00:00:00
in confidence. Sax told me he's a little broken up about the empty nest kind of thing. And by empty nest, I mean his
00:00:06
bulldog Moose is coming to live on the ranch. Has the moose landed? The moose is landing next week. We're
00:00:12
giving him a 3month trial. If he's on his best behavior, he stays. He's going to be great. He's so well trained.
00:00:17
What's going on? Moose is our our bulldog. Yeah. And Moose is loose.
00:00:23
He needs the space. He needs a ranch. He's a very athletic bulldog. This dog is not a couch potato. He's like very
00:00:30
active and he just needs the space to run around. Why don't you just buy a ranch and give him his own ranch?
00:00:36
Why buy a ranch when a bestie has one already? Yeah. A bestie who loves bulldogs. But no, he's a he's a spectacular specimen
00:00:43
of a bulldog. I mean, this is stunning bulldog. Yeah, he's a beautiful dog. Great bulldog. He's This is a trial adoption, a calacanis
00:00:51
adoption cycle. Oh my god, this is sad. You know these bulldogs resist training like Jason
00:00:57
you know like you know they are they are the most stoic loyal Jason
00:01:02
but stubborn individuals they will overweight stoic stubborn
00:01:08
overweight this is a spelt dog. How dare you? How dare you? Moose is a specimen.
00:01:13
In terms of personality this is founder market fit. I mean this is like owner pet fit. Founder bulldog fit. So what Moose would
00:01:20
do is he would jump on the couch and just kind of lay there. So we' like, "Moose, no, go down." So we put him
00:01:26
down. He jumps right back up. We take him down. Jumps right back up. I mean, he can go on all night doing this.
00:01:33
So finally, you just give in and let him sit there. It's literally J Couch. It's literally They are. Now it's his couch. Now it's his couch.
00:01:40
It's literally J. [Music] We'll let your winners ride.
00:01:47
Rainman David and it said we open source it to the
00:01:53
fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you.
00:01:59
All right everybody, welcome back to the number one podcast in the world. We got a banger episode for you today. all the
00:02:06
topics that you want to hear about in the world. And with us, our amazing crew, our chairman, dictator from Pio
00:02:13
Hapatia, enjoying the final moments of summer. How you doing there, brother?
00:02:19
Well, I come back in a couple of days. You get a little melancholy there,
00:02:25
brother? You a little sad? I mean, I think
00:02:31
it should everybody should have a two to three week vacation in August. I think it should be mandatory around the world.
00:02:36
I think the world should stop and we should all go on vacation. Yeah. Well, you proved that to the
00:02:42
audience by not showing up for the show for a couple of weeks. Yeah. It's the best time to go on vacation. I agree. I just literally got back from
00:02:49
a little Take your ass off through the end of July. Take two weeks off with your family. It's nothing better. I
00:02:55
I just did a a little uh visit down to Mexico City, which was absolutely delightful. Rome is amazing. Have you
00:03:01
been there before, Jim? No, but I've heard it's incredible. I heard the food scene in Mexico City is bananas.
00:03:06
It was bananas. And the startup scene there is amazing. It's kind of like if Spain and Williamsburg,
00:03:14
Brooklyn had a baby, like that would be Mexico City. It's super hip, super fun. Lots of young people, lots of energy.
00:03:19
Hey, speaking of uh young people with lots of energy. Hey, Freeberg's back with us in his cell working throughout
00:03:27
August to get incredible things done like our AI summit and the All-In Summit. Freeberg, uh, you gave up your
00:03:34
summer once again for the all-in crew and for the audience. How do you feel? You resentful or you feel good about
00:03:39
your decisions. I live for the work, Jal. You do. How's Aho doing? It seems like
00:03:45
you're um doing a lot of work there. You got your head down. Just give us a little update on the company. I appreciate BS. There's a lot going on.
00:03:52
We're very busy. I actually had a really cool test tube here that we had a customer visit today.
00:03:58
H I'll go find it. The world's first true potato seed. and we are ramping up production. Lot
00:04:04
going on. It's pretty exciting. Yeah, sounds sounds thrilling. Saxs, any uh thoughts there on potatoes and just
00:04:10
how thrilling this uh exercise has been. What are we talking about?
00:04:16
We're just talking about Oh, Freeberg had a thrilling summer. He's he's got a new potato in a test tube that he's
00:04:22
working on. Just Wait, did we invest? Is that in What's going on with that? Yeah, you're a shareholder.
00:04:27
I'm in. Okay. All right. Well, okay. I care about you in uh No, you did not me an investment.
00:04:35
I didn't I didn't get Wait, is this a sore subject? No. Why? No, it's a sore subject for me.
00:04:42
When this thing becomes worth 10 billion and I didn't get to slide in a little 250 slice. Not even a slice, huh? Free
00:04:48
bird. Look guys, a slice for your friends. They want They want value added investors. Jal, what's your value ad?
00:04:54
Exactly. A value ad. How about spreading disinformation on this podcast?
00:05:00
Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, since I'm not on the cap table, good luck with your mutant potatoes.
00:05:06
Uh disinformation. Mutant potato. Oh, we'll get through it,
00:05:13
folks. We'll get through it. Hey, uh Zach, you and I did a little interview with a certain senator. Give us an
00:05:18
overview. Yeah, we did a great interview with Senator Eric Schmidt from the state of Missouri who previously was attorney
00:05:24
general and wrote a book about his experience as attorney general. He brought the lawsuit Biden v Missouri
00:05:29
which exposed the Biden administration's censorship apparatus that they ran
00:05:34
through social media companies. This was the government's side of the the Twitter files and the discovery he brought when
00:05:41
married with the Twitter files that Elon released really paint a picture of how the government was in bed with social
00:05:47
networks to basically censor Americans free speech rights in favor of their point of view on co and many other
00:05:53
issues. So great conversation. Yeah, it was spicy and uh it's everywhere where you can find allin. But
00:06:00
we got this big event coming up. The summit is coming folks. Here we go for the fourth time in just a few weeks.
00:06:05
September 7th to the 9th. I think uh 8th and 9th are the main days. Man, this lineup is stacked. Alex Karp, Vlad from
00:06:13
Robin Hood, my guy, Energy Secretary Chris Wright and I are going to have a great discussion part two. Wow. Uber CEO
00:06:20
hitting an all-time high. Circle CEO, just an incredible lineup here. And Freeberg, it looks like we've got some
00:06:26
great partners. Yeah. First of all, the event is going to be very expensive to put on this year. We
00:06:32
actually have in addition to the great speakers, we have Diplo headlining one
00:06:37
of the main parties, the Diplo. Yeah. Gary Richards and Dylan Francis.
