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Bernie Sanders: Stop All AI, China's EUV Breakthrough, Inflation Down, Golden Age in 2026?

December 19, 2025 / 01:30:27

This episode discusses Bernie Sanders' proposal for a moratorium on new AI data centers, the implications of AI on jobs, and the economic landscape in the U.S. Key guests include David Sachs, who argues against Sanders' position, and Jim O'Shaughnessy, who provides insights on the economic data and AI's impact.

The hosts debate Sanders' claims about AI causing job losses and its effects on children's social interactions. Sachs emphasizes the importance of AI for U.S. competitiveness against China, arguing that halting progress would be detrimental.

They also analyze recent economic data, noting a mixed bag of unemployment rates and inflation figures. The discussion highlights the disconnect between economic indicators and public perception, particularly regarding inflation and job security.

In a lighter segment, the hosts share personal stories about their dogs, including a surprising reunion with a dog that resembles a deceased pet, adding a heartwarming touch to the episode.

The episode concludes with a discussion on the implications of China's advancements in semiconductor technology and the potential impact on the AI race.

TLDR

Bernie Sanders proposes an AI data center moratorium; hosts debate its implications for jobs and U.S. competitiveness against China.

Episode

1:30:27
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All right, everybody. Welcome back to your favorite podcast, the number one podcast. In fact, in the entire
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universe, the Allin podcast with your besties. We're all here. It's the original quartet. Everybody loves When
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the Core Four are here. And we have a docket for you today, guys. We got to start out with Bernie Sanders. I know
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this is becoming a bit repetitive, but AI is the topic. We reached a new level of retardation
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this week that we cannot avoid. Bernie Sanders has a major del pitch, a moratorum on new AI data centers.
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Here's his argument. Number one, the billionaires are pushing AI because they
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want more money and power. Number two, there's going to be massive unemployment. And he cites Skates,
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Staro, Elon, saying that a AI would replace most jobs. Number three, he uh has an interesting point actually. AI is
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harmful to kids because it decreases social interaction. Actually, we kind of agree with that one, I think, across the
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board. But here's his pitch, Sachs. His pitch >> you want your using these chat box.
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>> No, I've talked to my kids about it. >> Okay, we'll get into it.
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>> We can get into it, but I've talked to them about it. Look, if you actually
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look at the data, if you look at what kids are doing, it's so much more interactive and engaging for them to
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talk to their friends on Snap or to watch videos on Tik Tok. Those things are super engaging. Whereas doing
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research on an AI chatbot is just it's way less engaging and you see this in
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the data. So, I'm not saying there's not an issue there. You want to pay
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attention to the way that these technologies are shaping the minds of young kids, but I think people get a
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little bit confused. what they're really talking about is social media and then
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they attribute all the ills of social media over to these new AI chat apps and they are a little different. You know,
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when I when I asked my kids like >> how much do you use these things? Are they addictive? They said no, they're
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more just really useful. It's like Google. >> It's like there's two
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>> I couldn't do school without it. >> Yeah, there's two pieces here. One,
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using AI to be smarter and to learn stuff and ask questions. Absolutely fantastic. phenomenal. I think we'll all
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agree on that. There is, and I don't know if this is actually what he was referencing, but there's character AI in
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a in a long tale of spicy chats where people we talked about getting oneshotted and these parasocial
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relationships. That's I think what he's referring to, but maybe I'm reading it
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wrong, >> but let's get into it here. His pitch is that we need to slow down so that quote
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democracy can catch up and that Congress should put a moratorum on new data centers. That's his solution. He got
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roasted obviously on social media for this. It's the most absurd I think solution to you know what are valid
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concerns. friend of the podro kind of who represents Silicon Valley. He I guess supported it a bit and then he
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replied to me and says his concerns are not as acute and that he just wants to make sure we use renewable energy which
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I guess is you know a fine position to have poly market put up a little uh market here AI data center moratorium
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passed before 2027. Yeah, we'll see if that comes true or not. But uh hey Saxs, you are our SGE.
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Sachs or SGE, this is your time to shine. You have framed the AI debate as we can't lose to China. Bernie framed it as
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not letting the billionaire class get more power and money by eliminating American jobs. And last week on this
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very program, Tucker framed it as what are Americans going to get out of this? Right? That that was the framing, you
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know, as of December of 2025. So here's your chance, Sax. Why should Americans
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who have some concerns about losing their jobs care about beating China? Why should they care about that sex?
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>> Why should they care about beating China? Because AI is a profound technology. It's going to have huge
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economic and national security implications. And the thing that Bernie gets wrong is that he can't stop the
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progress. I mean, he can't stop China from making progress. We can stop progress in the US, but it's not going
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to stop China from advancing these technologies. A lot of this is just math. And just because we stopped
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doesn't mean China's going to stop. So, this would be the biggest own goal ever
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if we took our leadership in the AI race and just handed it to China. But look, I
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appreciate Bernie's honesty in a way because he is actually telling the truth
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about what he wants. And I remember just a week ago when President Trump signed an executive order to advance a national
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AI framework, a lot of critics and a lot of Democrats were saying this was a violation of states rights and we need
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to support the states and regulating AI. And here Bernie is acknowledging that this is not about states rights because
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he's saying that there needs to be a moratorium on new data centers even if the states want them. So he doesn't
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support states rights either. He just wants all the progress to stop. And I think this is really the truth of the
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matter is that all this talk about states rights or affordability, it's all a red hearing. And what's really going
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on is there's a large and growing contingent of people who just want all the progress to stop. But again, we
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can't stop China from making progress. So all they would be doing is seeding
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leadership of this AI race to China. What people like Bernie really want is they want the US to become like Europe.
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You know, Europe has half the share of global GDP that they had 30 years ago. And that's because of their hostility
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towards innovation and technological progress. And that's kind of where Bernie wants us to be is he wants us to
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go down the the path of Europe. And the reason he says is because, god forbid someone gets rich. Well, look,
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capitalism sometimes results in the unequal distribution of wealth, but socialism always results in the equal
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distribution of poverty and misery. And if the US stops developing AI, if we hand this leadership to other countries,
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it'll make the United States poor, it'll make the American people poor, and it
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will seed our leadership globally. We will not be the pre-minent power in the world anymore.
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>> Okay. >> So, I'll stop there. >> No, no, it's great. Thank you. SGE David
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Saxsberg, there seems to be a couple of conversations. Unfortunately, we weren't
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here last week, but we had a really nice uh visit from our pal Tucker, and we talked about this. He seemed to think
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there was a bit of a communication problem with selling to the public the value of these technologies. Do you
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agree with that? And what do you think's going on here in terms of the cross
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conversations? One group wants to del, has some concerns, environmental, you know, job displacement, etc.
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And then there is there an issue where the China beating China doesn't resonate
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with the American populace? You've been harping on about the rise of socialism
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for four plus years on this very podcast. So from where you sit, what's the actual disconnect in these multiple
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conversations that are going on concurrently and and seemingly coming to a head here at the end of 2025? Well, if
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you ask any of the politicians that are making these proclamations about the quote tech barons and try and actually
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talk to them about what is the AI technology delivering, what is it not delivering, you kind of typically hit a
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wall pretty quickly. It's very hard for folks to articulate what is actually
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happening. There's a tremendous amount of capital being put at risk against infrastructure to build out the capacity
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for many companies, the entire economy, the entire industry to deliver AI tools.
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There isn't an aggregation at this stage of value creation with the exception of Nvidia which has really got
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this $3 trillion market cap creation that's happened in the last couple years. Peter Teal said this best. He's
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like look at all the money that's going into AI. There's really only one company
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that's making any money and that's Nvidia. Like at this point the juryy's
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still out. We don't even know what AI is. It's sort of like when the internet
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was happening. You know, everyone thought these fiber optic switch companies were going to make all the
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money. Turns out that was wrong. It was the end applications that made all the money and they competed in many
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different markets from Google to Amazon to Uber. You can go down the list of all
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the beneficiaries of the core infrastructure technology of the internet that was built out. So what is
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really going on? Well, AI is the new lightning rod for fear and for divisiveness that ultimately breeds
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compliance and control, which is where these politicians are trying to drive the the populace and the voting
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conditions in the United States. And that's what's going on right now. There's a lot of fear about, oh, putting
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this data center in my town is going to do X or Y or Z with no real conversation
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about the truth of that matter. There's a lot of fear about wealth creation being aggregated in the hand of a few
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when, as we saw with the internet, it benefited the many. And that fear mongering is a very similar tactic that
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we've seen in the prior generations where policies were misstated, fear was used, and then voting control allowed
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folks to come to power that were looking for power. So I think it's just the
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lightning rod at the moment. >> Okay, Jim, what's your take on this big
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picture? What's going on here? >> I think it's important to understand
