter shallow recession.
And the media even tried to start redefining what a recession was to avoid those headlines.
But what the Biden administration did in response to that is they went hog wild with government hiring.
And what we're seeing now is inflation is now coming back down.
And we're seeing the number of government workers come down to a more reasonable level.
And the private economy is making up for it.
We still have a relatively historically low unemployment rate.
So those numbers look good.
Then you look at the deficit.
We've reduced the deficit year over year by $600 billion.
That will help bring interest rates down.
And then on prices, you got the lowest gas prices in five years, below $3 nationally.
And then finally on wages, real wages are up by over a thousand dollars on average.
And it's $1,300 for factory workers, $1,800 for construction workers.
And again, that's a big change from the buying years where you saw that in real terms wages went down by about 3000 on average per worker.
So look, I mean, it seems to me like we're on the cusp of a golden age here.
I don't see how the numbers could really be better.
And then on top of it again, you've got this AI tailwind which I think is a huge positive, not a negative which is adding roughly 2 GDP growth every year because of huge CapEx investment, with so far no job loss associated with that.
So I would just say, sit back and enjoy this.
I think we're headed for a gangbusters 2026.
Rates are coming down.
Inflation's coming down.
And you're also getting tax cuts going into effect next year. because of the big, beautiful bill.
No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on social security, plus the standard deductions being beefed up.
So people haven't even felt the benefit of those tax cuts that's coming in April.
I don't see how things could be much better.
Okay.
Freeberg, any thoughts here on the data as it's come in, or Chamath?
I'll go to either one of you.
Directionally, I think it's really positive.
You want to see private sector jobs growing, And the shrinkage of government sector jobs has profound impacts not just on the budget, but it starts to create obvious air pockets where you get a little bit more rational regulation.
You can deregulate in the appropriate places.
You can shift the burden and the responsibility to private industry.
So it's more than just what's in the numbers that I think is positive.
I've told you this story before, Jason, to do some of the things that I've wanted to do.
I'll give you an example.
When we started a battery business five years ago, when we filed with the DOE, the Department of Energy.
These are 700-page reports.
You spend millions of dollars and you hire teams of 50 and 100 people.
And what are we trying to do?
We're trying to build a battery business in the United States so that we can delever from the Chinese.
To the extent that we could do that a little bit simpler and a little bit easier, because there's fewer folks.
And so the burden goes to state and local regulators, which we all already have to deal with.
These are just generally good things for productivity.
They're generally good things for GDP.
It allows us to invest more aggressively in the things that help America.
So it's trending in the right direction.
By the way, Sachs didn't mention this explicitly, but I'll say it.
The other thing in 26 is you get a bunch of tax cuts that kick in.
No tax on tips, no tax on overtime.
The deductibility of the cost of interest for Things like car loans.
These are big stimulative actions.
Accelerated depreciation.
Accelerated depreciation.
You have big stimulative actions for the United States economy.
Yeah, I think what you guys are missing respectfully, is that you know.
Uh, trump promised something completely different.
He said, starting on day one, we will end inflation and make america affordable again to bring down the prices of all goods.
And when he was running for election, he promised the americans that he would reduce prices.
Now what's happened is prices have not come down.
They've gone up 2.5% to 3.1%.
But what really matters and I think you guys are doing a great job pro-administration, part of the administration what you're missing is the American people don't believe you.
And the American people are experiencing something different.
And when you look at the approval rating, Trump's approval rating is at its historic lows.
And specifically on inflation, pull up the silver bullet and meta analysis there.
This is the disconnect.
And this is why it seemed tone deaf last night when Trump was telling everybody it's great.
And when you say it's the golden age, Americans aren't experiencing that.
That's just not what they experience.
They are experiencing grocery prices that have continued to go up.
And they are experiencing unemployment that's gone up 15 percent, whether it's the federal employees, whether it's private sector, and you debate the numbers, or there's a golden age coming because of no tax on tips.
These are all talking points.
What the American people remember is the Trump administration said prices would go down.
Prices have gone up.
That jobs and manufacturing all these incredible manufacturing things.
Obviously that's going to take years.
That has not happened yet.
So I hope for the best.
I hope inflation goes down to two.
And I hope they turn this around.
But the American people don't believe the Trump administration.
And it's a big difference between promising stuff in 2024 and delivering it.
And here we are in the first year.
And the delivery that's come in from the Trump administration on inflation is and on the economy is not good if you're in the bottom half of society that doesn't own equities.
Period full stop.
So first of all, prices have come down.
You look at gas prices are the lowest in five years.
They're below $3 nationally.
Now I don't know how you want a new administration to come in and literally affect every single change on day one.
How do you do that?
Oh, no, that's just what he said.
No, what the president said is they would start working on it.
They would start working on it.
I'm not saying it's possible.
That's what he said.
Now, you say you start working on it on day one, and so he did.
And look at the results.
Inflation is now down to 2.7%, way below expectations.
I don't know how you want a better report than this.
Unemployment is very low.
I do remember the economic target was 3, 3, and 3.
3% GDP growth, 3% deficit to GDP, and 3% inflation.
They're below 3% inflation.
They're above 3% GDP growth.
And the deficit to GDP is not where it needs to be.
So cutting is still ahead.
But I looked at the budget for 2026 for a number of the departments in the cabinet over the last couple of days and they do have big cuts that they're trying to implement across the federal government.
We're going to be interviewing Scott Besant tomorrow morning.
That'll come out shortly after this episode airs.
But this is the catch-up conversation with Scott on how's the 3-3-3 plan going.
But on two of the three metrics, J-Cal, it does appear like things are good.