00:06:43
And so we have a huge set of blowout parties every night. It's going to be awesome to put all this on. They pay for
00:06:48
the event. We want to thank the sponsors. So Salana, big shout out. They were a sponsor last year and they're
00:06:53
stepping up as a big sponsor this year. Big shout out to our friends at Salana. They're amazing. They support everything we do. They're doing over a 100 million
00:07:01
transactions a day. It's unbelievable what they're getting done over there. Great team. And they're going to do a
00:07:07
full open bar for us uh Sunday. Juice Bar Coffee, the works classy team over there. And we don't just have like these
00:07:12
typical sponsorships of events. What we do is we ask, you know, our partners, hey, make an activation, make a place
00:07:19
for the besties and for the fans to hang. And they've all created these amazing experiences. And there'll be
00:07:26
matchas and espressos and craft beers and sushi and all kinds of great stuff.
00:07:31
And to our friends at OKX, they're going to be coming back. They're building an onstage. Got a matcha bar
00:07:38
coming. All these great things by our partners. Google Cloud's back offering 350K in credits to Google Cloud for
00:07:44
startups. What mentions they are over there. Google's crazy. Look at this, man. They're putting out a mini campus at the summit and uh yeah, 350K in cloud
00:07:52
credits has become Athletic Brewing's back. They're doing the scholarships again. We have a couple of scholarship slots left. Please don't apply for the
00:08:00
scholarships if you have means to buy a regular ticket. But if you do need a scholarship, please do apply if you're an upandcomer. Allin.com/summit
00:08:08
or allin.com/ yada yada yada. Did you guys see this? What's going on now?
00:08:13
Apparently, I was in the new South Park episode. The whole thing was around the sick offensity of AI.
00:08:20
That's you. Do I say anything in the show or is it just I'm just in the background? Uh, no. They had a line of people giving
00:08:27
tributaries to the president, you know, based on the Apple gift that Tim Cook gave to our amazing president. It's a
00:08:33
funny episode. You know what I like about the administration? Like JD actually retweeted all this stuff and and you know had it's good fun. We we we
00:08:39
get to mock our civil servants. That's the vice president to you. That's was what I said. My guy JD. What
00:08:45
did I say? Suddenly on a first name basis. My guy JD. Hold on a second. Let me just say hi to JD here and I'll just get his
00:08:50
feedback. I'm going to invite him to the diplo party. Hold on. Your biggest nightmare is here. Me and Chris Wright also talking directly now.
00:08:56
I'm directly plugged in. Oh yes. Chris, right? I'm bringing him a special gift to the summit. You're going to be you're going to love it. All
00:09:02
right. We got to talk about AI. AI mainet hit a bit of a detour this week. All over the, you know, three or four
00:09:07
days, AI stocks were down across the board because of this MIT study that went viral as well as Sam Alman's
00:09:15
comments about a bubble and Zuck instituting a hiring freeze in AI after
00:09:20
going on a complete blitzkrieg. So, let's get into it. Act one, Monday, Fortune dug up a generative AI study
00:09:27
that MIT published last week or last month, I should say. In that study, MIT
00:09:32
found that 95% of Geni pilots are failing to make it to production because of employee resistance, poor quality
00:09:40
output, and the most interesting problem seems to be resource misallocation.
00:09:45
According to the study, 70% of JN AI budgets are going towards things like building sales and marketing tools,
00:09:50
which have poor ROI. The highest ROI was found in back office optimization
00:09:57
like automating tasks that cut back spends you know on various departments.
00:10:02
Basically these pilots aren't working. Shamath is what the study found they evaluated 300
00:10:09
AI implementations and interviewed 150 leaders across 52 companies. You've been
00:10:14
grinding it out with your own software company now called 8090.
00:10:20
Does this align with what you're seeing on the field, Jama? I think what I would tell you is that I
00:10:25
think the first wave was just a lot of boards who read the words AI somewhere
00:10:32
in an article and then went to a board meeting and turned to the CEO and said, "What's your AI strategy?"
00:10:38
Mhm. And then the CEO turns around and sends that down into their or eventually hits
00:10:44
the CTO's desk. And I think the first wave is mostly people just spending money because they had large existing
00:10:49
budgets. And so they were like, let's just go and try a bunch of different things. And I think now we're going
00:10:54
through the sorting function of realizing that there's a big difference between probabilistic software and
00:11:00
deterministic software. That's probably the biggest reason why you're seeing so many failure modes in sales and
00:11:06
marketing. It's very hard to codify sales and marketing into a set of heruristics that never change. But back
00:11:11
office processes, why they're so good and a great target
00:11:18
for AI is ultimately you have so many people that have been hired to deal with edge cases, right? I think like that's
00:11:23
what people do in most companies is they're in charge of a process and they're they're dealing with edge cases. And I think that you can get extremely
00:11:30
high rates of accuracy if you implement AI correctly in back office tasks.
00:11:35
I think the real question is like what happens to all of this revenue that has been generated. You're seeing companies
00:11:42
generating $50 million of ARR in a matter of months and then raising huge
00:11:48
rounds. I think what we haven't seen is whether there'll be any sort of either logo churn or dollar churn as new
00:11:57
companies come in with even cheaper solutions. the foundational models move up the stack and just absorb capability
00:12:03
or things just don't work and they get abandoned. All of that churn happened in
00:12:08
social. I remember when I was in the middle of helping build Facebook, we went through that whole cycle. There was
00:12:14
seven or 8,000 social companies and within six years there was five of
00:12:21
us left. It happened in SAS when I was investing in SAS. There's a couple of very early and important successes like
00:12:27
Yammer which Sax started which I was very lucky to be an investor of but then
00:12:33
it took many years for the handful of winners to get really sorted out and I suspect we're about to go through that
00:12:39
same cycle in AI. So I think that article basically paints a very accurate picture. There's been a lot of triing
00:12:45
and experimentation. We now need to go through a sorting and a cleansing and then we'll rebuild from
00:12:51
first principles around the and not surprising not surprising to our sultan of SAS
00:12:56
David Sachs because the sales and marketing departments they they're very promiscuous when it comes to new tools
00:13:04
getting a great lead closing a sale you can directly connect it so we always see them test stuff out doesn't surprise me
00:13:10
that we'd see sales and marketing go after this first but what do you think about the brittleleness of this revenue
00:13:17
the churn sachs. Are we going to see a lot of these companies rocket up to 100
00:13:22
and come back down to 50? Is this something you're seeing uh or your your firm which I don't know your status at
00:13:28
the firm? Maybe you could tell us how how that's working out in terms of your intelligence there, but what is craft seeing on the field there?