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that politicians have an incredible sense of self-preservation. So the question is why would Bernie
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Sanders think he would not look totally foolish in putting that video out? And the reason it went viral is not because
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it sounded so crazy. It was that to some faction and percentage of people it sounded rational and reasonable.
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And the problem that highlights is that we have a huge perception issue in AI. We have a handful of companies.
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All the PR that you see from those handful of companies is a bunch of circular deal making. It's a bunch of
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capital that flows from one to the other. It causes these stocks to go up of which a small percentage of people
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benefit. And at the tail end of it, it's accompanied by a completely different
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set of articles that everybody also reads about the sort of damocles that's about
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to fall on their head. whether it's electricity prices or whether it's their
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jobs or whether it's the jobs of their children or the quality of their education. So we have a big perception
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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
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stopping all progress would seem as laughable as it should be? And I think you can go back to the guilded age and
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you can ask the question, how did the industrialist leaders of that era respond through that 1880 to 1920 age of
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industrialization when you had all of this technological upheaval accompanied by a handful of people with incredible
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success, right? Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford. What did they do? And I think the lesson we can borrow
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from them is we now need to be on the forward foot as an industry. Enough of the stupid haircuts, dumb watches, ugly
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clothes, ostentatious displays of wealth. We've all done it. I've been guilty of it. It has to stop. Absolutely
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stop. And instead, we need to start to use a percentage of the balance sheets of these companies in order to benefit
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as many Americans as possible. That is the absolute minimum. Andrew Carnegie built 2500 libraries.
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The idea was as he built the railroads, you're going to scale GDP. You're going
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to scale education and knowledge. Those libraries are artifacts that allowed people to feel a dividend from that
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industrial revolution. John D. Rockefeller took all of his wealth and invested in institutions and
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universities. Henry Ford specifically focused on wages. We need to self-organize better and we need to be
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more on the forward foot. We need to start doing things that are practically measurable by tens of millions of
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American citizens. And it starts to beat back the perception problem that we have
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because Sax pointed out last week, the data does not support the misperception. But the problem is, and Sax and I were
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talking about this last week, the misperception is gaining steam. And so I think we need to use these tools that we
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have to provide some more practical benefits that every man, woman, and child can feel. Otherwise, this thing is
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going to build and you'll see crazier and crazier versions of this Bernie Sanders video.
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>> All right. I think it's well said and you know, as I said last week, I think
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beating China does not matter to the average American. It's below their line,
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Jimoth. Uh I think in many ways what they care about is jobs. They care about their kids getting jobs and yeah, they
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care about costs. They care about inflation. They care about energy costs going up. Our industry has done a
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terrible job of explaining how this benefits the average American. And they're seeing all these headlines
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about, as you mentioned, all the cross deal booking and all these stocks going up. Half the country doesn't own stocks,
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so they're not participating in it. And they're not blind to seeing self-driving
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cars or seeing their kids having a hard time getting a job. and they're hearing
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everybody talk about job displacement and that's a valid concern. People are
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scared and our industry is scaring them I think by not meeting them where they are and then beating China respectfully
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is important sachs super important. I can intellectually agree with you on that.
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>> But if you lose your job and your kids can't get a job that's that's
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existential. Yes. It's not >> my child needs a job next year. They're
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graduating from school with $100,000 in debt and my energy bills going up and my
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grocery bills are going up and they haven't come down. That's what Americans
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are experiencing. And yeah, maybe giving uh I think you also made an interesting
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point there too about the libraries. >> The war with China is existential because if we can keep it on the
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battlefield of AI and intellectual and economic prowess, we have a very good chance of winning. If it devolves and
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all of a sudden becomes a different kind of battle, that's bad for everybody,
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especially our children and our children's children. So, we need to win the current game on the field. But in
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order to do that, we need to change these misperceptions. We need to start showing tactical artifacts that show
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that this is a dividend that can benefit everybody. And we need to start now. I'm
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just putting it out there. We have so much cash on the balance sheets of these companies. Wall Street values it at
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zero. If you look at the enterprise value of any of these companies and you do a sum of the parts, nobody cares
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about that cash. So, we need to start using that cash more effectively. >> What's the equivalent of the library
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metaphor here for you, Jamath? Do you have any ideas? >> I'm not going to frontr run
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what's being worked on except to say that the leaders of these companies have
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gotten the message. They are working on a whole host of solutions. And again, we're fighting misperception, which is a
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complicated battle, but it's winnable and I think you're going to start to see
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stuff in the new year. >> Yeah, I would say education is at the top of that list. Saxs, your thoughts
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here as we wrap on this first topic. >> I'm not sure whether to address the
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particular hoaxes or the fact that there are there's a larger effort here to try
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and discredit AI and get AI development to stop entirely. Let's talk about some of these
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particular hoaxes. So on the job loss claim, I feel like I do this every week now, but there's a new study from
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Vanguard where they analyze job growth and wage growth in occupations that are highly exposed to AI automation versus
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all occupations. And they find that both job growth and wage growth is higher, not lower, in the
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occupations that are exposed to AI. So if you look at job growth in occupations exposed to AI, it's 1.7% compared to
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0.8% for other. For wage growth, it's 3.8% versus 0.7% for other. So what you
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see here is something maybe it's counterintuitive, but it makes sense to me, which is as you make workers more
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productive, the value of their labor increases, not decreases, and they end up getting paid more, and you want to
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hire more of them. So this is a huge narrative violation. And again, this is coming from Vanguard and it's showing
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that AI productivity is good for workers. This follows on the heels of that study from Yale Budget Lab, which I
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talked about in a previous show that it said there's no discernable disruption
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to the job market based on 33 months of data after the launch of chat GPT. Now, I understand that you can make
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predictions as to the future that this state's going to change, that there will
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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
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opposite. It's job growth and job gains. By the way, we have a 2% tailwind to GDP
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growth right now. That's coming from this AI boom, this capex boom that's
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happening. And so, this is, I think, a very good thing for the US economy. Now, why do people want to sabotage it?
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There's a really interesting article in Semaphore recently that described how AI
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critics were funding journalism fellowships at major publications like NBC News, Bloomberg, Time, The Verge, LA
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Times, which by the way, I mean, I track these things. They're relentlessly negative about AI.
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These fellowships were funded by future of life institute which is a doomer group that thinks that
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AI is going to become sensient and replace humans and they were funded by a donation by Vitalic Buterine from
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Ethereum. It's an interesting story actually. He donated his dog coins to future of life. They ended up being
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worth $600 million. >> Dogecoins. >> Doge. And then you remember how there
00:18:06
was like those other dog coins. >> She Oh, he had a collection of dog coins. Got it.
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>> He had a collection of dog coins. Apparently people like air dropped them
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to him as like a promotional thing. >> Got it. >> I don't think he wanted them. So he's
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like, "How do I get rid of them?" So he donates them to Future of Life and they
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end up being worth $600 million. So by this >> Oh my god. almost like this accident.
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This Doomer think tank ends up with a $600 million war chest and they've been
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funding these journalism fellowships. They've been funding grants for academics to study AI. Obviously, that's
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going to end up being very negative. And they are funding a lot of these nimi organizations that are opposing data
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centers because their goal is just to get it to stop. That's their goal. They
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just want the development to stop. And you can't, I don't think, underestimate
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how much of an impact this has had on the public discourse. But if you look at their actual claims, like for example,
00:19:00
the water use claims, it's a total hoax. I mean, these AI data do not use a lot
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of >> Yeah, that was one of the things I wanted to get into because yeah, compared to a golf course, they're not
00:19:10
using that much or or walnuts and, you know, almonds in central California. So, I think it is worth maybe just
00:19:17
>> throwing a lot of spaghetti at the wall. Look, you have to remember who was who
00:19:21
was Ida Tarbel because it's quite interesting in the context of this. Ida Tarbell was this American writer again
00:19:27
in the Gilded Age. She was part of the Muckwreckers which was a group of journalists that were doing
00:19:32
investigative research around the abuses of the industrial revolution, labor abuses and the like. And she took on
00:19:39
sandal. Exactly. If you look at that example, I'm sure that the people in this current generation who have a
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Tarbell fellowship, what they're living out is this desire to tell a story about
00:19:50
exploitation and wrong and misdoing. The problem is that these things don't factually hold together, but
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unfortunately it adds to the perception problem that we have and that has been growing. As Sax said, like so many of
00:20:05
these things have been debunked, but it's playing whack-a-ole, Jason, because
00:20:08
they'll throw the water thing out. It'll get debunked next week. We'll probably
00:20:13
something about liquid cooling and all the PAS and forever chemicals. We'll have to debunk that. Then we'll go to