I'm not trying to be a spokesperson for the Trump administration.
But I'd say, if you look at this just from the raw economic data and the goals of the administration following that, there should be a flow through in terms of job growth, the flow through in terms of affordability, in terms of wage growth, all those other sort of economic indicators that actually affect people on Main Street every day.
That's also TBD in the narrative is still to be written.
But those high level economic goals are still, you know, are starting to kind of fall within the framework of what they set out to do, which is Generally good right.
Yeah, I'm just pointing out the disconnect.
Again, this is the disconnect with the American people.
No, I'm looking at year one.
Just year one.
We're here at the end of year one.
Well, it takes time to implement an agenda.
I totally agree.
I'm just telling the American people, don't believe the Trump administration right now.
There's more work to do.
That's the disconnect.
The data that came out today is looking awesome.
By the way, that Vanguard report that I mentioned that also exposes the AI job loss hoax.
It also has a new economic assessment for next year.
It's projecting 3 growth for next year, which I think is conservative, and an improved labor market outlook for 2026.
And it says the most robust improvement will come in the second half of the year.
So Vanguard is saying that 2026 is looking very good.
And by the way, that's when the fight for Congress will unfold is next year.
So the thing about polls is it's obviously just a snapshot in time.
And it doesn't tell you what things are going to look like six months from now or a year from now.
I think they're going to look very good.
Yeah.
I mean, maybe he turns it around.
I think it's already been turned around.
It just takes time to kick in.
Yeah.
I mean the public's perception.
It hasn't turned around and inflation was supposed to go down and it stayed.
It has.
No, it stayed at, it's still way above the 2%.
It's been 1.6% for the last three months.
No, it has not.
It's 2.7.
This is the problem, I think, with the administration and you're part of it.
You guys cherry-pick numbers, and it's not matching the numbers on the field.
CPI is cherry-picking?
This is a CPI report.
Open the cover of the Wall Street Journal.
Hold on.
2.7% CPI.
2.6% core.
1.6% for last three months.
What is hard to understand about this?
Obviously, the last three months are going to tell you what the trajectory is.
Okay.
You're looking for every excuse you can to basically downplay what is an awesome report.
And just look at the stock market, which is ripping today, because this is way below expectations.
You're the only one who's not happy about this news, J.K.
No, no, no.
The country's not happy about it.
I don't have a horse in this race.
I'm doing fantastic.
I own equities.
I'm doing better than I ever have in my life.
I'm talking about how the bottom half of America perceives it.
This is the blind spot of the Trump administration.
You've proved my point by not addressing it.
Let's go to the next one.
No, I haven't.
What?
I guess your point is that the American people expected that inflation would go down and prices would go down.
Prices have continued to go up.
The Fed has a 2% target.
It's a little bit unrealistic to say that.
You want to have a negative inflation rate?
Trump said prices will go down.
They have not.
That's what the American people feel.
Unemployment has gone up.
They expect it to go down.
So this idea that we're in the golden age is not tracking with the bottom half of Americans.
That's just facts, David.
It's just facts.
You have work to do.
Trump has work to do.
You're saying that anything less than deflation, anything less than deflation in your view is not.
I did not say that.
You keep telling, I keep telling you what I'm reporting in terms of facts.
Then you tell me I said something different.
I didn't say that.
The American people are very disappointed in the Trump administration's first year when it comes to inflation and the economy.
I don't understand how the numbers could be any better.
We just blew past expectations here.
2.7% versus 3%.
I don't know whose pulse you think you have the finger of, but the economists who put together these expectations were expecting 3.
Just pull up the chart for me so I can just explain that this isn't bias on my part.
I'm just putting the fact on the field.
No, it is not.
These are numbers that you can look at and see that Trump's Two worst categories right now are the economy and inflation.
The American people thought he was better.
These are snapshots in time, and they're going to be completely different next year.
And the snapshot in time from February goes down.
That's the snapshot time.
Every month, you have 12 months there to look at.
Let me explain.
I don't know what's so hard about it.
This is a really partisan point that you're making.
You're basically saying— I'm not partisan.
I'm independent.
The U.S. economy is like a giant super tanker.
I'm independent.
I'm not partisan.
Can I finish my point?
Sure.
I mean, you must know this, and I think you're pretending not to.
The U.S. economy is like a giant super tanker.
It takes time to turn around.
It takes time to implement your economic agenda.
It took the president the first six months of the administration— to implement the big, beautiful bill which is his economic program.
But it doesn't even go into effect until January 1st.
So the tax cuts have not gone into effect.
The inflation reductions have happened.
We've gone from 9% under Biden to now 2.6% core, 1.6% the last three months.
I don't know what more you could want.
Interest rates have come down.
They're projected to come down even more because inflation's coming down.
This is again a huge shift that's in the process of turning around, and I predict that by next year the numbers are going to be even better.
Let me remind you of what happened in the early 1980s under Ronald Reagan.
When Reagan took over, okay, the misery index was at like 20%.
Reagan implemented his economic agenda, but it took a couple of years to actually implement it.
By 1983 we actually had a very severe recession because Volcker had raised interest rates rates.
So much to tame inflation.
We're lucky we don't have that issue today.
In any event, it took like three years for Reagan to implement his economic agenda.
And his popularity was very low by 1983.
But by 1984, the program had worked and it was morning in America again.
And he won the biggest landslide election, I think, in American history.
So you've got to give it time for the president's agenda to play out and work.
And it certainly looks like after 10 months, that is performing extremely well and we are just beginning to see the impact of it.
I think the core issue is Trump over-promised and under-delivering year one and it's not the golden age for the bottom half of Americans and they don't feel it's the golden age.