00:13:34
I think we're seeing a lot of interesting AI applications being developed, but it's still very early
00:13:40
days. And I think that over the past week or so, there was a correction in sentiment towards AI, but I think it was
00:13:48
a healthy correction. I don't think this was the beginning of a bus cycle or something like that. I I still think that we're in a boom. I still think
00:13:55
we're in a investment super cycle, but I think there was a healthy dose of skepticism applied to some of the more
00:14:01
fantastical claims that have been made about AI. And I think this is why you saw there was like roughly what, like a 10% correction in public AI stocks. And
00:14:08
there was that MIT report that said that 95% of projects and companies are are
00:14:15
not making it to production yet and so forth and so on. So I feel like we're getting in the weeds a little bit here and what we should be talking about is
00:14:20
just sort of where we are in this um in this AI super cycle. And where do you perceive us at? We're
00:14:25
in the experimentation phase. We're in the pilot phase. But this issue around
00:14:30
probabilistic versus deterministic makes it hard to trust this software. Is that what you think the key issue is? Well,
00:14:36
let me tell you why I think that this correction is actually healthy is that after Chat GBT launched at the end of
00:14:43
2022 and then throughout 2023, the dominant narrative in AI is that AGI was
00:14:48
just two to three years away. And everyone kind of had their own definition of AGI was, but it was kind
00:14:54
of this idea of smarter than human super intelligence and kind of magic AI. AI
00:14:59
would be able to do everything. And as a result of that, you kind of had both
00:15:05
utopian and dystopian narratives really proliferated. And so, you know, you started getting this like job loss
00:15:11
narrative that within a few years, 50% of knowledge workers would be out of jobs. You got this rapid takeoff
00:15:17
narrative that basically the leading AI models would be able to turn their intelligence towards improving
00:15:23
themselves towards recursive self-improvement and therefore within a
00:15:28
couple of years the leading models would basically achieve super intelligence and leave everyone else in the dust and then capture all the value of humanity and
00:15:35
then based on that narrative which again it was the same underlying narrative
00:15:40
that fueled both utopian and and dystopian or doomer takes on AI. You got
00:15:46
I think a huge backlash which has already been forming where you have a thousand bills running through state
00:15:52
legislatores right now and you have all this AI safety legislation. You got
00:15:57
bills like in California the SB 1047 which would have applied tremendous amount of of new regulation to AI. So
00:16:04
you saw this policy backlash happen as well. And it was all based on these fantastical and kind of magic views of
00:16:12
what AI was going to do in just the next two to three years. And I think that the reason why this recent skepticism is
00:16:18
healthy is because I think it's rebuting all of that. And it's showing that, you know, AI is a powerful tool. I mean, I I
00:16:26
definitely think it's a new and important form of computing and it is going to unlock tremendous value in the economy, but it's going to take us a
00:16:32
while to get there. I mean, you can't just tell the AI, you know, be a sales rep, be a customer service rep, and kind
00:16:39
of throw it over the wall and expect that it's going to replace a human. It takes a lot of prompting and iteration
00:16:46
and validation to make the AI work, to make it generate business value. And if
00:16:52
we were on a path towards rapid takeoff, then what you would see is that the
00:16:58
leading AI models would be increasing the distance between like the top one or
00:17:03
two models would be increasing the distance between, you know, the rest of the models. And instead, what we're seeing is a clustering of model
00:17:10
performance around the same performance bench. Incremental, right? They're incrementally the progress to be a little bit more incremental. It's more evolutionary
00:17:16
rather than revolutionary. And I I think this really crystallized around the launch of chat GPT5 where a lot of
00:17:23
people were expecting GPT5 to be this huge breakthrough. Sam Alman was sort of
00:17:29
teasing this concept by posting photos of the Death Star that the idea that this model was going to blow everybody
00:17:34
else away and the reviews ended up being very mixed and then we saw that on the performance evaluations.
00:17:40
It's not that the model didn't represent progress, it just fell short of these lofty expectations that have been
00:17:46
created. So Freeberg, let me get you in on this just to sorry I've been kind of longwinded here, but just let me just
00:17:51
sum this up, which is please I think that what people can now see is that
00:17:56
we're not in like a a loop of recursive self-improvement. We're seeing that there are a handful of of great model
00:18:02
companies, but the development of this technology is going to be a more normal
00:18:07
technology race. It's not like the leading players just all of a sudden get achieve AGI just very quickly. And as a
00:18:15
result of that, I I think because it is a more normal technology race, I think
00:18:20
we can apply a more normal logic to it from both an investment and a policy
00:18:27
standpoint. And I think that a lot of the narratives that were hyped up about
00:18:32
imminent doom or imminent utopia, depending on what side you were on, were just massively overhyped. And this is
00:18:38
why I think it's just a very healthy thing. By the way, the other concerning thing is it's concerning when models
00:18:44
successively don't get meaningfully better, especially because there's a tendency for incremental models to get
00:18:50
overfit to benchmarks. That's another concerning thing that I think people were like scratching their heads about.
00:18:56
And if you look at the last big set of model updates, X of Grock, they didn't really meaningfully improve their
00:19:02
separation from the last generation model on the big benchmarks that matter. And that's also very concerning because
00:19:08
they tend to overfit to begin with. Yeah. And I would just say that, you know, another just piece of evidence
00:19:14
here is that the model companies are still leaprogging each other to some degree with their latest versions. And
00:19:19
again, that should not be possible if one model achieved rapid takeoff. The other thing you're seeing is that it's not like one model is dominating all the
00:19:26
other models. You're seeing that models are developing areas of competitive advantage. They're becoming increasingly
00:19:32
specialized. They have different personalities. If chatbt has been accused of being sick of fantish, grock
00:19:39
is maybe more based. I mean they have different modes that they excel at. Google I think has gotten really good at
00:19:44
video for example. Anthropic is is really good at coding. The specialization really belies this idea
00:19:51
of one model becoming all knowing and all powerful. We're seeing a proliferation now of specialization.
00:19:59
Let me try to get Freeberg in here. Altman appeared to compare the AI craze to the dotcom bubble according to CNBC.