00:20:20
like air cooling and how that's a problem. Then we'll go to something else. Eventually, it'll be the upper
00:20:24
land grouse, but they're not going to stop. >> Sax, how do you do you have a plan to
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reframe this to the American public? You're explaining how these bad things are happening and all the evil forces at
00:20:36
work behind the scenes. >> Well, look, it's not evil forces, but I don't think people understand the extent
00:20:40
to which the discourse has been impacted by a few anti- AI tech billionaire. >> I brought it up every week and on your
00:20:48
text. >> I brought it up. Hold on. I brought it up on this show and I tweeted about it
00:20:51
way back in November. Yeah. >> And I linked to a writer named Nerret Weisslat who has analyzed this whole
00:20:57
doomer industrial complex and she has shown that there are hundreds of these front organizations and they're all
00:21:04
really just funded by a few big tech billionaires. It's Dustin Moskovitz, Yan
00:21:08
Talin and Vitalic Buterine. Well, when I first described this, people thought that this sounds kind of crazy like a
00:21:14
conspiracy theory. And then sure enough, Semaphore comes out with the article explaining that all these journalism
00:21:20
jobs are being funded by future of life, which was the big donation by Vitalic Buterine. So my point is just you can't
00:21:28
underestimate the extent to which a few billionaires who've donated over a billion dollars to this cause have
00:21:34
distorted the public debate. And you really see this actually in the relative popularity of AI in the United States
00:21:41
versus China. So there's recently a poll on they call it AI optimism where they
00:21:45
ask people do you believe that the benefits of AI will outweigh the harms. 83% of people in China believe the
00:21:52
benefits will outweigh the harms or AI optimistic. In the US it's only 39%. >> So again the discourse has really been
00:22:00
affected by a few of these >> institutions. Let's say let's say that's
00:22:05
all true. >> Yeah. My question to you is, what's your plan to turn this around and explain to
00:22:10
the American people why they should be optimistic about this? What's your plan,
00:22:14
David? >> Well, look, I mean, you're right that we have to flip the narrative around. And I
00:22:19
I do think that the tech companies have done a really bad job explaining the benefits. We talked about this with
00:22:23
Tucker. I think he brought up some really good points. And you're right, like the the AI companies lean way too
00:22:29
much into the whole job loss narrative as as a way to explain their value prop. And I think it's just either what Jamath
00:22:35
has said, which is this is about their next fundraising round, or it's a form
00:22:39
of laziness because it's easier to describe job loss or job replacement than it is productivity, right? Like
00:22:45
multiffactor productivity is a difficult concept to explain. So I do think that they've played into this narrative. But
00:22:51
I think that what we have to do here is just debunk these narratives. Again, no evidence of job loss yet. No evidence of
00:22:58
the the water problems. I think the electricity issues with data centers are addressable. You have to let the AI
00:23:05
companies build their own power. They don't have to connect to the grid. In fact, that's what President Trump has
00:23:10
called for for the last 6 months is to let the AI companies build their own power so they're not drawing on the
00:23:15
grid. So, that problem is easily addressed as well. Talking about the affordability problem, but you're right,
00:23:20
we have to get the message out how this technology will benefit Americans. And the bottom line is, look, I've always
00:23:25
said I'm a technorealist, not a techno accelerationist. Because at the end of
00:23:29
the day we don't have a choice. I mean yeah China is gonna develop the technology if we don't.
00:23:34
>> Okay. >> So we don't really have a choice. >> I you know as I said last week I think
00:23:38
the three most pressing issues chimat education housing and healthcare. And our industry is in a unique position to
00:23:45
use AI to impact all three of those. So why don't we as an industry collectively
00:23:50
explain all the great things going on there. I gave a shout out to Daniel, Prenovo, Pernovo rather, all these great
00:23:57
companies analyzing our blood. There's so much going on in healthcare that could massively lower the cost, make
00:24:02
people's lives better. >> Obviously, in construction, you could have incredible advances, and certainly
00:24:07
in education, but we haven't explained those three things. What's your point?
00:24:11
Is there anything you can think of to add to that list? >> We have to understand the president and
00:24:15
Sachs, they're responsible for shephering the GDP of America. And as Sax said, half of American GDP over the
00:24:24
next few years is forecasted to come from all of the capital that goes in to build out our capabilities in AI. We
00:24:31
need this to happen. There's the existential reason why, but there's also
00:24:34
a basic economic reason why. So Jason, the social license comes when off to the side, the private companies
00:24:43
start to take this perception problem more seriously. So to your point, are there things that they can do around
00:24:50
housing? Yes. And again, not to frontr run, they're actively working on something that I think could be
00:24:55
transformational separately. Could they do something on healthcare? TBD, but we should look at it. Can you do something
00:25:01
in education? TBD, but we should look at it. But the point is, if you can have the same companies that are on the
00:25:08
forward foot building this revolution for us, recognize that we need to bring some more folks along take some of their
00:25:15
balance sheet capital and invest it to create this social license to operate. We will flip this perception on its
00:25:23
head. >> Yeah, I think it's well said. And you know, there was a really interesting I
00:25:26
don't you guys must remember this. The AT&T commercials, you will. Do you
00:25:30
remember those >> by the way? Sorry, that's another great example, Jason. AT&T at the turn of the
00:25:34
century. What did they do? They took their capital and they created Bell Labs. What did Bell Labs do? Bell Labs
00:25:40
drove all of modern information theory. It was the precursor to the internet. They did so much fundamental research. I
00:25:47
want to be clear. I don't think that this is a five alarm fire. This is very
00:25:50
fixible right now. And the litmus test quite honestly is in 3, four, five, six months. Jason, when you see the trickle
00:25:57
of progress if we can get organized, does your perception change and does the language that you use and the tone that
00:26:04
you've used over these last 6 months has me? >> No, no, no. I'm actually thinking that
00:26:08
you've actually been quite a good early warning system >> for what a certain percentage of
00:26:14
Americans think. And so, >> yes, I predicted it perfectly. Yes. >> It's been extremely useful. But now we
00:26:19
got to act on it and you have to change your mind. >> Oh, no. No. My my mind has been very
00:26:23
crystal clear. I won't let you you know, tell what I'm saying is my opinion has been job displacements
00:26:29
coming. >> Jason, let me be clear. We have to earn you changing your mind publicly on this
00:26:33
show. If we do that, we're back in a good place. >> Uh, yeah. No, I think that you're saying
00:26:37
that in a very condescending way. I have brought up I have brought up Okay. Unintentionally.
00:26:42
>> Here, let me let me try to say again. Sorry. Let me try this again. We have
00:26:45
>> You're saying it as if I'm misguided. >> No, no, no. You have a perception
00:26:49
>> which is what do you think my perception is? that on the balance it's a coin flip
00:26:54
about whether AI is going to be >> all good for all people or very good for
00:26:59
a small subset of people. That's what I would roughly say that's I would say
00:27:03
that's accurate job. So let me finish. So if we can execute this plan again, meaning marry all the
00:27:12
stuff we're doing on the forward foot within in investing >> with some of the stuff that we also need
00:27:17
to do to bring a broader swath of the American population along. >> Yeah. >> You will have a different perception if
00:27:25
we are successful. And what I'm saying is you've had this one perception and
00:27:29
our goal would be to shift you and people like you. >> Okay. I I I take it I think it's
00:27:35
completely fair. Yeah. I have been trying to bring up that as an industry, we have not recognized people's valid
00:27:42
concerns about job displacement. That's all I've brought up on this program. I'm
00:27:46
not saying I think it's going to be cataclysmic or we can't handle it. But I
00:27:49
think if we constantly talk about, hey, winning the AI race in China, that's
00:27:54
abstract for people. And if we deny the fact that robo taxis and human robotics are coming and intelligent people like
00:28:03
Elon or other leaders are saying, "Yeah, we're we're planning on replacing those
00:28:07
jobs. We're doing a terrible job communicating this." And I do think part
00:28:10
of this is communication and part of it is, "Hey, these are valid concerns." So
00:28:14
I think great resolution. Yeah, sure. I'll be the litmus. >> Do you guys know what um the Mottton
00:28:19
Bailey fallacy is? >> No, explain it to the audience. I mean, I think I've heard of it, but
00:28:22
>> the M and Bailey Castle is an early medieval fortification where there's
00:28:26
like a very protected area, the keep or the M. And then the Bailey is kind of this looser area that's harder to
00:28:34
defend. Right. So, what happens is if they need to retreat, they'll go into the M. Okay.
00:28:40
>> Yeah. Lord of the Rings. Right. Right. So, this has become known as a debating
00:28:44
trick or fallacy where people will make a really outrageous claim, which is they'll they'll basically run to the
00:28:53
Bailey and then when you prove that it's false, they'll run back into the M and
00:28:58
say something very unobjectionable. So, in the context of like the AI job loss fallacy,
00:29:04
the Bailey is people will say this is causing massive job loss, massive disruption. It's already here. you can
00:29:10
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
00:29:16
Vanguard study there is no job loss then they'll retreat into the M and they'll
00:29:21
say no no no I'm talking about what's going to happen in the future which is a
00:29:24
position that's fundamentally irrefutable and then when I point that out well wait you just totally change
00:29:31
what you're saying you're like no no no I was only talking about the future and
00:29:34
then as soon as we sort of seem to have agreement >> then the people in the M will race out
00:29:38
to the Bailey and basically saying well look at happening with Uber drivers or what have you. So there is this Mott and
00:29:43
Bailey thing happening all the time on this job loss question >> and I just want people to be straight
00:29:49
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
00:29:55
can't refute that because none of us can prove what's going to happen in the
00:30:00
future. But be honest about what's happening today. And in the first three years after the launch of AI chatbots,
00:30:07
there's been no discernable disruption to the labor market and the early studies and data are showing
00:30:12
>> wage increases and actually job increases and there's definitely job
00:30:17
increases in blue collars because of the construction boom. >> This has been our first debate club
00:30:23
corner. Every week we're going to teach you how to debate better here. No, it's
00:30:26
you know and I I appreciate that and I have really tried to say here like I'm
00:30:30
not a doomerist at all. you know the statistics I look at you know I talk to Dar I have actually sincerely that's why
00:30:37
I don't use I use displacement you know I really use refined language I do I do
00:30:42
and when I talked to DA he told me in areas where robo taxis like Whimo are occurring what they did specifically to
00:30:51
deal with this issue was they stopped trying to hire drivers in cal in Los Angeles and in San Francisco because
00:30:59
there are so many whimos they don't want them to have a had experience. So, you
00:31:03
know, you wherever in the castle we're talking about this, I I I don't have a a horse
00:31:10
in this race. I'm not part of this habal of, you know, Dustin Mosvitz's people. I
00:31:14
just know from talking to Uber and Whimo and these other companies and, you know,
00:31:19
other companies that are building software where they're trying to eliminate jobs. And so, I'm just
00:31:24
bringing that up as a a really interesting example. Uber and Whimo, Elon with Tesla, they are actually
00:31:31
making plans right now to deal with this displacement of drivers and they're
00:31:36
coming up with new products and services for those drivers. So, one of the things
00:31:38
they're doing is data labeling at Uber. They they bought a data labeling company
00:31:42
and they're taking the drivers and saying, "Hey, you want to do some data
00:31:44
labeling over here?" And actually creating AI jobs for them. So, this is, you know, uh something that the whole
00:31:50
industry is working on. >> Look, there's going to be a spectrum, right? Some jobs are going to change,
00:31:55
some jobs will be eliminated. The question is with respect to job eliminations, will that be more than
00:32:00
offset by the net new job creations? If you're looking at things like Uber drivers and we go to full self-driving,
00:32:06
then obviously there's going to be some category of job loss there. So, I'm not
00:32:10
claiming that there's not going to be any elimination of certain types of jobs, but I believe that on the whole,
00:32:16
what we're seeing is that when you improve the productivity of workers, their wages go up and there's more
00:32:21
demand for their labor, not less. That's what the data is showing so far and I
00:32:26
just don't think you get that from the media right now because they are promoting this dumer narrative and a lot
00:32:31
of that is astroturfed by these enormously deeped organizations that have been funded by a few effective
00:32:37
altruists. All right, topic number two. Economic numbers are out. It's a mixed
00:32:42
bag. Unemployment rate is up and government payrolls are down. Inflation somewhere in between. Let's get into the
00:32:50
numbers here. Fun with numbers. unemployment rate rose to 4.6% from 4.4% in September and 4% in January of 2025
00:33:00
when President Trump took over. US economy added 64,000 jobs in new jobs in November. October saw about 104,000 job
00:33:09
losses, but 162,000 of those job losses came from the federal government. You remember the Doge buybacks, friend of
00:33:17
the pod Elon Musk was involved in. Uh those all took effect at the end of September. So, there was a little bit of
00:33:22
a balloon payment that occurred. An analyst from Moody's says, quote, "It's
00:33:26
a frozen job market. There's not much hiring. There's not much firing happened." That tracks with what I'm
00:33:32
seeing on the ground. Meanwhile, inflation came in better than expected at 2.7%, beating the 3.1%
00:33:39
expectation, but still far away from the 2% target for the Fed. Trump gave an 18minute very loud emphatic address to
00:33:51
the nation last night and it was not that we're invading Venezuela. It was uh
00:33:57
mostly him talking about his accomplishments in terms of uh prices and affordability
00:34:04
and uh a little bit of admonishing Biden. Here's a 20 second clip. The last administration and their allies in