And I think Just tackling that head on and saying, yeah, we have more work to do.
And I actually think that's what the address last night was about.
I suspect somebody maybe Susie or the chief of staff or somebody said hey, we got to start communicating better about the cost of living and our promises during the election so that we turn this around.
That's actually what I think is happening.
But I don't have a horse in this race.
I'm doing fabulous because I own equities.
I'm happy.
I'm concerned, sure, that the bottom half of society needs to do a little bit better.
That's all.
All right.
But you know listen, I'm never going to win with you Sax, because you're the captain of the debate club.
You'll win every debate.
You're incredible.
Well look, I mean like the president.
The president made the right point last night, which is he inherited a giant mess.
Again, under the Biden years, we had a $3,000 reduction in real wages by American workers.
That's already gone up by $1,000 under President Trump in the first year.
But yeah, if you're a worker and you're just looking at your situation, you're underwater 2000 relative to where you were five years ago.
So obviously you're going to be salty about that.
But that's the situation that President Trump inherited.
I don't know how much more progress you could make in 10 months, but give it another year and then we'll really see.
All right.
I am rooting for you guys.
I hope you turn it around in year two.
Okay.
Freberg, we got an important story here we have to get to.
Do you guys want to hear a crazy personal story for two minutes as a palate cleanser?
Oh, yes.
This is an amuse-bouche.
Okay, this is an amuse-bouche.
A little pomplamoose sorbet.
This is the craziest story in my life right now.
Pull up the photo, Nick.
The first photo.
You guys remember my dog, Monty?
Yeah, this is the virtue signal dog.
No, this is the best dog.
This is the only one.
Monty was my dog for 10 years.
I got him 10 years ago in January.
And he died suddenly in May.
He turns out he had a tumor on his heart and his heart burst open in front of me and he died.
It was the worst thing.
He was with me every second of every day that I wasn't at work.
He slept on my bed.
He was in my office all day.
You guys have seen him a million times in the background during the all-in pod.
My best friend in the world.
The greatest... thing I've ever come across in my life.
So he died suddenly.
It was very brutal, very hard.
So I'm at my house the other day.
My next door neighbor walks in and he's got this dog on his leash.
Pull up this photo.
This is this dog.
So my next door neighbor finds this dog at Rocket Dog Rescue.
It was pulled out of a kill shelter.
The vet estimates this dog is like a decade old.
Today, I live probably 40 miles away from where we got Monty.
He was found wandering the streets of the Mission District in San Francisco.
This random dog here was found at some random kill shelter somewhere in California, pulled out of the kill shelter a few days ago, put into Rocket Dog and rescued by my next door neighbor.
Brings him over.
He's walking him in the street.
I'm like, oh, my God, that dog looks just like my old dog, Monty.
We ran a DNA test.
This dog is Monty's brother.
This dog is Monty's brother.
It is the craziest.
There's like a billion dogs on planet Earth.
And of the billion dogs, some random dog from some random litter, from some street pup in the mission district from a decade ago found its way into a shelter, into another rescue center, into my next door neighbor's arms and brought back to my house months after Monty died.
How crazy is that?
What is his personality like?
I'm going to hang out with him this afternoon.
I got to go see him.
But how crazy is this?
It's Monty's actual brother from the same litter.
He doesn't look like Monty, in fairness.
The angles are off.
Stepbrother?
Monty's more robust.
Yeah, well, Monty was well-fed.
This dog lived in a freaking kill shelter.
Monty was a cackling.
Take 12 pounds off Monty.
Wait, where's the other?
DNA tests don't lie.
Where's the dog that was being tortured by Revlon?
That dog's gotten robust, too.
Yeah.
Was it Revlon who was torturing your cousin?
She, Daisy, has a thousand siblings, not just one.
Oh, no.
Daisy, I'm fine with.
It's Mitchell Freeburg I hate.
Marshall.
Marshall Freeburg.
I hate Marshall Freeburg.
I got to hang out with Pokey and Joker.
He ate the pistachios last Christmas, ruined our whole dinner.
Monte's father must have really gotten around San Francisco.
Yeah.
He had a great ride on Church Street.
I mean, what are the odds of this?
Same mother, same father.
It's not a half brother.
This is the same father.
Are you saying Monty's dad was a pimp?
Same litter, same dog, same mother, same father.
Same litter on the streets of San Francisco a decade ago.
And they all find their way in different parts of California and come.
And Monty's buried in my backyard.
And this dog, his brother.
What is it, Summer of Love?
Was it the Summer of Love?
It looks the same.
You would say no way, but you got to see better shots of it.
I'll put more photos next time.
You put them side by side.
Yeah, this doesn't make sense.
I know it's the craziest ever and, by the way, like yeah, it doesn't look like they're related.
I'll be honest with you.
Gotta find you a proper photo.
What's going on with oki and joker?
How old are these dogs now?
Oh, my god, from your lips to god's ears bro, oki is 14 and a half.
She turns 15 in july.
She's so precious joker's heat, or nine, so touchwood they're.
Uh yeah, golden retrievers don't really live to 15, but my god, she's good.
You got a lot of good years.
I was just on the.
I was on the floor last thursday snuggling with her and it was so precious.
Well, you know what we did, the.
I think the best thing that we did was we got much more disciplined about diet for hockey when she turned about 13 a little bit calorie restricted, it's not nearly as much.
She lost a few kilos.
It just helped her a lot walking.
And She's a little deaf unfortunately, but she can see.
Dogs are the best.
Dogs are the best.
Here's my other photo of the dog that Chamath hates.
Pull it up just so you can see.