00:20:07
Here's the quote. Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are over excited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is
00:20:13
AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes. And then a quote from Sam Waltman,
00:20:19
another quote, I think we totally screwed up some things with the roll out of GPT5. So he's kind of admitting that Freeberg. What does this mean in terms
00:20:25
of the massive investment opening out was talking about $500 billion. So is
00:20:31
this in do you think if you were to game what Sam is saying here maybe he wants
00:20:37
it to cool off maybe these investments are too large given the problem and the
00:20:43
progress. What what's the game on the field here, Freeberg, in terms of the in massive investment that people are
00:20:48
claiming this is going to require if we're not seeing the results in
00:20:54
corporations like the big capex investment because most of the capital that's been raised has been raised by the model companies
00:21:00
and most of it's been deployed into chips, right, in data centers, right? So does that make sense right now
00:21:06
or do we does that need to cool off as well while these companies prove hey we
00:21:11
can get some things done in corporate America? So I think one one of the key things
00:21:19
that's being understood so you know the internet was being connected there was connectivity
00:21:25
and and fiber being deployed in a rate that exceeded the economic
00:21:31
value creation by the end users on the internet during the dotcom boom and so as a result the dot boom was a became a
00:21:37
bubble that burst but the ultimate promise of the internet was realized many orders of magnitude greater than I
00:21:43
think you know most folks declared and proclaimed at the time. It was just delayed by a few years. I think
00:21:49
it's likely to be the same here. Whether this particular capex cycle is going to have that ROIC or not, I think is is a
00:21:55
bit TBD. But I think there's kind of three big trends underway that are worth noting. The
00:22:00
first is that there's a realization now that you need to pair humans and human engineering with the generative tools
00:22:08
that these generative AI systems are providing. So you can get a bunch of code written, but you still need to
00:22:14
debug the code. You still need to get it into production. You still need to get it to integrate. So this kind of pairing
00:22:20
of humans with AI is something that's being learned. What's the right model? It's not that you just turn on
00:22:25
generative AI and it runs your business for you. It's like where does it fit in the org? Who are the people that run it? How do they use it? Etc. And then
00:22:32
similar to that, I think we're seeing a lot of partner models being developed. So rather than have like a Sora or a
00:22:37
video model just generate a movie, it turns out that you can use the generative AI to generate the objects
00:22:45
and then use an existing rendering engine like Unity to actually make the video. So those sorts of pairing models
00:22:52
where you use what's being called a deterministic system or an existing piece of software that integrates with
00:22:58
generative AI can accelerate outcome. So filmmakers can now make AI movies by
00:23:04
coupling the AI generative tools with an existing offtheshelf kind of rendering system. And that works a lot better than
00:23:10
just telling the AI make a bunch of video where then all the people look different. You can't control the objects, you can't change the camera
00:23:16
angle, you can't change the framing, the color, the lighting, all the features that you may want to otherwise control. So layering AI on top of the existing
00:23:23
system seems to be the right answer. And I think we're seeing that not just in film making or digital content creation,
00:23:28
but in other areas as well where the AI provides almost like a substrate that can sit on top of existing tools and
00:23:34
just be like a marionette and do a better job. And I think I think the third key thing that we're seeing that's causing a bit
00:23:40
of the observed hiccup is this movement to SLMs. And you guys have seen a bunch of these papers from Nvidia and others
00:23:46
that have shown performance improvements by actually moving away from one large model that does it all to much smaller
00:23:52
specialized models that work in a specific task in a specific application or that work together as a network of
00:23:58
models. And my personal belief on this is actually that these models are going to move towards SLMs that we don't
00:24:04
understand how and why they work the way they do in a network fashion because today we're designing the SLMs in a
00:24:09
deterministic way. We're saying this is an SLM that does X, Y, or Z. But if the models eventually get developed by other
00:24:15
models, those SLMs will become really, you know, not well understood, but they'll work in a network. The reason
00:24:22
that's important is because this rearchitecturing of these systems dramatically reduces the energy cost and
00:24:28
the dollar cost per token generated. And so it brings down the cost and the runtime of these systems. So to your
00:24:35
point Jal, the capex investment suddenly gets much higher ROIC rather than the
00:24:41
challenged ROIC that it's dealing with today because the systems are so energy and cost inefficient today. So if the
00:24:47
architectural redesigns work, then these systems become much more efficient, 10x 100x more efficient. And I actually
00:24:53
think at that point token production will go way up, not way down. So those
00:24:59
are three big trends that I see kind of underway right now that might be architecting the overall kind of ecosystem and and probably causing some
00:25:05
of the observed hiccups. Jac, what do you think? Is it like do you think there's a big slowdown underway? I mean, yeah, I mean it's this is following
00:25:12
exactly the technological curve that we see. Nick, you can pull it up here where
00:25:17
we've seen this with smartphones and the internet itself, but the trough of disillusionment is probably where we're
00:25:23
living right now because there were so many expectations. you know, this innovation comes out, people get really
00:25:28
excited, massive amounts of money is invested, and then people wonder, hey, was this a good investment or not, and
00:25:34
then it just takes incremental improvement over time. We saw this with Uber, as an example, where people were
00:25:41
like, oh, it'll never be profitable, never be profitable, profitable, Door Dash will never work. And then they just added a couple of bucks and it scaled
00:25:47
globally. The network effects kicked in. We're going to see it again with self-driving. self-driving is actually
00:25:52
probably just getting through the peak of inflated expectations where people are starting to realize, oh, these edge
00:25:58
cases are pretty serious. You probably don't want these things going too fast. You're going to need to be very thoughtful about putting them on roads.
00:26:06
And um that leads to a really intact we should have at some point on this
00:26:12
program about should that be federal or local. Should the local states get to decide self-driving rules on their roads
00:26:19
or should the federal government come in and make a blanket one? But looking
00:26:24
specifically at the sales one, we're seeing on the field that maybe the salespeople aren't being replaced by AI,
00:26:31
but the SDRs are becoming 10 times like literally 10 times more effective at
00:26:36
finding the next lead at organizing leads and targets. So, it's definitely
00:26:42
happening, but it's incremental inside these organizations and it's just going to take specialization and people have
00:26:47
to actually embrace the tools. That's probably the biggest thing is there's a lot of resistance to these tools
00:26:53
already. And um once you get people actually embracing them, they start to
00:26:58
work. But if people aren't going to embrace them and there's some resistance, it's kind of like what we saw with the internet. Yeah.