00:34:11
Congress looted our treasury for trillions of dollars, driving up prices and everything at levels never seen
00:34:18
before. I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast. >> Sax, your thoughts on the economic data.
00:34:27
>> Well, you're you're painting it as you're painting the economic data as
00:34:30
mixed. I don't know how you have a economic report that's better than what
00:34:33
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%.
00:34:40
That's why the market is rallying today in a big way. Core inflation is down to
00:34:44
2.6%. These are significant beats. And this puts core CPI inflation in the US at its
00:34:52
lowest level since March of 2021. So, since the whole CO thing. And if you listen to Kevin Hasset, he said that
00:34:59
over the past 3 months, core inflation's been running at 1.6%. So the trend line
00:35:04
is going down even further. So it looks to me like inflation's rolling over and
00:35:08
that's just about a solved problem which is really good news for what it implies
00:35:12
for interest rates because it implies that interest rates are coming down and that's going to bring down things like
00:35:17
mortgage costs and the costs of financing a car payment and things like that. Now you talk about unemployment. I
00:35:24
think the unemployment news is very very good. So if you look at the data from September to November, the overall
00:35:33
employment is down 41,000. But why was that? Private employment was up 121,000, but government employment in the last 2
00:35:41
months has declined by 162,000. So this is what the media was focused on is they
00:35:45
were trying to claim that unemployment was up, but actually it's just that the
00:35:49
government jobs decreased. Why did the government jobs decrease? Well, you remember that when Doge went in and made
00:35:54
their cuts at the beginning of the year, they offered people a buyout as of October 1st. Now, some people took the
00:36:01
buyout right away, but a lot more waited until the last possible day, which was October 1st. And that's why you saw this
00:36:07
big spike in October unemployment, but those are government jobs that are being cut. And moreover, there are people who
00:36:15
voluntarily wanted to take the buyout and they took that deal. So again, I think the employment picture is looking
00:36:21
actually quite good and if you believe what we believe, you don't want an excessive number of government jobs. And
00:36:28
President Trump has presided over, I think, the first decrease in the federal workforce in decades. We've seen a 10.7%
00:36:36
decrease in federal workers in 2025. Basically, the number's gone from 2.4 million to 2.15 million. I know that'll
00:36:44
make Freeberg very happy. But look, what we had during the Biden years is we had
00:36:49
9% inflation. We had a very weak economy. We did have a recession. It was that two quarter shallow recession. And
00:36:56
the media even tried to start redefining what a recession was to avoid those headlines. But what the Biden
00:37:02
administration did in response to that is they went hog wild with government hiring. And what we're seeing now is
00:37:08
inflation is now coming back down and we're seeing the number of government workers come down to a more reasonable
00:37:15
level and the private economy is making up for it. We still have a relatively historically low unemployment rate. So
00:37:23
those numbers look good. Then you look at the deficit. We've reduced the deficit year-over-year by 600 billion.
00:37:29
That will help bring interest rates down. And then on prices, you got the lowest gas prices in five years, below
00:37:36
$3 nationally. And then finally, on wages, real wages are up by over $1,000 on average. And um it's $1,300 for
00:37:45
factory workers, $1,800 for construction workers. And again, that's a big change
00:37:49
from the buying years where you saw that in real terms, wages went down by about
00:37:55
$3,000 on average per worker. So look, I mean, it seems to me like we're on the
00:38:01
cusp of a golden age here. I don't see how the numbers could really be better.
00:38:06
And then on top of it, again, you've got this AI tailwind, which I think is a
00:38:10
huge positive, not a negative, which is adding roughly 2% GDP growth every year because of huge capex investment with so
00:38:18
far no job loss associated with that. So I would just say sit back and enjoy this. I think we're headed for a gang
00:38:25
busters 2026. Rates are coming down. Inflation's coming down. And you're also
00:38:31
getting tax cuts going into effect next year because of the big beautiful bill. No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no
00:38:37
tax on social security, plus the standard deductions being beefed up. So people haven't even felt the benefit of
00:38:43
those tax cuts. That's coming in in April. I don't see how things could be
00:38:47
much better. >> Okay, Freeberg, any thoughts here on the data as it's come in? Or Chimath? I'll
00:38:53
I'll go to either one of you. >> Directionally, I think it's really
00:38:55
positive. You want to see private sector jobs growing and the shrinkage of government sector jobs has
00:39:04
profound impacts not just on the budget, but it starts to create obvious air pockets where you get a little bit more
00:39:13
rational regulation. You can deregulate in the appropriate places. You can shift
00:39:18
the burden and the responsibility to private industry. So, it's more than just what's in the numbers that I think
00:39:23
is positive. I've told you this story before, Jason, to do some of the things
00:39:26
that I've wanted to do. I'll give you an example. When we started a battery
00:39:30
business 5 years ago, when we filed with the DOE, the Department of Energy, these
00:39:36
are 700page reports. You spend millions of dollars and you hire teams of 50 and 100 people. And what are we trying to
00:39:44
do? We're trying to build a battery business in the United States so that we
00:39:46
can delever from the Chinese. to the extent that we could do that a little bit simpler and a little bit
00:39:53
easier because there's fewer folks and so the burden goes to state and local
00:39:58
regulators which we all already have to deal with. These are just generally good
00:40:01
things for productivity. They're generally good things for GDP. It allows us to invest more aggressively in the
00:40:06
things that help America. So it's trending in the right direction. By the way, Sachs didn't mention this
00:40:11
explicitly, but I'll say it. >> The other thing in 26 is you get a bunch
00:40:14
of tax cuts that kick in. No tax on tips, no tax on overtime. the deductibility of the cost of interest
00:40:20
for things like car loans. These are big stimulation accelerated depreciation. You have big
00:40:29
stimulative actions for the United States economy. >> Yeah. I think what you guys are missing
00:40:35
>> respectfully is that uh >> you know uh Trump promised something completely different. He said starting
00:40:42
on day one we will end inflation and make America affordable again to bring down the prices of all goods. And when
00:40:47
he was running for election, he promised the Americans that he would reduce prices. Now, what's happened is prices
00:40:55
have not come down. They've gone up 2.5 to 3.1%. But what really matters, and I
00:41:00
think you guys are doing a great job, you know, pro- administration, part of the administration. What you're missing
00:41:06
is the American people don't believe you. And the American people are experiencing something different. And
00:41:11
when you look at the uh approval rating, Trump's approval rating is at its historic lows. and specifically on
00:41:17
inflation. Pull up the silver bullet and meta analysis there. This is the disconnect and this is why it seemed
00:41:22
tonedeaf last night when Trump was telling everybody it's great and when you say it's the golden age, Americans
00:41:27
aren't experiencing that. That's just not what they experience. They are
00:41:32
experiencing grocery prices that have continued to go up and they are experiencing unemployment that's gone up
00:41:39
15%. Whether it's the federal employees, whether it's private sector, and you
00:41:43
debate the numbers, or there's a golden age coming because of no tax on tips,
00:41:46
these are all talking points. What the American people remember is the Trump administration said prices would go
00:41:52
down. Prices have gone up. That jobs and manufacturing, there'd be all these
00:41:56
incredible manufacturing things. Obviously, that's going to take years. That has not happened yet. So, I hope
00:42:01
for the best. I hope inflation goes down to two. And I hope they turn this around. But the American people don't
00:42:07
believe the Trump administration. And it's a big difference between promising
00:42:11
stuff in 2024 and delivering it. And here we are in the first year and the delivery that's come in from the Trump
00:42:17
administration on inflation and on the economy is not good if you're in the bottom half of society that doesn't own
00:42:25
equities. Period. Full stop. >> So, first of all, prices have come down. You look at gas prices are the lowest in
00:42:30
five years. They're below $3 nationally. Now, I don't know how you want a new
00:42:35
administration to come in and literally affect every single change on day one. How do you do that?
00:42:40
>> Oh, no. That's just what he said. >> No. What the president said is they
00:42:43
would start working on they would start. >> I'm not saying it's possible. That's
00:42:47
what he said. >> No, he said he'd start working on it on day one. And so he did. And look at the
00:42:52
results. Inflation's now down to 2.7% way below expectations. I don't know how
00:42:57
you want a better report than this. Unemployment is very low. The only reason Remember the uh the economic
00:43:04
target was 3 three and three 3% GDP growth, 3% deficit to GDP and 3% inflation. They're below 3% inflation.
00:43:13
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
00:43:21
looked at the budgets for 2026 for a number of the departments in the cabinet over the last couple days and they do
00:43:28
have big cuts that they're trying to implement across the federal government.
00:43:32
We're going to be interviewing Scott Bessent tomorrow morning that'll come
00:43:36
out shortly after this episode airs. But this is the catchup conversation with Scott on how's the 333 plan going. But
00:43:42
on two of the three metrics, Jay Cal, it does appear like things are good. I'm
00:43:46
not trying to be a spokesperson for the Trump administration, but I'd say if you
00:43:49
look at this just from the raw economic data and the the goals of the administration following that, there
00:43:54
should be a flow through in terms of job growth, the flow through in terms of affordability, in terms of wage growth,
00:44:00
all those other sort of economic indicators that actually affect people on Main Street every day. Uh that's also
00:44:05
TBD in the narrative is still to be written, but those high level economic goals are still, you know, are starting
00:44:10
to kind of fall within the the framework of what they set out to do, which is generally good, right?
00:44:15
>> Yeah. I'm just pointing out the disconnect again. This is the disconnect
00:44:18
with the American people. I mean, >> no, no, I'm looking at year one. >> Just year one. We're here at the end.
00:44:24
>> Time to implement an agenda. >> I totally agree. I'm just telling you
00:44:28
the American people don't believe the Trump administration right now. There's
00:44:31
more work to do. >> That's the data that came out today is looking awesome. By the way, that
00:44:37
Vanguard report that I mentioned that also exposes the AI job loss hoax, it also has a new economic assessment for
00:44:46
next year is projecting 3% growth for next year, which I think is conservative, and an improved labor
00:44:52
market outlook for 2026, and it says the most robust improvement will come in the
00:44:57
second half of the year. So, Vanguard is saying that 2026 is looking very good. And by the way, that's when the fight
00:45:04
for Congress will unfold is next year. So, you know, the thing about polls is it's obviously just a snapshot in time
00:45:10
and it doesn't tell you what things are going to look like 6 months from now or
00:45:13
a year from now. I think they're going to look very good. >> Yeah. I mean, maybe he turns it around.
00:45:18
>> I think it's already been turned around. It just takes time to kick in.
00:45:22
>> Yeah. I mean, the the public's perception it hasn't turned around and
00:45:24
inflation was supposed to go down and it stayed. >> It has. No, it stayed at it's still way
00:45:31
above the 2% >> 1.6% for the last three months. >> No, it has not. It was just 2.7.
00:45:38
>> No, that's the problem I think with the administration and your part of it. Like
00:45:42
you guys cherry pick numbers and it's not matching the numbers on the field.
00:45:46
So when you cherryick cherry picking, this says CPI report. >> The the the number
00:45:52
>> open the cover of the Wall Street Journal. 2.7 Hold on. 2.7% CPI 2.6% 6%
00:45:58
core >> 1.6% for last 3 months. >> Okay. >> What is hard to understand about this?
00:46:04
Obviously, the last three months are going to tell you what the trajectory is. >> Okay. The the fact is
00:46:11
>> you're looking for every excuse you can to basically downplay what is
00:46:16
>> an awesome report and just look at the stock market which is ripping today
00:46:20
because this is way below expectations. You're the only one who's not happy
00:46:23
about this news, Jacob. >> No, no. the the country is not happy about it. I I'm not I don't have a horse
00:46:28
in this race. I'm doing fantastic. I own equities. I'm doing better than I ever
00:46:32
have in my life. I'm talking about how the bottom half of America perceives it.
00:46:36
This is the blind spot of the Trump administration. You've proved my point by not addressing it. Let's go to the
00:46:41
next subject. >> No, I haven't. What? What? >> No, I guess the fact that you guys My
00:46:46
point is the American people >> expected that inflation would go down and prices would go down. Prices have
00:46:53
continued to go up. Fed has a 2% target. It's a little bit unrealistic to say
00:46:57
that what you want to you want wait you want to have you want to have a negative
00:47:00
inflation rate. >> Trump said prices will go down. They have not. That's what the American
00:47:06
people feel. Unemployment has gone up. They expect it to go down. So the this idea that we're in the golden age is not
00:47:14
tracking with the bottom half of Americans. That's just facts, David. It's just facts. You have work to do.
00:47:20
Trump has work to do. You're you're saying that anything less than deflation
00:47:23
anything less than deflation in your view is >> I did not say that you keep telling I
00:47:27
keep telling you what I'm reporting in terms of facts then you tell me I said
00:47:31
something different I didn't say that the American people are very disappointed in the Trump
00:47:35
administration's first year when it comes to inflation and the economy >> I don't understand how the numbers could
00:47:41
be any better we just blew past expectations here 2.7% >> I don't know whose expectations I don't
00:47:48
know whose >> pulse you think you have the finger of but the economists who put together
00:47:54
>> these expectations >> were expect one more time for me just pull up the
00:48:00
chart for me uh so I can just explain that this isn't bias on my part I'm just
00:48:05
putting the fact on the field no it is not this is >> these are numbers that you can look at
00:48:11