Last Christmas, at Nat's birthday dinner on the 26th, which is her birthday, Marshall Freeburg jumped on the table, started eating all of the pistachios and the nuts.
Ruined them.
Ruined all of them.
Slobbered everywhere.
All David Friedberg was like, oh, look at that.
Alison Friedberg was like Marshall Friedberg.
They they have no control over what's going on.
Here, pull this photo up, Nick.
This is a medical issue.
Marshall Friedberg's been dealing with.
He wakes up with irrecoverable erections.
So he can't walk.
What?
Pull this off.
Irrecoverable.
Oh, my God.
So, Nick, you got to blur this out.
Oh, whoa.
Dude's packing.
So this little guy, he weighs like eight pounds.
How do you get rid of that erection?
He has these erections.
And well, the doctors say, like, you just got to wait.
And if it ends up staying for too long, there's going to be a surgery.
But like right now, he's OK.
But he can't move when he gets them and he's stuck.
And he'll just be there, unable to move for like 20 minutes.
Same thing happened.
I gave Chamath some of my roast sparks, and he had a similar thing happen.
He was frozen.
There's a Brian Johnson joke in here.
That is a problem.
How's Moose doing, J. Cal?
Here he is, Zach.
Is that your dog, Zach?
This is the moose.
The moose is loose.
Oh, buddy.
Oh, buddy.
This is my buddy.
What are you doing?
What's he chewing on?
I think he's got a popcorn.
Get that out of your mouth.
Come on.
Get that out of your mouth.
He is such a little love buddy.
It's like a gremlin.
He loves it.
It's great to see you so in control.
Don't eat the cones, Jason.
You're such a natural dog guy, Jason.
Disciplinarian.
This dog loves food.
And he loves to wrestle.
You're like a modern Caesar in the ranch.
Does he headbutt you?
The dog whisperer.
Hold on moose, take it easy.
Buddy, i know he loves to wrestle this dog.
He's heavy, right he's well.
He added about four or five pounds because he wasn't eating all that much when we got him and then we realized he needs a little bit of extra food.
So we gave him a little more food and he became a little less um grumpy, and then he just we take him for like maybe three, one mile walks a day on the ranch.
Totally fine if he misses a walk.
Dog's got way too much energy.
So he's not he's a ranch dog, not a city dog.
No, I know.
I told you.
Yeah, he needs to run when he doesn't run.
You got a problem.
All right.
Let's keep going through the docket here.
That's dog corner.
That's canine corner.
What do you guys think?
That's a good corner.
It's a good cat show.
Canine corner is the best corner.
But how crazy is that?
Like one in a billion has got to be that this dog lands up next to me.
It's just the craziest thing.
Anyway.
Yeah.
And yeah, there's no cat corner here.
Cats are horrible.
Shout out to our friends at Waymo for eliminating the cat problem in San Francisco.
I mean, that's just, that was the greatest update to their software ever.
If they can eliminate more cats.
What's that paradox that the AI has?
It's like, do I hit the wrong problem?
It's like the cat problem.
Go for the cat.
Absolutely.
You could get somebody there on time or you could get them there 30 seconds late and take out a cat.
Take out the cat.
Less stray cats.
Cats are horrible.
Shout out to our cat ladies listening to the pod.
How many cat ladies listen to this pod?
Zero.
Oh, there are a few.
Are there a few?
Yeah, they...
They're on blue sky talking about, oh God, I had a joke.
I'm not going to do it.
All right.
According to a Reuters report, Freiburg, China has built a prototype of ASML's EUV machine.
Hey, if this is true this report it could have a profound impact on the AI race that we talked about.
For those of you who don't know, ASML is the Dutch company worth 400 billion, 22nd largest market cap in the world, and they are the only company that makes euv machines, also called lithography.
That stands for extreme ultra violet.
That's how you make h100s.
Here's a photo of one of these giant machines.
They cost 250 million dollars to make and they take six months to make, filled with all kinds of important parts carl zeiss lenses, etc.
Since 2018.
These machines have been limited for sale by the Dutch.
Why?
Why can't China buy these machines?
Well, in 2018, Trump's Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, put pressure on the Dutch to impose export controls on China, and later, that same year, they did.
So, according to Reuters, in this news story, Freedberg China used former ASML engineers allegedly to reverse engineer the machines.
Reuters has pointed out that the machine in China has not yet produced any working chips.
It's a prototype.
The CCP is targeting 2028 for working chips.
Some sources say maybe 2030 is more likely.
You've been talking about China lithography on the show.
We can play the chariots of fire, music that Freiburg insists we play when he does his victory lap Chamath.
Here's his victory lap, episode 224.
Last year, China announced and began a 37 billion investment in developing their own three nanometer chimp technology.
China made a claim that this investment they had made was starting to pay off and they had developed their own EUV system and their big semiconductor companies called the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, or SMIC, in China.
They launched a seven nanometer chip with Huawei in their Mate 60 Pro, which is sort of like their iPhone competitor in China.
And so they're proclaiming that they've already got this EUV technology.
From what I understand and Sachs would know better than I it sounds like there was a lot of reverse engineering and workaround of existing technology in order to deliver that system.
Who do you think has the best chance of challenging NVIDIA?
My early prediction for 2026 is Huawei, where I think that there is lithography technology that exists in China that is not publicly discussed, that is going to be deployed in Huawei and all these fabs that they're building in mainland China.
So announcements 2026, impact 2027?
Probably fair.
I honestly don't think that the Reuters story is necessarily news, because I think it's a little bit of a narrow scope in trying to describe what happened, which is that they quote stole ASML technology because scientists are working on it.