00:27:04
Here's a big question that I have. You know how at some point like you get so invested
00:27:11
in a way of doing things that when things change, it's almost too hard
00:27:17
to change the way your company orients and you see it in every single phase of
00:27:24
these big innovation cycles. The question is, is there a point at which these foundational model companies have
00:27:31
invested too much money in LLMs where so many of their employees only
00:27:37
understand that and all of a sudden there are completely different ways of
00:27:42
building these models. State space is one example, but then you know some new entrant decides to build a completely
00:27:49
different kind of representation. They may also then build custom silicon for
00:27:55
it. All of those things have yet to happen and the reason is we're really only a few years into what should be a
00:28:01
multi-deade innovation cycle. So those are like some really important questions
00:28:06
because then you have this problem of the sunk cost fallacy of well we spent
00:28:11
all this money on this LLM based approach and now all of a sudden there's this thing that comes around the corner.
00:28:17
That's the thing that I'm really curious about and waiting for is will there be these small teams
00:28:24
and it may take advantage of what Freeberg said. He uses an LLM as a jumping off point but then builds an
00:28:29
entirely different approach is able to generate entirely different and cheap silicon. That hasn't happened yet. And
00:28:35
the reason it hasn't happened is not because it doesn't make sense but it's because we're so early into it. Yeah.
00:28:40
And then what do these big guys do? The big guys have spent tens of billions of dollars.
00:28:46
Yeah. on all kinds of stuff, human capital, opex, capex.
00:28:53
So it's going to be it's going to be really interesting. Well, this study actually addresses this
00:28:58
purchasing of AI tools from specialized vendors. Those succeeded two out of three times. So the statistics in that
00:29:05
early study seem to um indicate you're right about that Shimath is if you're doing something very specific and we've
00:29:12
got a couple of companies doing very specific things like Tax GPT is one of our uh companies we incubated and
00:29:18
they're only going after you know tax and CPAs and being a co-pilot for them.
00:29:23
Those things seem to be succeeding faster than going to a general model and asking tax questions to it. There's also
00:29:30
all this other stuff that people never talk about that are very practical realities of building a So, for example, we've been selling into the enterprise
00:29:36
at 8090. We'll do this year, this is our first full year of business. We'll do about $40 million of bookings in the first year.
00:29:43
Yeah, that's crazy. And it's all back office type stuff. But
00:29:48
our first customer where we delivered enormous gains, we were fired.
00:29:53
And the reason we were fired was not because the technology wasn't working, but it's because as it goes lower and
00:30:00
lower from the board and the CEO into the bowels of the organization,
00:30:07
you actually run into huge push back. And I think that there's going to be that cycle that we have to deal with as
00:30:12
well, which is in all of these AI businesses, there's all kinds of stuff that scare people. And there are many
00:30:20
people in decision-making roles at many of these companies that will have to sort out where's their comfort level.
00:30:26
And it was like one of these things where I was like, well, what are we supposed to do? We escalated and blah
00:30:32
blah blah and it got resolved. But my point is that I think is a cycle that has yet to play itself out in all of the
00:30:37
Fortune 2000, global 2000. I would not expect that the AI boogeyman that has
00:30:44
been created doesn't have some negative ramifications over the next couple of years as well as this stuff gets sorted out.
00:30:49
The last piece is the talent war. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Meta was looking at downsizing its
00:30:55
AI division as part of a larger restructuring. Wall Street Journal then reported Meta has a hiring freeze across
00:31:02
the AI divisions, which is just crazy because just eight weeks ago, Zuck went
00:31:07
crazy. He was trying to buy Ilia's uh super intelligent startup. You remember
00:31:12
Ilia declined. So Zuck poached Daniel Gross. Meta Aqua hired the scale AI team
00:31:18
and then they agreed to invest 14 billion in that. Sam Walman claimed Zuck was making hundred million offers
00:31:24
regularly for open AI talent. I'm curious, you know, what you think of that Sachs is the talent war seemed to
00:31:31
go insane for a couple of months and now is pausing. What's your take on all this
00:31:38
I don't know uncertainty boom bust cycle in such a compressed period of time or is this just
00:31:44
I mean you you were seeing founders turning down multi-billion dollar acquisition offers for startups that
00:31:50
hadn't even released a product yet as if those types of offers grow on trees and
00:31:55
they don't I mean these types of hundred million or billion dollar job offers they don't come along very often I mean
00:32:02
you have to be at kind of the sweet spot of a boom cycle and you need a huge company with tons of money that feels
00:32:08
like it's strategically vulnerable and is at risk of being left behind. And if
00:32:13
you get a confluence of those factors, then you can get kind of crazy offers like that. But they don't come along
00:32:19
very often. I think that what Meta is doing is probably digesting a little bit. They've now made a bunch of talent
00:32:25
acquisitions. They've done some aqua hires at, you know, very expensive aqua hires and they're probably just
00:32:31
consolidating a little bit. Like I said, I don't think this is the bust part of the cycle. I don't think that a bubble
00:32:37
has popped or anything like that. I actually think that we're still probably early to the middle of this investment
00:32:44
super cycle. And it's just a healthy correction in sentiment here that people are realizing it's going to be a little
00:32:51
bit harder and take more work than just, oh, the AI is going to figure out how to improve itself and we get to super
00:32:56
intelligence. That was always a little bit of a fantasy. Mera should have taken the billion dollar offer from Zach or Ilia should
00:33:02
have taken the 30 billion Sachs. I mean, these things never happen. And as you're saying, I mean, I guess it depends how much they
00:33:08
have in the bank account. You know, if if they're already like billionaires from whatever they did before, then then
00:33:14
maybe it doesn't matter. But if you were just starting out, for example, and didn't have any money in the bank,
00:33:19
that's a pretty hard thing to turn down. I mean, realistically, yeah, they probably they probably sold a bunch
00:33:26
of OpenAI equity at 300 and 500 billion. They're both Open AI co-founders, so
00:33:31
they seem like they're free rolling, so they have no incentive to sell. Yeah. Which is fine. It's just that there's a lot of people who've never
00:33:37
been through a bus cycle before. And if they think that this is the normal state
00:33:42
of the world, they're going to be sorely mistaken. By the way, you're right, Sax. It's hard to build as you know cuz you did a a
00:33:49
billion dollar company that then exits for more than a billion. It is hard right where you justify that valuation
00:33:55
based on fundamentals. So right now we're in a part of the cycle where you can justify that valuation
00:34:01
based on it strategic value to a multi-t trillion dollar market cap company. But
00:34:07
that only lasts while those companies are in the market for strategic acceleration. Yeah. if they're behind, if they're
00:34:13
stuck, then you have to make your company work on its own as an actual business.
00:34:19
And to get to a $30 billion valuation based on fundamentals, that is
00:34:24
extraordinarily difficult. I mean, that implies, you know, multiple billions of revenue, actual revenue.