and see that Trump's two worst categories right now are the economy and inflation the American people thought he
00:48:18
was >> these are snapshots in time and they're going to snapshot time from February goes down.
00:48:24
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
00:48:30
hard about this is a really partisan point that you're making it. You're
00:48:33
basically saying >> I'm not part economy is like a giant super >> tanker. I'm not part
00:48:38
>> Can I finish my point? >> Sure you can. >> I mean you must know this and I think
00:48:41
you're pretending not to. The US economy is like a giant super tanker. It takes
00:48:45
time to turn around. It takes time to implement your economic agenda. It took the president the first six months of
00:48:49
the administration to implement the big beautiful bill which is his economic program. But it doesn't even go into
00:48:54
effect until January 1st. So the tax cuts have not gone into effect. The inflation reductions have happened.
00:49:02
We've gone from 9% under Biden to now 2.6% core 1.6% the last 3 months. I don't know what more you could want.
00:49:10
Interest rates have come down. They're projected to come down even more because
00:49:13
inflation's coming down. This is again a huge ship that's in the process of
00:49:17
turning around and I predict that by next year the numbers are going to be even better. Let me remind you of what
00:49:22
happened in the early 1980s under Ronald Reagan when Reagan took over. Okay, the
00:49:25
misery index was at like 20%. Reagan implemented his economic agenda, but it took a couple of years to actually
00:49:32
implement it. By 1983, we actually had a very severe recession because Vulkar had
00:49:37
raised interest rates so much to tame inflation. We're lucky we don't have
00:49:41
that issue today. In any event, it took like three years for Reagan to implement
00:49:45
his economic agenda and his popularity was very low by 1983, but by 1984, the program had worked and it was morning in
00:49:53
America again. And he won the biggest landslide election, I think, in American history. So, you got to give it time for
00:50:00
the president's agenda to play out and work. And it certainly looks like after
00:50:06
10 months that is performing extremely well. and we are just beginning to see the impact of it.
00:50:12
>> I think the core issue is Trump overpromised and underd delivering year
00:50:17
one and it's not the golden age for the bottom half of Americans and they don't
00:50:21
feel it's the golden age and I think just t tackling that head on and saying
00:50:25
yeah we have more work to do and I actually think that's what the address last night was about. I suspect
00:50:30
somebody, maybe Susie or the the chief of staff or somebody said, "Hey, we got
00:50:35
to start communicating better about the cost of living and our promises during the election so that we turn this
00:50:43
around." That's actually what I think is happening. But I I don't have a horse in
00:50:46
this race. I'm doing fabulous because I own equities. I'm happy. I'm concerned,
00:50:51
sure, that the bottom half of society needs to do a little bit better. That's
00:50:55
all. All right. But you, you know, listen, I I'm never going to win with you, Saxs, because you're the captain of
00:51:00
the debate club. You will win every debate. You're you're incredible. >> Well, look, I mean, like the president
00:51:04
the president made the right point last night, which is he inherited a giant mess. Again, under the Biden years, we
00:51:09
had a $3,000 reduction in in real wages by American workers. That's already gone
00:51:15
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
00:51:21
situation, you're underwater 2,000 relative to where you were 5 years ago. So obviously you're going to be salty
00:51:26
about that, but that's the situation that that President Trump inherited. I don't know how much more progress you
00:51:32
could make in 10 months, but give it another year and then we'll really see.
00:51:36
>> All right, I am rooting for you guys. I hope you turn it around in year two.
00:51:40
Okay, Freeberg, we got an important story here we have to get to. >> Do you guys want to hear a crazy
00:51:45
personal story for 2 minutes as a palette cleanser? >> Oh, 32. >> Oh, yes. As a palette cleanser,
00:51:50
>> this is an amuse bougge. >> Okay, this is an amuse. A little a little pomplamoose sorbet.
00:51:56
>> This is the craziest story >> in my life right now. >> Pull up the photo, Nick. The first
00:52:01
photo. >> You guys remember my dog, Monty? >> Yeah. This is the virtue signal dog.
00:52:06
>> Not the virtue signal. >> Oh, this is the best dog. This is Monty.
00:52:10
>> This is Monty. Monty. Monty was my dog for 10 years. I got him 10 years ago in
00:52:15
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
00:52:22
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
00:52:28
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
00:52:33
best friend in the world. The greatest thing I've ever come across in my life.
00:52:39
>> So, he died suddenly. It was very brutal, very hard. So, I'm at my house
00:52:43
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
00:52:51
dog. So, my next door neighbor finds this dog at Rocket Dog Rescue. It was pulled out of a kill shelter. The vet
00:52:59
estimates this dog is like a decade old. Today, I live probably 40 miles away from where we got Monty. He was found
00:53:06
wandering the streets of the Mission District in San Francisco. This random dog here was found at some random kill
00:53:11
shelter somewhere in California, pulled out of the kill shelter a few days ago, put into Rocket Dog, and rescued by my
00:53:17
next door neighbor. Brings him over. He's walking him in the street. And I'm
00:53:20
like, "Oh my god, that dog looks just like my old dog, Monty." We ran a DNA
00:53:24
test. This dog is Monty's brother. >> What? >> This dog is Monty's brother. It is the
00:53:32
craziest. There's like a billion dogs on planet Earth. And of the billion dogs,
00:53:36
some random dog from some random litter from some street pup in the Mission District from a decade ago found its way
00:53:42
into a shelter, into another rescue center, into my next door neighbor's arms, and brought back to my house
00:53:47
months after Monty died. How crazy is that? What is his personality like? >> I'm going to hang out with him this
00:53:53
afternoon. I got to go see. >> But how crazy is this? Just It's Monty's
00:53:57
actual brother from the same >> Monty in fairness. >> Monty. >> Well, the angles are off.
00:54:02
>> Step brother. >> Monty's more robust. >> Yeah. Well, Monty was wellfed. This dog
00:54:06
lived in a freaking kill shelter. So, >> Monty was a heck of a dog. Take take 12
00:54:10
pounds off Monty. But >> wait, where's the other tests? >> Don't lie.
00:54:14
>> Where's the uh dog that was being tortured by Revlon? >> That dog. The dogs have gotten robust,
00:54:20
too. >> Yeah. >> Was it Rabon who was torturing your >> She she Daisy has a thousand siblings,
00:54:26
not just one. >> And uh Daisy Daisy I'm fine with. It's Mitchell. It's Mitchell Freeberg. I hate
00:54:32
>> Marshall. Marshall. >> Marshall Freeber. I hate Marshall Freeberg.
00:54:36
>> I got to hang out. >> He ate the pistachios last Christmas. Marshall's like a little
00:54:40
>> Monty's father must have really gotten around San Francisco. >> He had a great run on
00:54:46
>> What are the odds of this? >> Same mother, same father. It's not a
00:54:48
half brother. This is the same Monty's dad was a >> same same litter, same dog, same same
00:54:54
mother, same father, same litter on the streets of San Francisco a decade ago. And they all find their way in different
00:54:59
parts of California and come to Andy's buried in my backyard. And this dog >> samples
00:55:06
love. Was it the summer of the same? >> You would say no way, but you got to see
00:55:11
better shots of it. I'll put more >> photo side by side. >> Yeah,
00:55:14
>> this doesn't make sense. >> I know. It's the craziest ever. And by
00:55:17
the way, like >> yeah, it doesn't look like they're related. I'll be honest with you.
00:55:21
>> Gotta find you a proper photo of >> What's going on? Chop up with Oki and
00:55:25
Joker. How old are these dogs now? >> Oh my god. From your lips, the God's
00:55:28
yours, bro. Aie is 14 and a half. She turns 15 in July. >> She's so precious.
00:55:34
>> And Joker's eight or nine. So Touchwood, they're uh >> Yeah,
00:55:38
>> Golden Retrievers don't really live to 15, but my god, she's been
00:55:42
>> You got a lot of good years. I was just on the I was on the floor last Thursday
00:55:45
snuggling with her and it was so precious. >> Well, you know what we did the I think
00:55:49
the best thing that we did was we got much more disciplined about diet for AI when she turned about 13.
00:55:58
Little bit calorie restricted. It's not nearly as much. She lost a few kilos. It
00:56:03
helped her a lot walking and >> she's a little deaf unfortunately, but
00:56:07
she can see. >> Dogs are the best. My god, >> dogs are the best. Here's my Here's
00:56:11
here's my other photo of the dog that Chamoth hates. Pull it up just so you can see.
00:56:15
>> Marshall, listen. Last last Christmas at Nat's birthday dinner on the 26th, which
00:56:20
is her birthday, Marshall Freeberg jumped on the table, started eating all of the pistachios and the nuts,
00:56:26
>> ruined them, >> ruined all of them, slobbered everywhere. >> All David Freeberg was like, "Oh, look
00:56:32
at that." Allison Freeberg was like, "Marshall Freeberg, they they have no
00:56:36
control over what's going on." >> Here, pull this photo up, Nick. This is
00:56:40
a a medical issue Marshall Friedberg's been dealing with. He wakes up with irreoverable erections, so he can't
00:56:45
walk. >> What? >> Pull this up. >> Irreoverable. >> So, Nick, you got to blur this out. When
00:56:53
you >> Oh, dude's packing. >> So, this little guy, he wait erection.
00:57:00
>> He has these erections and well, the doctors say like, "You just got to wait
00:57:03
and if it ends up staying for too long, there's going to be a surgery." But like
00:57:07
right now, he's okay. But he can't move when he gets them and he's stuck and
00:57:10
he'll just stand there unable to move for like 20 minutes like with his little
00:57:13
>> thing happened. I gave Chimat some of my roast sparks and he had a similar thing
00:57:18
happened. He was frozen. >> There's there's a Brian Johnson joke in
00:57:21
here. But >> that is a problem. >> Yeah. >> How's Moose doing? Jake's my special
00:57:26
guy. >> Here he is. Special. >> Oh, >> is that your dog? >> This is the moose. The moose is trying
00:57:34
to keep Oh, buddy. Oh, buddy. Fish is my buddy. Oh, good. What are you doing? What are you chewing on?
00:57:41
>> What's he doing? >> I think you got a pop. Get that out of your mouth. Come on. Get that out of
00:57:45
your mouth. He is such a little love buddy. Sh love. >> It's like a gremlin.
00:57:54
>> He loves it. >> It's great. It's great to see you so in control.
00:58:00
>> Jason, you're such a natural dog guy, Jason. That's buddy. >> A disciplinarian. This dog loves food.
00:58:09
>> You're really and he loves to wrestle. >> You're like a modern believable
00:58:14
at the ranch. >> Does he headbutt you? >> The dog whisper >> Moose. Take it easy, buddy. I know. He
00:58:21
loves to wrestle this dog. >> He's heavy, right? He's >> Well, we he added about four or five
00:58:26
pounds cuz he wasn't eating all that much when we got him. And then we realized he needs a little bit of extra
00:58:31
food. We gave him a little more food and he became a little less um grumpy >> and then he just
00:58:37
>> we take him for like maybe three one mile walks a day on the ranch. >> Totally fine. If he misses a walk,
00:58:44
doggy's got way too much energy. So, he's not he's a ranch dog, not a city
00:58:48
dog. This dog >> I know. I know. I told you. >> Yeah, he needs to run. When he doesn't
00:58:52
run, you got a problem. All right, let's keep going through the docket here. Uh
00:58:56
that's dog corner. That's K9 corner. What do you guys think? That's a good
00:58:59
corner. It's a good cat corner. It's the best corner. >> But how crazy is that? One like one in a
00:59:03
billion's got to be that this dog lands up next to me. It's just the craziest
00:59:06
thing. Anyway, >> yeah. And uh yeah, there's no cat corner here. Cats are horrible.
00:59:10
>> Shout out to our friends at Whimo for eliminating the cat problem in San
00:59:14
Francisco. >> I mean, that's just that was the greatest update to their software ever.
00:59:19
If they can eliminate more cats, >> what's that paradox that the AI has
00:59:25
where it's like, do I hit the trolley? It's like the cat problem. Go for the
00:59:29
problem. Go for the cat. It's just go for the cat. >> Absolutely. You could get somebody there
00:59:32
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
00:59:40
horrible. Shout out to our cat ladies listening to the pod. There's I wonder
00:59:44
how many cat ladies listen to this pod. I think there are a few. >> Oh, there are a few.
00:59:48
>> Are there a few? Yeah, they hear from they're on blue sky talking about Oh,
00:59:54
god. I had a joke. I'm not going to do it. All right. According to a Reuters
00:59:58
report, Freeberg, China has built a prototype of ASML's EUV machine. Hey, if
01:00:06
this is true, this report, it's uh it could have a profound impact on the AI
01:00:11
race that we talked about. For those of you who don't know, ASML is the Dutch
01:00:15
company worth $400 billion, 22nd largest market cap in the world, and uh they are the only company that
01:00:22
makes EUV machines, also called lithography. That stands for uh extreme ultraviolet. That's how you make H100s.
01:00:31
Here's a photo of one of these giant machines. They cost $250 million to make, and they take 6 months to make,
01:00:38
filled with all kinds of important parts. Carl Zeiss lenses, etc. Since 2018, these machines have been limited for
01:00:47
sale by the Dutch. Why? Why can't China buy these machines? Well, in 2018, Trump's Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo,
01:00:55
put pressure on the Dutch to impose export controls on China. And uh later that same year, they did. So,
01:01:03
according to Reuters in this news story, Freeberg, China used former ASML engineers
01:01:10
allegedly to reverse engineer the machines. Reuters has pointed out that the machine in China has not yet
01:01:18
produced any working chips. It's a prototype. The CCP is targeting 2028 uh for working chips. Some sources say
01:01:26
maybe 2030 is more likely. You've been talking about China lithography on the
01:01:30
show. We can play the Chariots of Fire music that Freeberg insists we play when he does his victory lap. Chimoth, here's
01:01:36
his victory lap. Episode 224. Last year, China announced and began a 37 billion investment in developing their own
01:01:46
3nanometer uh chimp technology. China made a claim that this investment they had made was starting to pay off and
01:01:53
they had developed their own EUV system and their big semiconductor companies called the semiconductor manufacturing
01:02:00
international corporation or SMIC in China. They launched a seven nanometer chip with Huawei in their Mate 60 Pro,
01:02:08
which is sort of like their iPhone competitor in China. And so they're proclaiming that they've already got
01:02:13
this EUV technology. From what I understand, and Sax would know better than I, it sounds like there was a lot
01:02:18
of reverse engineering and workound of existing technology in order to deliver that system.
01:02:24
>> Who do you think has the best chance of challenging Nvidia? My early prediction
01:02:29
for 2026 is Huawei where I think that there's lithography technology that exists in China that is not publicly