That's not really the full scope of what's been going on in China for a number of years.
And it really understates the technological progress that China's independently made in using other systems to try and achieve lithography parity.
So, if you go back a number of years, the current kind of investment vehicle is actually Chinese banks put capital into a fund that's roughly 48 billion US dollars, which is actually what's called the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, Phase 3.
So there was Phase 1, which started in 2014, which focused on manufacturing, so developing fabs with groups like SMIC.
Phase two was stood up in 2019, which focused primarily on design and materials.
And then this phase three fund was established in 2024, explicitly to pivot to what they call choke points or bottlenecks in the manufacturing process.
And state media has confirmed the existence of this phase three fund and the intentionality of the phase three fund to try and replicate lithography technology.
A couple of months ago, if you pull up the link, Nick, here's a publication on this paper.
So this is the leading research group out of China that's been backing into lithography technology using AI driven systems.
They published this paper, which was a very good summary of where they are in July.
Was this in Nature?
No, it was in Light Science and Applications.
And this paper is called Advancements and Challenges in Inverse Lithography Technology a Review of Artificial Intelligence-Based Approaches.
If you read into the paper and then you read the other publications from this particular research team at Tsinghua University.
They have made a number of breakthroughs in using AI to try and reestablish alternative systems and the traditional Zeiss optics and other control systems that are used in the ASML platform.
And the way that they've done it.
I won't spend too much time on it, but there's a bunch of neural networks that they've used, trained and have made discoveries from, including doing things like working with suboptimal optics, meaning you can have optics that have a degree of diffusion.
And then how do you actually recreate three nanometer printing techniques or three nanometer masks by having shadowy effects that accounted for in the AI?
So you almost like assume that the shadowy effects are going to come out and you print differently than you otherwise would.
You don't need the degree of precision that you need and you don't necessarily need to go get the Zeiss optics.
There was another paper that was published early this year by another Chinese research team that actually demonstrated how they did use AI to discover a novel method for doing optics.
So there is a very broad and well-funded effort that's been underway for over a decade, But just in the last couple of years, with artificial intelligence based approaches, they've made a series of breakthroughs.
It is very likely the case that Huawei already has a lithography system that they'll be putting into production.
And this is why I kind of talked about it when we were in Vegas and pointed it out earlier this year.
But again, I think Reuters just sort of maybe caught on to some narrow segment.
But this is a bigger story and a bigger set of progress that's been made over quite some time.
Rampification sacks. here and what you're thinking.
Obviously, you've talked a bunch about hey, let's sell our stack in there, and they're clearly working on their own stack.
What's the ramification of this, if it's true?
Well, I've never supported selling EV lithography to China.
It is probably selling the stack of h100, whatever the previous nvidia stack was.
Yeah, euv lithography these machines that are made by asml is probably our single biggest advantage in the ai race, because they're the only machines are capable of creating say, two to three nanometer chips semiconductors, and it's sort of the perfect export control because there's only one company that makes these machines.
Like you showed, they're gigantic, they're expensive.
So if you think about like, trying to put an export control on a commodity, there'd be a lot of ways to circumvent it because it's a lot of sources for a commodity.
But in this case, there's literally only one company that makes these machines.
So it's been a tremendous advantage, I'd say, for the West that we have EUV lithography.
I'm not surprised that China is trying to reverse engineer it.
It's kind of the obvious thing to do.
No advantages forever.
It does seem likely that at some point they'd be able to figure out how to do it.
So I think that this article is not altogether a surprise in that sense.
I mean, I'm sure that China is trying really, really hard to reverse engineer this.
In the meantime, however, they've also made substantial progress with DUV lithography.
So the previous generation of lithography before EUV was DUV.
E is extreme.
D is deep.
In any event, DUV was supposed to sort of top out at, say, 14 nanometer chips.
And China was able to push the technology to get to 7 nanometer and now to 5.
So they've been able to get a lot further using DUV lithography than anyone thought possible.
And that is why the Huawei chips, the Ascend chips are.
They're not as good as our chips, but they're serviceable.
And they've been able to use their prowess and networking to string more of them together.
You have the Cloud Matrix 384 technology, where Huawei will string together 384 of their Huawei Ascend chips into a rack and that will perform comparable to an NVIDIA rack but using a lot more power.
So the bottom line is China's been able to create a lot of these workarounds to our restrictions.
But if they figured out how to reverse EUV, that would be, I'd say, a blow, because it is a real advantage for us.
But I'm not convinced that this Reuters story is the full picture.
I think it's just a data point.
Chamath, any thoughts here?
If you want a very short summary of how the last generation of chips work, the best way to think about this is that the most profitable and valuable chips to date have taken a very compute-centric approach.
That's why we've needed these ultra-advanced process nodes.
But the reality is that in a world of infinite inference, let's say, The next generation of silicon will not take the same compute-heavy approach and will probably rely on a much more memory-centric architecture that uses a lot of SRAM.
The value of that is that you can produce these things, as Zach said, at 14 nanometer, at 7 5, all of these process nodes that are much less advanced.
That, I actually think, is the future.
So, in a weird way, if they steal this, which I think we should assume they've already stolen quite honestly, and they figured it out.
The question is how bad is it?
That's the really important question.
And the thing about a more memory-centric approach for AI inference or these next-generation forms of silicon.
It demands a lot more of compilers.
It demands a lot more of the software.
I still think that's where we are light years ahead.
So I don't think it's the end of the world, and we're still in a very good place.
But it is bad.
Freiburg.
Weren't we supposed to start onshoring with the CHIPS Act and maybe get trending towards having this production ability in America?
And obviously that's been really hard to do.