00:34:30
Does somebody want to underwrite 500 billion for OpenAI common shares? Anybody think that that is a good trade?
00:34:35
I'll make the I'll make the bull case. I'll make the bull case. Yeah, please. Yeah. I think the simplest way to make the bull case is if you look
00:34:41
at the kager on their mouse and the conversion from ma to dows.
00:34:47
You essentially take a small minor percentage of the Facebook or Google terminal arpoo and apply it to some
00:34:54
number of ma dows 3 4 years from now. So if I had to guess, if you take 4 500
00:35:00
million MADO growing at I'm guessing, let's just be conservative%
00:35:05
700 million weekly active users right now. 750. Okay. So then so then I would
00:35:11
probably put that at like 500 DAO to be conservative. It's probably doubling
00:35:16
every two years. So 500 goes to a billion, billion goes to two in four years. And at 2 billion DAO, they
00:35:25
generate a tenth of Facebook's revenue. Just to be very conservative and you probably get to a trillion five
00:35:31
valuation there, right? So it's you could you could triple up on that bet. Yeah. I mean, look, OpenAI has actual
00:35:36
revenue. I mean, they they have actual revenue because they have subscriptions and they appear to have the dominant
00:35:42
position in the consumer space and it is a replacement for a lot of people for
00:35:47
search, which is the most lucrative franchise on the internet. And this is one of their applications. So I actually
00:35:53
think that you can make that case, you know, pretty comfortably. But can we
00:35:59
could we go back to a point you were making before Jal about in the survey that the attempts to just apply some
00:36:05
sort of generalized AI model didn't work very well like 95% of the time it didn't succeed in these large enterprises. But
00:36:12
if they used a more specific vertical application or vertical model or an SLM approach which is more a smaller
00:36:19
specialized model then it showed much greater success. I mean that makes a lot of sense to me is that in order to drive
00:36:26
business value there's a lot of what I would call last mile problems right like LLMs need context and so you have to
00:36:33
first of all connect to all of your enterprise data sources and you have to prompt them in a very detailed way in
00:36:39
order to get to a good answer and then you have to validate that answer to make sure it's not a hallucination and then
00:36:45
you need to iterate on it and so this idea that you're just going to have one super intelligence that just figures all
00:36:51
this stuff out it's just not the way it's playing out in the real world. You're seeing again a lot of very
00:36:56
specific business problems that have to be solved. But I I think that this is a great thing ultimately for the ecosystem
00:37:04
because it implies that you're going to get lots of vertical applications and lots of specialized models that capture
00:37:13
value in lots of different markets. And that that's actually the way that we're going to drive this throughout the
00:37:18
economy as opposed to it just being one foundation model eating all the value. So I I think this is a very healthy
00:37:23
thing for the ecosystem. Yeah, it makes total sense that the vertical systems would feel more
00:37:29
deterministic sacks because they're giving they have a tighter problem set, a tighter data set to actually come to
00:37:36
an answer. Whereas the, you know, probabilistic, you know, just asking an LLM to come up
00:37:42
with a business plan for you, it it just feels like it could be 80% correct, 90%
00:37:47
correct as opposed to 99% correct, which the vertical ones are actually getting very good at getting the correct answer.
00:37:54
Okay, let's talk a little bit. That last 10% is fundamental and that's where you get all the the last mile problems. And you have to understand the
00:38:01
the industry in order to solve the the problems of how you kind of go from let's say 90% accuracy or effectiveness
00:38:08
to 99 which is where the business value is. Well, and you use last mile sax. I think it's quite appropriate if you look at
00:38:14
self-driving which is the tip of the spear I think in this argument. Whimo has a bit more deterministic model.
00:38:21
They're they don't have uh safety drivers. Robo taxi has safety drivers for a good reason. They're using a
00:38:27
probabistic model and they're getting an intervention every, you know, x hundreds of miles, let's say, which means if you
00:38:34
were to use it daily, you're going to have, you know, an intervention, I don't know, every week or two. And obviously,
00:38:41
they'll iterate and they'll get that down to the same level as Whimo. But on
00:38:46
what timetable, Freeberg, on what timetable do you see a probabilistic model like Elon is pursuing with his
00:38:53
robo taxi program versus the more, you know, deterministic one? When do you
00:38:58
think those cross over? Do you have any insight as a scientist or any guess? I don't know.
00:39:04
Yeah, that is the 10 trillion dollar question is when will that problem be solved? All right, let's talk a little
00:39:09
politics here. According to Poly Market, Gavin Newsome is the early favorite in the 2028 Democratic
00:39:17
presidential race. So, who gets the nomination? So, here's some background. Newsome is surging in a couple of polls this week. Uh, here's one from Politico
00:39:24
that asked California Democrats and left-leaning independents who their preferred candidate would be in 2028.
00:39:31
Newsome came in first with 25% of the vote. Then, Kamla, your favorite Sachs and Pete Budajedge, AOC, your favorite
00:39:39
uh Chimath there. Tim Waltz, another one of Sax's favorite. And the odds have jumped about 9 percentage points on Poly
00:39:46
Marketers for Poly Market Newsome at 28, AOC at 14, and a bunch of people, you
00:39:52
know, in the single digits that you could probably guess. So, your thoughts on the early information here? Does this
00:39:59
is any of this even valid, Sax, in your mind, or is it just too much time between now and then? Well, I think it's valid in the sense that you're seeing
00:40:06
Democrats react positively to what Newsome is doing. And what what Nuome is
00:40:13
doing is mirroring Trump's style in an attempt to to again give Democrats what
00:40:19
they want, which is they they they want a Trump of their own. And despite Democrats figning objections to Trump's
00:40:26
style, that this is really what they want is they they want someone who they perceive to be a fighter. That said, I
00:40:32
think there are two problems with presumptively crowning Gavin as the nominee three years in advance. One is
00:40:39
that what Nuome is doing here is completely performative. Everyone can see that he's acting and he's aping
00:40:46
Trump's style or what he thinks is Trump's style. Whereas Trump is completely authentic. Trump is always Trump and everyone understands that and
00:40:52
there's something very authentic and likable about that. Whereas I think that Gavin comes across as being synthetic or
00:40:59
plastic and you don't really have a sense of who the real person is. And I think trying to pretend to be the left's
00:41:07
version of Trump only I think reinforces that that problem that he already had. So one is authenticity. The other is
00:41:14
that I think that Democrats make a huge mistake if they think that Trump's
00:41:20
popularity is based on his style. I mean, it's true that Trump has a
00:41:26
trillion dollar personality and that is very helpful in politics, but ultimately I think the reason why Trump has done so
00:41:33
well for a decade is because he's been on the right side of a bunch of core issues in American politics that other
00:41:40
people just weren't focused on or weren't talking about. Cities seems to be one that heads up versus
00:41:46
Gavin Newsome will become one of the attack vectors or one of the grand debates. Jeffreyburg, you have
00:41:52
California's, you know, descent into madness in the major cities and then obviously Trump is
00:41:58
cleaning up DC from a very first principled basis like, hey, you can't camp here. Period. Full stop. So, what
00:42:04
do you think the chances are here, Freedberg, that this new strategy going on the podcast, having a podcast, being
00:42:10
spicy on social media is going to work for Gavin or you in Sax's camp? It's a
00:42:16
bit performative and maybe not fake. And by the way, Gavin Newsome, can't wait to have you on the pod. Go ahead, Freeber.