01:02:37
discussed that is going to be deployed in Huawei and all these fabs that they're building in mainland China.
01:02:42
>> So announcements 2026 impact 27 probably fair. >> Do you have first first on allin
01:02:48
Freeberg? Congratulations on your weekly >> victory lap here. I don't I don't I
01:02:54
honestly don't think that the Reuter story is necessarily news cuz I think it's a little bit of a narrow scope in
01:02:58
trying to describe what happened which is that they quote stole ASML technology because scientists are working on it.
01:03:03
That's not really the full scope of what's been going on in China for a number of years and it really
01:03:09
understates the technological progress that China's independently made in using
01:03:13
other systems to try and achieve lithography parody. So if you go back a number of years, the current kind of
01:03:20
investment vehicle is actually Chinese banks put capital into a fund that's roughly $48 billion uh US dollars which
01:03:29
is actually what's called the national integrated circuit industry investment
01:03:33
fund phase 3. So there was phase 1 which started in 2014 which focused on manufacturing. So developing fabs with
01:03:41
groups like SMIC. Phase two was stood up in 2019 which focused primarily on design and materials. And then this
01:03:49
phase three fund was established in 2024 explicitly to pivot to what they call choke points or bottlenecks in the
01:03:57
manufacturing process. And state media has confirmed the existence of this phase 3 fund and the intentionality of
01:04:04
the phase 3 fund to try and replicate lithography technology. Couple of months ago, if you pull up the link, Nick,
01:04:10
here's a publication on this paper. So this is the leading research group out
01:04:14
of China that's been backing into lithography technology using AIdriven systems. They published this paper which
01:04:22
was a very good summary of where they are in July. Was this in nature? No, it's in light
01:04:28
science and applications and this paper is called advancements and challenges in
01:04:33
inverse lithography technology a review of artificial intelligence-based approaches. If you read into the paper
01:04:40
and then you read the other publications from this particular research team at Singua University, they have made a
01:04:46
number of breakthroughs in using AI to try and reestablish alternative systems and the traditional Zeiss optics and
01:04:54
other control systems that are used in the ASML platform. And the way that they've done it, I I won't spend too
01:04:59
much time on it, but there's a bunch of neural networks that they've used,
01:05:03
trained, and have made discoveries from, including doing things like working with
01:05:07
suboptimal optics, meaning you can have optics that have a degree of diffusion. And then how do you actually recreate
01:05:13
3nmter printing techniques or 3nm masks by having shadowy effects accounted for in the AI? So, you almost like assume
01:05:21
that the shadowy effects are going to come out and you print differently than you otherwise would. you don't need the
01:05:26
degree of precision that you need and you don't necessarily need to go get the
01:05:28
Zeiss optics. There was another paper that was published early this year by another Chinese research team that
01:05:34
actually demonstrated how they did use AI to discover a novel method for doing optics. So there is a very broad and
01:05:41
wellunded effort that's been underway for over a decade. But just in the last
01:05:45
couple of years with artificial intelligence based approaches, they've made a series of breakthroughs. It is
01:05:50
very likely the case that Huawei already has a lithography system that they'll be
01:05:55
putting into production and this is why I kind of talked about it when we were in Vegas and pointed it out earlier this
01:06:00
year. >> But I again I think Reuters just sort of maybe caught on to some narrow segment,
01:06:04
but this is a bigger story and a bigger set of progress that's been made over
01:06:08
quite some time. ramification stacks here and and what you're thinking. Obviously, you've talked a bunch about,
01:06:16
hey, let's sell our stack in there and they're clearly working on their own
01:06:19
stack. What what's uh what's the ramification of this if it's true? >> Well, I've never supported selling EUV
01:06:25
lithography to China. It is probably, >> you know, selling the stack of H1,
01:06:30
whatever the previous Nvidia stack was. Yeah, EUV lithography. These machines that are made by ASML is probably our
01:06:36
single biggest advantage in the AI race because they're the only machines that
01:06:41
are capable of creating say 2 to 3 nanometer chips, semiconductors, and it's sort of the perfect export control
01:06:48
because there's only one company that makes these machines like you showed. They're gigantic. They're expensive. So
01:06:54
if you think about like trying to put an export control on a commodity, there'd
01:06:58
be a lot of ways to circumvent it because there's a lot of sources for a commodity. But in this case, there's
01:07:03
literally only one company that makes these machines. So it's been a tremendous advantage, I'd say, for the
01:07:08
West that we have EUV lithography. I'm not surprised that China is trying to
01:07:14
reverse engineer it. It's kind of the obvious thing to do. No advantages forever. It does seem likely that at
01:07:21
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
01:07:29
that sense. I mean I'm sure that China is trying really really hard to reverse
01:07:34
engineer this. In the meantime, however, they've also made substantial progress
01:07:38
with DUV lithography. So the previous generation of lithography before EUV was DUV. E is extreme. D is deep. In any
01:07:48
event, DUV was supposed to sort of top out at say 14 nanometer chips and China was able to push the technology to get
01:07:56
to 7 nanometer and now to five. So they've able to get a lot further using DUV lithography than anyone thought
01:08:03
possible and that is why the Huawei chips, the Ascent chips are they're not as good as our chips, but they're
01:08:09
serviceable and they've been able to use their prowess in networking to string
01:08:14
more of them together. You have the cloud matrix 384 technology where Huawei will string together 384 of their Huawei
01:08:22
Ascent chips into a rack and that will perform comparable to an Nvidia rack but using a lot more power. So the bottom
01:08:32
line is China's been able to create a lot of these workarounds to our restrictions. But if they figured out
01:08:38
how to reverse EUV that would be I'd say a blow because it is a real advantage
01:08:43
for us. But I'm not convinced that this Reuter story is the the full picture. I
01:08:48
think it's just a data point. >> Jim, any thoughts here? >> If you want a very short summary of how
01:08:53
the last generation of chips work, the best way to think about this is that the most profitable and valuable chips to
01:09:00
date have taken a very compute ccentric approach. That's why we've needed these
01:09:05
ultra advanced process nodes. But the reality is that in a world of infinite inference, let's say the next generation
01:09:14
of silicon will not take the same compute heavy approach and will probably rely on a much more memorycentric
01:09:20
architecture that uses a lot of SRAM. The value of that is that you can produce these things as Sax said at 14
01:09:26
nanometer at 75 all of these process nodes that are much less advanced that I actually think is the future. So, in a
01:09:34
weird way, if they steal this, which I think we should assume they've already stole it
01:09:41
quite honestly and they figured it out, the question is how bad is it? That's
01:09:45
the really important question. And the thing about a more memory ccentric approach for AI inference or these next
01:09:52
generation forms of silicon, it demands a lot more of compilers. It demands a lot more of the software. I still think
01:09:59
that's where we are light years ahead. So, I don't think it's the end of the
01:10:02
world and we're still in a very good place, but it is bad. Friberg, weren't we
01:10:08
supposed to uh start onshoring with the chips act and maybe get trending towards
01:10:15
having this production ability in America? And obviously that's been really hard to do.
01:10:22
And China and their relationship with Taiwan seems to be and and the possibility that they actually take over
01:10:28
Taiwan in a military fashion has been this existential concern or even short-term concern.
01:10:35
>> Maybe it's a better way to say it. The I think the biggest security implication
01:10:38
to consider at this moment is that both the US and mainland China are onshoring manufacturing and that makes Taiwan less
01:10:46
of a strategic point of interest for the United States and for United States industry. Maybe one of the ways to think
01:10:51
about the positive aspect of what is going on which is maybe call it the bulcanization of generally manufacturing
01:10:57
but specifically semiconductor manufacturing in this case is reduced security concerns. So there's no longer
01:11:04
this flash point perhaps in Taiwan. If China did invade Taiwan and the US had fab manufacturing, we're less likely to
01:11:10
want to defend Taiwan. And frankly, if China has fabs on mainland, do they really need to invade Taiwan?
01:11:16
>> What's the economic interest in doing so? >> Yeah, that's kind of where I was going
01:11:19
with it. But if they also wanted to jumpstart Freedberg, they could just go to Taiwan and take the machines. Like,
01:11:25
is that actually the plan? >> Like I I don't know what the CCP's plan
01:11:29
is. I think that's a pretty um simple statement to make. I think just going to
01:11:33
Taiwan is probably a lot more complicated than >> of course it is. My point is if this if
01:11:38
this was super existential to get those chips for China and they go to Taiwan and they then they've reverse engineered
01:11:44
the machine by default. >> We we need to recognize we keep using the term reverse engineering as if ASML
01:11:49
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
01:11:55
alternative production manufacturing methods and systems that are being developed in China that not only maybe
01:12:01
provide parody to ASML, but get ahead of ASML. And I think this is really important to understand. China is not
01:12:06
just in a catch-up race. They're in a primacy race and they are trying to develop privacy in lithography
01:12:12
technology which will give them privacy in manufacturing which will give them primacy in AI which will give them
01:12:17
economic leverage over the planet and that is very critical for us to understand. This is not about stealing
01:12:22
data from ASML. Like, no one gives a [ __ ] If you're sitting in China, you're
01:12:25
thinking about I've got the world's best scientists or some of the world's best
01:12:28
scientists and I'm giving them the resources and I'm giving them the mandate to go solve this problem. The
01:12:33
government, as I mentioned last year, put $40 billion against this problem and said, "Go figure it out." And these guys
01:12:39
at Singa are publishing some groundbreaking research on how to do it. >> But it's easier to catch up or to copy
01:12:47
than to innovate. So if you're China, the first thing you'd want to do is just copy EUV and
01:12:52
get that technology for yourself. >> Well, let me ask you this. What would
01:12:56
you do? So you're the AIAR. You're sitting in the United States and China's
01:12:59
got this lithography technology. Is your goal to steal their technology or is your goal to get your best scientists
01:13:03
and say, "Let's get ahead of their technology." >> If I'm China,
01:13:06
>> neither are the United States. >> It's to solve the problem. What is the
01:13:10
actual economic commercial problem we're solving? >> Right. So if you can figure out a way to
01:13:14
do manufacturing better, cheaper, faster than the way the that China does it, you
01:13:18
would obviously take that path. You're not trying to get to par with China, if
01:13:21
you view yourself to be supreme to China, >> China. But you have to understand even
01:13:24
with these EUV machines and the same is true in the other side >> at two or even sub 2 nanometer scale,
01:13:30
you have these incredible laws of physics that you are pushing to the boundaries of which cause these chips to
01:13:35
have pretty low yield. you have a lot of systems that actually aren't that efficient and highly utilized as a
01:13:42
result. So these systems are brittle. The second thing is that when you have these compute- ccentric architectures,
01:13:47
you end up making design decisions like HBM, they'll have to go and steal all
01:13:52
the HBM which is the high bandwidth memory business that SKHix and Samsung have. But again, that's where Nvidia and
01:13:58
then Google have an effective monopoly. >> Let me ask you a question, S. I mean,
01:14:02
what's your strategic response if China next year goes into manufacturing? with
01:14:06
a sub 2 nanometer system that's got higher yields, is faster, is cheaper than anything that we're seeing anywhere
01:14:12
else in the world. >> Well, I don't think that's going to happen. Let's talk about that if it actually
01:14:17
happens. I don't think it's going to. But what would I be focused on right
01:14:21
now? I would say we want to get more of the leading edge manufacturing in the United States. TSMC has already opened a
01:14:29
big fab in Arizona and they're planning on increasing the size of that and that's really important and we should
01:14:37
get all these restrictions out of the way. They're facing all sorts of permitting restrictions. I mean all the
01:14:43
stuff that Bernie is talking about where he wants to slow down. I mean he's talking about data centers but not
01:14:49
>> manufacturing but the concepts are the same. >> Yeah. Roana, Elizabeth Warren, you've
01:14:53
got >> exactly wrong. I mean, >> anti-che progress people saying, "Let's
01:14:57
stop all this stuff." Meanwhile, China is not just racing to catch up, but they're likely going to get ahead of the
01:15:02
United States. And if we're caught flatfooted because we've got a moratorium on development, a moratorium
01:15:07
on production, it's going to be extraordinarily damaging, >> right? Well, look, this is where I agree
01:15:13
with you is that if this Reuters report is accurate, it does speed up the timeline on China closing the chip gap
01:15:20
from >> decades to a few years. You can go read the Singua papers. You'll see that these
01:15:25
guys are so advanced. >> If they care about being ahead, why are they publishing that paper?
01:15:29
>> So, by the way, this is a really important point and I've picked up on
01:15:32
this from a number of different disciplines in scientific research. So, what's been going on is scientists in
01:15:39
China, they're very smart people. There's very great scientists there. And
01:15:43
like all scientists, they don't think necessarily in terms of nationalism first. They think in terms of science.
01:15:49
They want to publish their research. They want to be known. They want to be the discoverers of these new frontiers
01:15:56
and so they publish. And what we've seen in several instances is that the scientific research groups will publish
01:16:02
and they'll publish slightly ahead. And once they get ahead of the market or
01:16:06
they get ahead of the world, suddenly they stop publishing. And it's almost like the CCP comes in and it's like,
01:16:12
okay, you guys are now, you know, going too far. We don't want to tip our hat
01:16:16
too far. And the stuff starts to recede. And I think there was this one paper on
01:16:20