And China and the relationship with Taiwan seems to be, and the possibility that they actually take over Taiwan in a military fashion, has been this existential concern, or even short-term concern.
Maybe it's a better way to say it.
I think the biggest security implication to consider at this moment is that both the US and mainland China are onshoring manufacturing and that makes Taiwan less of a strategic point of interest for the United States and for United States industry.
Maybe one of the ways to think about the positive aspect of what is going on, which is maybe call it the balkanization of generally manufacturing, but specifically semiconductor manufacturing in this case, is reduced security implications concerns.
So there's no longer this flashpoint, perhaps in taiwan.
If china did invade taiwan and the us had fab manufacturing, we're less likely to want to defend taiwan.
And frankly, if china has fabs on mainland, do they really need to invade taiwan?
What's the economic interest in doing so?
Yeah, that's so kind of where he's going with it.
But if they also wanted to jump start friedberg, they could just go to taiwan and take the machines like is that actually the plan?
I don't know what the CCP's plan is.
I think that's a pretty simple statement to make.
I think just going to Taiwan is probably a lot more complicated than.
Of course it is.
My point is if this was super existential to get those chips for China and they go to Taiwan, then they've reverse engineered by default.
We need to recognize.
We keep using the term reverse engineering as if ASML is the only way to do this.
And it is not.
If you read their papers and you read what's coming out, there are alternative production and manufacturing methods and systems that are being developed in China that not only maybe provide parity to ASML, but get ahead of ASML.
And I think this is really important to understand.
China is not just in a catch-up race.
They're in a primacy race.
And they are trying to develop primacy in lithography technology, which will give them primacy in manufacturing, which will give them primacy in AI, which will give them economic leverage over the planet.
And that is very critical for us to understand.
This is not about stealing data from ASML.
Like no one gives a shit.
If you're sitting in China you're thinking about, I've got the world's best scientists, or some of the world's best scientists, and I'm giving them the resources and I'm giving them the mandate to go solve this problem.
The government, as I mentioned last year, put 40 billion against this problem and said go figure it out.
And these guys at Tsinghua are publishing some groundbreaking research on how to do it.
It's easier to catch up or to copy than to innovate.
So if you're China, the first thing you want to do is just copy EUV and get that technology for yourself.
Well, let me ask you this.
What would you do?
You're the A.I. czar.
You're sitting in the United States and China's got this lithography technology.
Is your goal to steal their technology or is your goal to get your best scientists and say let's get ahead of their technology?
If I'm China.
Neither.
I think it would be to solve the problem.
What is the actual economic commercial problem we're seeing?
And so if you can figure out a way to do manufacturing better cheaper, faster than the way that China does it, you would obviously take that path.
You're not trying to get to parity with China if you view yourself to be supreme to China.
But you have to understand, even with these EUV machines.
And the same is true on the other side.
At two or even sub two nanometer scale.
You have these incredible laws of physics that you are pushing to the boundaries of which cause these chips to have pretty low yield.
You have a lot of systems that actually aren't that efficient and highly utilized as a result.
So these systems are brittle.
The second thing is that when you have these compute-centric architectures, you end up making design decisions like HBM.
They'll have to go and steal all the HBM, which is the high bandwidth memory business that SK, Hynix and Samsung have.
But again, that's where NVIDIA and then Google have an effective monopoly.
Let me ask you a question, Sax.
I mean, what's your strategic response if China next year goes into manufacturing with a sub two nanometer system that's got higher yields, is faster, is cheaper than anything that we're seeing anywhere else in the world?
Well, I don't think that's going to happen.
Let's talk about that if it actually happens.
I don't think it's going to.
But what would I be focused on right now?
I would say we want to get more of the leading edge manufacturing in the United States.
TSMC has already opened a big fab in Arizona.
And they're planning on increasing the size of that.
And that's really important.
And we should get all these restrictions out of the way.
They're facing all sorts of permitting restrictions.
I mean, all the stuff that Bernie's talking about where he wants to slow down.
I mean, he's talking about data centers, but not chip manufacturing, but the concepts are the same.
Yeah.
Ro Khanna, Elizabeth Warren, you've got exactly wrong.
I mean, anti-tech progress people saying, let's stop all this stuff.
Meanwhile, China is not just racing to catch up, but they're likely going to get ahead of the United States.
And if we're caught flat footed because we've got a moratorium on development, a moratorium on production, it's going to be extraordinarily damaging.
Right.
Well look, this is where I agree with you is that, if this Reuters report is accurate, it does speed up the timeline on China closing the chip gap from.
It's not just for you.
You can go read the Tsinghua papers.
You'll see that these guys are so advanced.
If they care about being ahead, why are they publishing that paper?
So by the way, this is a really important point.
And I picked up on this from a number of different disciplines in scientific research.
So what's been going on is scientists in China, they're very smart people.
There's very great scientists there.
And like all scientists, they don't think necessarily in terms of nationalism first.
They think in terms of science.
They want to publish their research.
They want to be known.
They want to be the discoverers of these new frontiers.
And so they publish.
And what we've seen in several instances is that the scientific research groups will publish, and they'll publish slightly ahead.
And once they get ahead of the market or they get ahead of the world, suddenly they stop publishing.
And it's almost like the CCP comes in and is like, OK, you guys are now, you know, going too far.
We don't want to tip our hat too far.
And the stuff starts to recede.
And I think there was this one paper on optics that is designed to replace the Zeiss monopoly in optics that suddenly disappeared.
And that research team stopped publishing.
I got to find this paper.
This came out last year.
But there are a number of these disciplines where there's publications that go to a certain extent and then they stop publishing.