00:42:22
I would say that the current polling is a reflection of the nonTrump aligned
00:42:30
markets response to Trump. And so it will change certainly over
00:42:36
time as the results of the administration's actions bear out, etc. One way to think about this or forecast
00:42:42
this is what is the reaction going to be to this administration? I think there's
00:42:48
a, as I've talked about many many times, a very high probability that someone who's a little bit more socialist
00:42:53
aligned is going to end up being kind of thrust forward here. And I think AOC fits the bill there. So then I think the
00:42:58
question is what's the Republican response going to be to the choice they
00:43:04
may have in trying to prop up or frame up one of those two candidates. And I
00:43:10
think frankly there may be some group that would say we would rather be up against the socialists because they're
00:43:15
going to look like idiots and we're going to win. And so there's going to be weirdly support for a socialist-like
00:43:22
candidate. The other side is the honest moderate question which is who would you rather have as president? A socialist or
00:43:30
Gavin Newsome? And I do think a lot of moderates would say if I had to pick between those two excluding the
00:43:35
Republican candidate, I would want to pick the moderate. I would want to pick Gavin Chimath. What issue will determine the
00:43:42
midterms and then the 2028 election? Look at your crystal ball there, Chimath. And tell us what you see.
00:43:50
Yeah, midterms might be easier to to think about. Right. I think the midterms are going to be about the economy, but the economy is
00:43:56
going to be a window into a lot of these other issues, the safety security issue, the immigration issue, the tariff issue.
00:44:04
rates. I think rates are going to be an enormous swing factor here. I think Powell is really holding on white
00:44:11
knuckled to a position that probably doesn't underly the the data. So, I think in the
00:44:18
short term it's just going to be more of an economic up or down vote for the Trump administration. Many things I
00:44:24
think are positive and in their control, but there are a few things that are not in their control. In 2028, I don't know. The one thing I would say about the
00:44:31
candidacy though is like I I don't know if you guys remember, but when the Republican
00:44:36
primary process started, the person at the top of the polls at the time was Ron
00:44:42
DeSantis. And I said, "You do not want to be ahead early. These people never
00:44:47
win. They never win. They take all the arrows and peak too early." No, it's it's not even that. It's just
00:44:53
like they never win. So if I had to apply that rubric here, what I would say is
00:44:59
the practical choice that the Democratic voters will have is
00:45:06
to actually ask whether they want a replay of California
00:45:11
on an American 50-state scale. And if you look at it through that lens,
00:45:17
I think Gavin Newsome is going to have a very difficult path because of what has
00:45:22
transpired over his tenure as the governor. And he's going to have to explain away a lot. So I think that in
00:45:29
the absence of real choices, I think that he's the clear winner. What is that phrase? In the land of the blind, the
00:45:35
oneeyed man is king sort of a thing. I think when you actually go into the
00:45:41
election cycle starting after 26 in 27 honestly it's going to be up in the air.
00:45:47
What I will tell you is that the way that the electoral college is set up and the voting dynamics for the presidency
00:45:53
is set up a socialist cannot win. But the way that the democratic
00:46:00
primaries are set up a socialist can absolutely win. So this is the sort of Saxis point which is I think for the
00:46:08
Republican side the best outcome is a very radical agenda that isn't really
00:46:13
supported by substantive facts and is more supported by vibes.
00:46:19
This is what I feel. I just feel it should be right. And I think that those things may win a primary but will just
00:46:25
get destroyed in a federal election. What about you? The world's greatest moderate. What do you think? pretty
00:46:30
clear that the socialist movement is happening and that is going to inspire a lot of young people to come out like
00:46:36
they did in New York from Mandami and I think you have to think about what the platform is. I agree the economy will
00:46:41
determine the midterms, but I would look ahead at the core issues we've discussed
00:46:46
here many times, Freeberg. And if I was advising the Democrats, I would smash
00:46:51
the Republicans where they don't speak up about important issues to the American
00:46:58
voter and where young people feel they are being ignored. So, what would I say
00:47:03
if I was them, if I was running their platform in 2028? I would go with real wages that are stagnant and Trump
00:47:09
doesn't talk about that. In fact, he's cutting taxes on the rich. They got a credible attack vector right there that
00:47:15
nobody's talking about the minimum wage and Trump doesn't care. JD doesn't care about you or the minimum wage or your
00:47:20
wages. I would go after education being unaffordable and again Trump and JD don't talk about that. Then I would go
00:47:27
after housing. Republicans don't talk about that. They don't talk about housing. And then I would go right at
00:47:32
the immigrant issue and I'd say, "Listen, America's for immigration. This
00:47:38
country was built off of immigrants and JD and Trump want to pull up the ladder behind everybody and not allow other
00:47:44
people to immigrate to this country after they benefited from it." That's the perfect attack vector for beating
00:47:51
the Republicans in 2028. Housing, wages, education, and healthcare. These are
00:47:56
things you never hear Trump talk about. You never hear JD talking about these. And I think that that's the way to if
00:48:02
they want to beat them all the time. It's it's way down the bottom of the list.