optics that is designed to replace the Zeiss monopoly in optics that suddenly disappeared and that research team
01:16:26
stopped publishing. I got to find this paper. This came out last year. >> There are a number of these disciplines
01:16:31
where there's publications that go to a certain extent and then they stop publishing. So I think that there's a
01:16:35
little bit of a >> because of the funding cycle in China. You have every single local government
01:16:40
that's given capital to invest in businesses and so they compete and compete until it gets to the state level
01:16:46
and you have one or two national champions. But if this was so important, Freeberg, would there also be an
01:16:51
argument to publish things that would send um that would be misinformation or send people
01:16:59
down a wrong direction? >> No, because you have to again the funding cycle is you get as a policy
01:17:06
person in Shanghai, you get promoted because you make a good bet. >> Yeah. No, but you so by the time it
01:17:13
becomes a one national to Freeberg's point, when's the last time you saw BYD
01:17:16
or CL publish anything meaningful, >> but when they were not the national champion, they were probably publishing
01:17:24
very aggressively. But at that time, there was 50 different companies competing to be the national
01:17:30
champion. So I suspect what's happening here is there's 50 different semi-
01:17:34
startups all over China. Everybody's trying to support their own local version and eventually when there's one
01:17:40
they disappear. >> Okay. Interesting. >> I mean, one of the things we see is
01:17:45
China does give money to these research institutions on frontier science and then there's an industrialization. It's
01:17:52
something the US isn't quite as good at. And I think it's again, we've talked
01:17:55
about the co-opting of our universities as research institutions over the last couple of decades. They've become these
01:18:01
sort of employment centers, if you will, and they've become these sort of weird
01:18:05
social engineering systems. They've kind of gotten away from some of the core
01:18:09
research or that that's been kind kind of co-opted. In China, there are these
01:18:13
sort of dedicated research centers and then there are universities where there's very clear independent research
01:18:18
that goes on on university campuses. They typically get quite a bit of funding. And the way this worked, if you
01:18:24
look into the details of this China National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, and there were three
01:18:29
funds, one, two, and three, the funds get bigger and bigger as the research teams make progress. Uh, it's a very
01:18:34
smart way of doing things from a central planning perspective. And then in in phase three, they're now targeting these
01:18:40
specific unlocks that then will enable industrialization. So they're funding
01:18:44
some of this core research. The core research has these breakthroughs and then it gets industrialized. It's during
01:18:48
that research phase where we see a lot of publications happening and this is happening in life sciences as well and
01:18:53
in physics and in material science and as soon as they start to get a little bit ahead of the curve then it gets
01:18:58
industrialized and the and the publications kind of stop. So I don't know if it's necessarily the CCP
01:19:03
stepping in and saying hey stop publishing you're going to let the world know too much of what we're having
01:19:07
versus okay the handoff is now happening and industrialization begins. Yeah, look, I would just say that to me the
01:19:13
takeaway here is that the timeline on China closing the gap with us is being sped up. Whether it's the fact that
01:19:21
they're copying what we're doing, whether EUV is being reverse engineered
01:19:24
or maybe their scientists are figuring out a way to leaprog, we are in a pretty close race with China. And that's why I
01:19:31
think it's really important that we don't listen to Bernie and others who
01:19:35
just want to stop the progress because the progress is not going to stop. This is going to happen in China and that
01:19:41
will be a big problem for the United States. >> All right, speaking of socialism/communism,
01:19:46
uh you guys thinking about coming to Austin, my neck of the woods. >> I've been uh pulling up these photos in
01:19:52
Austin of these homes. >> You know I'm doing it right. >> Welcome to Texas, boys.
01:19:56
>> Like on the lake. >> Sachs already bought a house. Sachs already bought a house.
01:20:00
>> He hooked me up with the uh agent. >> What does she got you looking at?
01:20:04
>> I'm not sure yet. We're just >> You guys are bidding against each other,
01:20:08
[ __ ] >> You can have my sloppy seconds. >> You have the high ground, so you can
01:20:11
negotiate hard. >> Uh there is so much inventory, but only like 20% of the inventory is on the MLS.
01:20:19
80% here because it's a no reporting state is off market. So, it's completely
01:20:24
different than >> any other market. Certainly California. >> I want to be on the lake. Like, if I'm
01:20:29
going to do this on the water, >> Oh, really? I don't want the lake. I
01:20:33
mean, if you're here, here's the challenge with the lake. People are going to come up to your house and take
01:20:39
pictures and hang out like 2 feet off your house and starting at 7 a.m. >> Texas house in San Francisco.
01:20:45
>> Everybody's zipping around the lake in motorboats starting at 7 a.m. It's
01:20:49
beautiful. >> I love your thing. It's great, but just >> understand it's going to get loud at 7
01:20:55
a.m. >> There's nothing a good motorboating doesn't >> Who doesn't love a good motorboat?
01:21:02
Jal, I heard you're like an hour away. You're not even in Austin. >> I I'm in the Hill Country on my ranch,
01:21:08
but we're getting a place closer to the city, actually. So, we're 30 minutes
01:21:11
outside the city. >> 30 minutes? My god. >> I heard you're >> I heard you're in the sticks.
01:21:18
>> No, not that far. Not that far. >> No, he's in the suburbs of the suburbs.
01:21:21
>> No, if you want to have like, you know, dozens of acres, you can't do that in
01:21:25
the city. >> When I was growing up in Memphis, they called that Bumble Egypt.
01:21:30
BF >> Bumble. >> I mean, if you want a ranch and you want like dozens of acres, you can't do that
01:21:37
in You can get an acre to three acres inside of the city. >> I found an acre in Terry Town.
01:21:43
>> An acre is doable. Two acres is possible. >> You know what's so sad? Even if this
01:21:48
bill doesn't get on the books, which I think >> everyone's leaving,
01:21:51
>> there's a decent chance it ripped the band-aid off, the revenues of California
01:21:55
are going to plummet. plummet. >> Man, it is um yeah, I mean we saw the writing on the wall. Socialism is coming
01:22:05
and you know this one of the great things about having a United States of America that different states can
01:22:12
optimize for different things. >> The thing here >> that one bill this proposed billionaire
01:22:16
tax has singlehandedly changed the trajectory of the California economy by a hundred to$200 billion dollars over
01:22:24
the next 5 to 10 years. It's an enormous cell phone. People were here willing to
01:22:29
pay the money and now >> Yeah, people were willing to put up with a lot in this state.
01:22:35
>> As soon as you tell people, "Hey, we're we're doing property seizures,
01:22:38
>> property seizures or their threat of property seizures or the fact that
01:22:42
people didn't come out against property seizures is enough for everyone to be
01:22:45
like, "See you see you later." The fact that all the politicians didn't in
01:22:50
uniform stand up and say, "This is ridiculous. We're never going to let
01:22:52
this happen." They let this happen by not defending the property rights that
01:22:57
are endowed in this country. They lost everything. >> They had to defend it.
01:23:02
>> What do you think happens to the state budget over the next four or five years
01:23:06
as a result of this? >> You're right. It's trash. And by the way, and that that's what drives the
01:23:09
socialist spiral because then they try and do more property seizures and they try and get the money back.
01:23:14
>> Who are they going to tax? Everybody's going to be gone now. >> And here's the other crazy statistic
01:23:17
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
01:23:22
the new year. But the California pension fund system is underfunded by roughly a
01:23:27
trillion dollars. So these folks in the California pension fund system are sitting around waiting for money to come
01:23:33
to them every year for the next 30, 40, 50 years and the money isn't there. They're guaranteed that money from this
01:23:39
pension fund system and it's not there. What are they going to do? It's a
01:23:43
trillion dollars short. That's a state obligation. Why would anybody hear something like that and think giving
01:23:49
politicians more money is a good idea? These people are so fiscally irresponsible. They're fiscally
01:23:56
illiterate. There is that it's pretty clear to me that in New York and California it'll be 60 plus% taxes.
01:24:08
And you know, if you were living in a perfect society that appreciated it and you had this incredible safety, you had
01:24:17
extraordinary schools and the roads and the public transit, >> everything worked.
01:24:22
>> Yeah. Like Japan, >> you'd pay 60%, you would be ecstatic. >> Yeah. You'd be like, "Okay, I mean, it's
01:24:28
a lot, but hey, this is a pretty great place to live." If you're paying that
01:24:32
and people are breaking into your home and there's nine overdoses a day, you're
01:24:38
like, "Wait a second." And then on top of that, by the way, >> and they're seizing your private
01:24:42
property now. >> Seizing your property. >> They're seizing your property. And by
01:24:45
the way, they don't care about you when it when you look at the laws. I was just
01:24:49
talking to some law enforcement people. >> City's using your money to give homeless
01:24:53
people vodka. It's just >> Well, I mean, if it was tequila, I mean, I have a good tequila brand we could
01:24:59
give to the homeless. Maybe we can make a deal. >> Yeah. >> Shout out to all at Gaya coming to you.
01:25:04
Uh to delivery is happening right now. Um, in all seriousness, I was talking to some security folks um and was talking
01:25:14
to my security guy in Cal who's a in California and um in California, not only do they not have the castle
01:25:22
doctrine, they've replaced the castle doctrine where you can like defend your
01:25:25
home if somebody comes into it with your gun uh and protect your family and your
01:25:30
property. Now you have to have this um duty to flee. So you have to be able to run out
01:25:39
of your home with your family as opposed to defend your family. So they literally
01:25:44
are telling the criminals, "Hey, listen. If you break into somebody's home in
01:25:47
California, don't worry about getting shot. You they're going to have to run
01:25:51
out or else they're in the wrong." Like this is deranged. The the inmates have
01:25:56
literally taken over the asylum. They they have taken over the asylum. I I realized this two years ago and I pulled
01:26:02
the rip cord. Some Elon realized it six years ago when he tried to build a factory. He pulled the rip cord. You
01:26:08
guys are realizing it now. Everybody's realizing this. New York uh the hedge
01:26:12
fund guys in New York and in Jersey and Connecticut. They realized it. What? >> Only Hollywood guys. I know a bunch of
01:26:18
Hollywood guys leaving. >> Yeah. I literally this producer, one of the major producers who has produced
01:26:24
billions of dollars worth of films came here last year. I met him at a football game. He said, "Tell me everything." I
01:26:29
told him everything. He moved here. He moved here. He's going to start making
01:26:32
movies here. And he is one of the top top I won't say who he is, but you know
01:26:37
his films because his partner who is an incredibly high-profile comedian, like amongst the highest profile in history,
01:26:44
where they make films together, he moved here. Why? He he doesn't want to live in
01:26:49
LA and risk his family's life to an home invasion and and the house burning down
01:26:53
because they don't fill water in the reservoir. I mean, guys, >> hopefully not everyone realizes it cuz I
01:26:59
need to sell my house to someone. >> Good luck. You'll be okay. You'll be
01:27:04
okay. There's a Chinese billionaire. >> Actually, you know, you know who you'll
01:27:07
be able to sell your house. >> There's no billionaires left in California.
01:27:10
>> It's whoever uh the politicians are that are able to aggregate power and money in
01:27:15
the socialist. >> Gavin will buy your house and turn it into a home. >> Gavin's gone. You guys are going to look
01:27:21
You guys are going to look back on Gavin and realize he was the most uh >> upstanding moderate governor that
01:27:28
California had in modern era and suddenly we're going to be like what the >> and I think that's a great place to stop
01:27:33
it, boys. >> We will be doing a couple of episodes between now and the end of the year and
01:27:39
uh yeah, no weeks off. Hopefully we get to see each other over the holidays. I'll see you Saxs uh and you as well
01:27:46
Jimath and Freedberg shortly. Oh, by the way, the president just signed an executive order reclassifying marijuana
01:27:52
from schedule one to schedule three. >> Schedule one to schedule three. Okay. Uh
01:27:59
that's something Obama wanted to do in the second term and never did. So, >> I think it's a good thing. I mean,
01:28:04
schedule one is like heroin. You know, it just never made sense to treat it the same as heroin. You know, I know a lot
01:28:09
of people aren't thrilled about marijuana. It's not great when people are in the
01:28:12
>> I don't like marijuana, but I I agree with this. >> It's not heroin.
01:28:17
I mean it would be on I think most people intellectually would put it on the same level as alcohol, right?
01:28:23
>> I just want it studied so that we can have toxicity labels. That's the big
01:28:26
thing that I want because like if these kids >> Yeah. >> That's the most important thing is put a
01:28:32
tox label on these things so you know what you're taking. >> It's the the strength of these things
01:28:37
over the last 50 years has changed dramatically. And there are Yeah. There there there are these um shards they
01:28:46
create of this like incredibly intense THC that will make you like go psychotic. Like it's really dangerous.
01:28:52
So the smoking a joint from our youth is very different than smoking these like resins and stuff that they've created
01:28:59
apparently that are like a 100 times the potency 200 times potency and they can put you in a psychotic state. Really
01:29:05
dangerous folks. >> Oh that's that's where like the FDA should regulate it. More like alcohol or
01:29:09
something. 100%. Much better process, especially since kids are getting messed up. Yeah.
01:29:14
>> All right, everybody. Another amazing episode of your favorite podcast in the
01:29:18
world, the all in pockets. Love you. >> Happy holidays, everybody. Merry Christmas.
01:29:22
>> Happy Hanukkah. Merry Christmas. >> Happy Hanukkah. Christmas, whatever
01:29:26
you're into. >> Let your winners ride. Rainman David >> and it said we open sourced it to the
01:29:37
fans and they've just gone crazy with it. >> Queen of besties are my dog taking a notice driveway.
01:29:56
Oh man, my habitasher will meet up. >> We should all just get a room and just
01:30:00
have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just It's like this like sexual tension
01:30:04
that we just need to release somehow. >> Your feet. Waiting to get Mercury's are going all
01:30:23
in.