So I think that there's a little bit of a mechanism.
It's because of the funding cycle in China.
You have every single local government that's given capital to invest in businesses.
And so they compete and compete until it gets to the state level and you have one or two national champions.
But if this was so important Freeberg, would there also be an argument to publish things that would send?
That would be misinformation or send people down a wrong direction.
No, because you have to again.
The funding cycle is you get as a policy person in Shanghai.
You get promoted because you make a good bet.
So by the time it becomes one national?
To Freebrook's point when's the last time you saw BYD or CATL publish anything meaningful?
But when they were not the national champion, they were probably publishing very aggressively.
But at that time, there was 50 different companies competing to be the national champion.
So I suspect what's happening here is there's 50 different semi-startups all over China.
Everybody's trying to support their own local version.
And eventually, when there's one, they disappear.
Okay, interesting.
I mean, one of the things we see is China does give money to these research institutions on frontier technology science, and then there's an industrialization.
It's something the U.S. isn't quite as good at.
And I think it's again.
We've talked about the co-opting of our universities as research institutions over the last couple of decades.
They've become these sort of employment centers, if you will, and they've become these sort of weird social engineering systems.
They've kind of gotten away from some of the core research, or that's been kind of co-opted.
In China, there are these sort of dedicated research centers.
And then there are universities where there's very clear independent research that goes on on university campuses.
They typically get quite a bit of funding.
And the way this worked.
If you look into the details of this China National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund and there were three funds one, two and three the funds get bigger and bigger as the research teams make progress.
It's a very smart way of doing things from a central planning perspective.
And then in phase three, they're now targeting these specific unlocks.
That then will enable industrialization.
So they're funding some of this core research.
The core research has these breakthroughs and then it gets industrialized.
It's during that research phase where we see a lot of publications happening.
And this is happening in life sciences as well and in physics and in material science.
And as soon as they start to get a little bit ahead of the curve, then it gets industrialized and the publications kind of stop.
So I don't know if it's necessarily the CCP stepping in and saying, hey, stop publishing.
You're going to let the world know too much of what we're having versus okay.
The handoff is now happening and industrialization begins.
Yeah look, I would just say that to me.
The takeaway here is that the timeline on China closing the gap with us is being sped up.
Whether it's the fact that they're copying what we're doing, whether EUV is being reverse engineered, or maybe their scientists are figuring out a way to leapfrog.
We are in a pretty close race with China, and that's why I think it's really important that we don't listen to Bernie and others who just want to stop the progress.
Because the progress is not going to stop.
This is going to happen in China.
And that will be a big problem for the United States.
All right.
Speaking of socialism, slash communism.
Are you guys thinking about coming to Austin, my neck of the woods?
I've been pulling up these photos in Austin of these homes.
You know I'm doing it, right?
Welcome to Texas, boss!
Like, on the lake.
Sax already bought a house.
Sax already bought a house.
He hooked me up with the agent.
What has she got you looking at?
I'm not sure yet.
We're just going to do a call.
You guys are bidding against each other, assholes.
You can have my sloppy seconds.
You have the high ground, so you can negotiate hard.
There is so much inventory.
But only, like, 20% of the inventory is on the MLS.
80% here, because it's a no reporting state, is off market.
So it's completely different than any other market, certainly California.
I want to be on the lake.
If I'm going to do this, I want to be on the water.
Oh, really?
I don't want the lake?
I mean, here's the challenge with the lake.
People are going to come up to your house and take pictures and hang out like two feet off your house and starting at 7 am,
Everybody's zipping around the lake in motorboats starting at 7 a.m.
It's beautiful.
I love the motorboat.
It's great, but just understand it's going to get loud at 7 a.m.
There's nothing a good motorboating doesn't do.
Who doesn't love a good motorboat?
J. Cal, I heard you're like an hour away.
You're not even in Austin.
I'm in the hill country on my ranch, but we're getting a place closer to the city, actually.
So we're 30 minutes outside the city.
30 minutes?
My God.
I heard you're an hour.
I heard you're in the sticks.
No, not that far.
Not that far.
No, he's in the suburbs of the suburbs.
No, if you want to have, like, you know, dozens of acres, you can't do that in the city.
When I was growing up in Memphis, they called that Bumblef*** Egypt.
I mean, if you want a ranch and you want like dozens of acres, you can't do that.
You can get an acre to three acres inside of the city.
I found an acre in Tarrytown.
No problem.
An acre is doable.
Two acres is possible.
You know what's so sad?
Even if this bill doesn't get on the books, which I think everyone's leaving, there's a decent chance it ripped the bandaid off.
The revenues of California are going to plummet.
Plummet, man.
It is um yeah, i mean, we saw the writing on the wall.
Socialism is coming and you know this, one of the great things about having a united states of america the different states can optimize for different things.
That one bill, thing here, that one bill, this proposed billionaire tax, has single-handedly changed the trajectory of the california economy by 100 to 200 billion dollars over the next five to ten years.
It's an enormous cell phone.
People were here willing to pay the money, And now
Yeah, people were willing to put up with a lot in this state.
People were.
But as soon as you tell people, hey, we're doing property seizures, property seizures or their threat of property seizures or the fact that people didn't come out against property seizures is enough for everyone to be like, see ya.
See you later.
The fact that all the politicians didn't in uniform stand up and say, this is ridiculous.
We're never going to let this happen.
They let this happen by not defending the property rights that are endowed in this country.
They lost everything.
They have to defend it.
What do you think happens to the state budget over the next four or five years?
You're right.
It's trash.
And, by the way, and that's what drives the socialist spiral, because then they try and do more property seizures and they try and get the money back.