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Episode Highlights

  • Bernie Sanders on AI Moratorium
    Bernie Sanders proposes a moratorium on new AI data centers, citing concerns over job loss and social interaction.
    “His pitch is that we need to slow down so that democracy can catch up.”
    @ 02m 36s
    December 19, 2025
  • AI's Impact on Jobs
    A new study shows that AI exposure correlates with higher job and wage growth, challenging common fears.
    “As you make workers more productive, the value of their labor increases, not decreases.”
    @ 16m 30s
    December 19, 2025
  • AI's Water Use Claims Debunked
    Claims about AI's water usage are misleading; they don't consume as much as often claimed.
    “These AI data do not use a lot of water.”
    @ 19m 00s
    December 19, 2025
  • Job Market Stability Amid AI
    Despite fears, the job market has shown resilience with no significant disruption from AI.
    “There’s been no discernable disruption to the labor market.”
    @ 30m 07s
    December 19, 2025
  • Government Job Cuts Explained
    Government jobs decreased significantly, leading to a spike in unemployment figures.
    “Those are government jobs that are being cut.”
    @ 36m 11s
    December 19, 2025
  • Public Perception vs. Reality
    Despite positive economic data, public sentiment remains skeptical about the administration's performance.
    “The American people don’t believe you.”
    @ 41m 08s
    December 19, 2025
  • A Heartfelt Tribute
    Reflecting on the loss of a beloved dog and the impact it had on life.
    “He was my best friend in the world.”
    @ 52m 33s
    December 19, 2025
  • The Crazy Coincidence
    Discovering a dog that resembles Monty leads to a shocking family connection.
    “How crazy is that?”
    @ 53m 47s
    December 19, 2025
  • China's Race for Technological Primacy
    China is not merely trying to catch up; they are aiming for technological supremacy.
    “China is not just in a catch-up race. They’re in a primacy race.”
    @ 01h 12m 06s
    December 19, 2025
  • The Accelerating Chip Gap
    The timeline for China to close the technological gap with the US is rapidly decreasing.
    “The timeline on China closing the gap with us is being sped up.”
    @ 01h 19m 13s
    December 19, 2025
  • California's Economic Downfall
    California's proposed billionaire tax could drastically change its economic trajectory.
    “That one bill has singlehandedly changed the trajectory of the California economy.”
    @ 01h 22m 16s
    December 19, 2025
  • California's Home Invasion Crisis
    A discussion on the alarming state of home invasions in California and the implications for families.
    “They literally are telling the criminals, 'Hey, listen.'”
    @ 01h 25m 41s
    December 19, 2025

Episode Quotes

  • AI is the new lightning rod for fear and divisiveness.
    Bernie Sanders: Stop All AI, China's EUV Breakthrough, Inflation Down, Golden Age in 2026?
  • We have to flip the narrative around.
    Bernie Sanders: Stop All AI, China's EUV Breakthrough, Inflation Down, Golden Age in 2026?
  • I think we’re on the cusp of a golden age here.
    Bernie Sanders: Stop All AI, China's EUV Breakthrough, Inflation Down, Golden Age in 2026?
  • He was my best friend in the world.
    Bernie Sanders: Stop All AI, China's EUV Breakthrough, Inflation Down, Golden Age in 2026?
  • China is not just in a catch-up race. They’re in a primacy race.
    Bernie Sanders: Stop All AI, China's EUV Breakthrough, Inflation Down, Golden Age in 2026?
  • They’re seizing your property.
    Bernie Sanders: Stop All AI, China's EUV Breakthrough, Inflation Down, Golden Age in 2026?

Key Moments

  • Bernie's Proposal02:36
  • AI Debate04:00
  • Doomer Funding18:29
  • Government Job Cuts36:11
  • Inflation Concerns46:51
  • Personal Story51:45
  • DNA Test Revelation53:24
  • China's Strategic Moves1:10:32

Tension Over Time

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