Who are they going to tax?
Everybody's going to be gone now.
And here's the other crazy statistic that we never talk about.
I was going to try and put some data together and get it as a topic, but we should save it for the new year.
But the California pension fund system is underfunded by roughly a trillion dollars.
So these folks in the California pension fund system are sitting around waiting for money to come to them every year for the next 30 40, 50 years and the money isn't there.
They're guaranteed that money from this pension fund system and it's not there.
What are they going to do?
It's a trillion dollars short.
That's a state obligation.
Why would anybody hear something like that and think giving politicians more money is a good idea?
These people are so fiscally irresponsible.
They're fiscally illiterate.
There is that.
It's pretty clear to me that in New York and California, it'll be 60 plus percent taxes.
And you know, if you were living in a perfect society that appreciated it and you had this incredible safety.
You had extraordinary schools and the roads and the public transit.
Everything works.
Yeah.
Like Japan.
You'd be 60 percent ecstatic.
Yeah.
You'd be like, OK, whatever.
It's a lot, but. hey, this is a pretty great place to live.
If you're paying that and people are breaking into your home and there's nine overdoses a day, you're like wait a second.
And then on top of that, by the way, they just... And they're seizing your private property now.
Seizing your property.
They're seizing your property.
And by the way, they don't care about you.
When you look at the laws, I was just talking to some law enforcement people.
City's using your money to give homeless people vodka.
It's just...
Well, I mean, if it was tequila, I mean, I have a good tequila brand we could give to the homeless.
Maybe we can make a deal.
Shout out to all the tequila coming to you.
Delivery is happening right now.
In all seriousness.
I was talking to some security folks and was talking to my security guy in California.
And In California, not only do they not have the castle doctrine, they've replaced the castle doctrine where you can defend your home if somebody comes into it with your gun and protect your family and your property.
Now you have to have this duty to flee.
So you have to be able to run out of your home with your family as opposed to defend your family.
So they literally are telling the criminals hey listen, if you break into somebody's home in California, don't worry about getting shot.
They're going to have to run out or else they're in the wrong.
Like this is deranged.
The inmates have literally taken over the asylum.
They have taken over the asylum.
I realized this two years ago, and I pulled the ripcord.
Elon realized it six years ago when he tried to build a factory.
He pulled the ripcord.
You guys are realizing it now.
Everybody's realizing this.
New York, the hedge fund guys in New York and in Jersey and Connecticut.
They realized it.
What three years ago?
LA Hollywood guys.
I know a bunch of Hollywood guys leaving.
Yeah I, literally.
This producer, one of the major producers, who has produced billions of dollars worth of films, came here last year.
I met him at a football game.
He said, tell me everything.
I told him everything.
He moved here.
He moved here.
He's going to start making movies here.
And he is one of the top top.
I won't say who he is, but you know his films because his partner, who is an incredibly high profile comedian, like amongst the highest profile in history where they make films together.
He moved here.
Why?
He doesn't want to live in LA and risk his family's life to a home invasion and the house burning down because they don't fill water in the reservoir.
I mean, guys, hopefully not everyone realizes I need to sell my house to someone.
Good luck.
You'll be OK.
You'll be OK.
There's a Chinese billionaire.
There's no actually, you know, you'll be able to sell your house.
You know, billionaires left in California.
It's whoever the politicians are that are able to aggregate power and money.
Gavin will buy your house and turn it into a homeless shelter.
You guys are going to look back on Gavin and realize he was the most upstanding moderate governor that California had in modern era.
And suddenly we're going to be like, what the fuck?
And I think that's a great place to stop it, boys.
We will be doing a couple of episodes between now and the end of the year.
And yeah, no weeks off.
Hopefully, we get to see each other over the holidays.
I'll see you, Sax, and you as well, Chamath and Friedberg, shortly.
Oh, by the way, the president just signed an executive order reclassifying marijuana from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3.
Schedule 1 to Schedule 3.
Okay.
That's something Obama wanted to do in the second term and never did.
I mean, it's a good thing.
I mean, Schedule 1 is like heroin.
It just never made sense to treat it the same as heroin.
I know a lot of people aren't thrilled about marijuana.
It's not great when people are smoking in the streets.
I don't like marijuana, but I agree with this decision.
But it's not heroin.
It's not heroin.
I mean it would be on – I think most people intellectually would put it on the same level as alcohol.
I just want it studied so that we can have toxicity labels.
That's the big thing that I want because like if these kids –
That's the most important thing is just put a tox label on these things so you know what you're taking.
It's the strength of these things over the last 50 years has changed dramatically.
So much.
Yeah, there are these shards they create of this incredibly intense THC that will make you go psychotic.
It's really dangerous.
So the smoking a joint from our youth is very different than smoking these resins and stuff that they've created before, apparently that are like 100 times the potency, 200 times the potency.
And they can put you in a psychotic state.
Really dangerous, folks.
Well, that's where, like, the FDA should regulate it.
More like alcohol or something.
100%.
100%.
Much better process, especially since kids are getting access to stuff.
100%, yeah.
All right, everybody.
Another amazing episode of your favorite podcast in the world.
Love you, boys.
Be all in pockets.
Love you, boys.
Bye-bye.
Happy holidays, everybody.
Merry Christmas.
Happy Hanukkah.
Merry Christmas.
Happy Hanukkah.
Merry Christmas.
Whatever you're into.
Merry Christmas.
We'll let your winners ride.
Rain Man, David Sack.
And it said, we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.
I'm going all in.
Besties are gone.
They're all just useless.
It's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.
Wet your feet.
Wet your feet.
We need to get merch.