00:48:07
No, they talk they don't they when's the last time what's Okay, so tell me Jim, what is the proposal? Wages went up significantly in Trump's
00:48:14
first term and then they started stagnating again under Biden and that's the whole purpose of his trade policy is to encourage reshoring of manufacturing
00:48:21
in the United States. Tax bill, he passed a huge tax bill that locked in all these gains. No tax on tips. You can
00:48:27
debate the impact to the broad population, but there are enough examples where actual take-home wages
00:48:34
are higher than what they would be in a counterfactual. Yeah. And by the way, Gavin Newsome has
00:48:39
a supermajority in the California legislature. He can run the state however he wants. He also has a very
00:48:45
compliant court that will rubber stamp his decisions. Completely different than Trump who has a very narrow majority and
00:48:51
and he has a court that basically tries to stop everything he does. So Gavin Newsome can run the state. He could be
00:48:57
operating the state for the benefit of its citizens instead of holding all these performative press conferences and
00:49:02
doing podcasts and tweeting all day. So where where is the program that you're talking about? It doesn't exist.
00:49:08
It's a fine criticism, but if if the I'm talking about the Democrats as a group, if the Democrats came out and just said,
00:49:14
"We're going to add a dollar to the federal minimum wage every year for the eight years we're in office," that would fly with the American public. They said,
00:49:20
"We're going to build." That's not a strategy. You can make that argument. I'm just telling you what the winning argument is. The winning argument is
00:49:26
Well, no, you're just saying whatever it takes to get elected, but giving stuff away is not adults make hard decisions.
00:49:32
You mean like giving people no tax on their overtime and no tax on their tips?
00:49:38
Those kind of giveaways, Jamal, those that's helping middle class and working class. I I don't disagree, but to the point of
00:49:45
giving away free stuff doesn't work, it actually does. It does get people out to vote. People were very motivated when
00:49:50
they heard those proposals by Trump. I'm saying they should just take that proposal and 10x it. That's a way to
00:49:56
win. I'm not saying it makes sense. I'm not saying I'm endorsing it. I'm just giving you the playbook. Okay. Well, what I would do to to fight
00:50:02
your your playbook of empty promises is I would actually talk about the record of the candidate.
00:50:08
Exactly. And I think we're talking about a state like California, which is thoroughly blue and has been run by Democrats now
00:50:13
for a long time. And Gavin probably will be the nominee because I do think that his performative antics are working with
00:50:20
the base. I mean, they wanted an anti-Trump, but the the way to attack this is to talk about the record here.
00:50:26
So, let's just go through some of the numbers. So, as we all know, we pay the highest taxes in the country for the
00:50:31
worst public services. Gavin's spending turned a $75 billion surplus into a $20
00:50:37
billion deficit in just a couple of years. And somehow none of that money went to fill the reservoirs or fire
00:50:43
hydrants. And so, we had entire neighborhoods burned down as a result. And they can't get permits to rebuild.
00:50:49
California has the fourth largest economy in the world. So that's good. But we have the highest rates of poverty, homelessness, inequality,
00:50:57
illiteracy, and wage stagnation. So yes, wage stagnation, JCAL, is the highest in
00:51:03
the country. And we have the third highest unemployment among the 50 states. We're second only to Hawaii in
00:51:10
housing costs. So, you want to talk about making promises to lower housing costs, but if you look at blue states
00:51:16
like California, they're among the worst. We're the worst in energy costs,
00:51:21
and we have the highest rate of both retail crime and frivolous lawsuits. And that's why businesses are moving out of
00:51:26
the state. You may have seen that Bed Bath and Beyond said that even as they're opening 300 more physical
00:51:32
stores, they're not going to return to California. And this just got the CEO mocked by Nuome because he never
00:51:38
actually takes any of the criticism to heart. He just sort of deflects it. So
00:51:44
until the Democrats, I think, confront why they really lost. Okay. And it's
00:51:50
it's not just because of the style of Trump. They want to just attribute it to Trump's style, but the reality is it's
00:51:57
because of the the policies and it's about the record. And until
00:52:03
they're willing to confront those things and change their policies, then I think they're going to continue losing. I put into Grock the following question.
00:52:09
And the reason I asked the question this way is I think that the three most credible candidates that have a record
00:52:15
to run on on the Democratic side are Gavin Newsome, Gretchen Whitmer, and Wes Moore. So I asked Grock, rank Michigan,
00:52:23
California, and Maryland. So three Democratic states run by three very popular, well-known Democratic governors
00:52:29
on three metrics. quality of life, cost of living, and crime
00:52:35
and summarize that into a ranked overall list. Right? So, pretty standard plain
00:52:40
vanilla question. And at the end, I I can publish this later if you want, but
00:52:47
at the end, the final overall rankings were Maryland first excels in quality of
00:52:52
life and has the lowest estimated crime rates with a moderately high but manageable cost of living. Michigan,
00:52:58
most affordable with decent quality of life and moderate crime, making it a balanced choice.
00:53:04
California, high quality of life in terms of opportunities and lifestyle, but severely hampered by high costs and
00:53:10
elevated crime rates. And there's all kinds of detail, but I was just giving you the final summary. So, I think that
00:53:16
when you get into a Democratic primary, those are three people that will run.
00:53:24
And I think Democratic voters will have to choose what record do I want to put
00:53:29
up to vote for the broad voting American public. Is it California's? Is it
00:53:35
Maryland's or is it Michigan's? And if you just do a quick AIdriven analysis,
00:53:40
Wes Moore, then Gretchen Whitmer, then Gavin Newsome, just on the facts. Yeah, makes sense. Freak, your thoughts
00:53:47
on the the platform I put out there or anything else with this 2028 discussion as we wrap up? No, I think the
00:53:53
socialists are going to continue to grow their momentum and
00:53:58
you know it'll be fun. See what happens. Okay, here we go. So, Trump had a busy
00:54:04
week. He met with Putin, then Zalinsky and some of the leaders in Europe. Sachs, this is your time to shine. We
00:54:11
didn't talk about this yet because it happened after we taped, but last Friday, Trump met with Putin in Alaska. A lot of hand ringing around that.
00:54:17
Lasted about three hours. No ceasefire was reached. That was uh the stated goal of it. And on Monday, Trump
00:54:25
the state of the goal. Okay, I'm just going by what Trump said when he was on his way there that he wanted a ceasefire. And then the on
00:54:33
Monday, Trump met with Zilinsky and a bunch of European leaders at the White House. first inerson meeting since that
00:54:39
argument. You remember back in the overall office in February and uh included the EU president,
00:54:46
NATO secretary general, chancellor of Germany, Italy and UK showed up as well.
00:54:52
your your thoughts on where we're at with the Ukraine and if we're going to get a ceasefire, a peace negotiation or
00:54:59
a peace settlement or if the United States is just going to walk away because it seems like Trump is a little
00:55:04
perturbed by the progress here and he has said, you know, maybe it's just up to them to figure it out and he'll be
00:55:10
done with the whole thing. Your thoughts, Saxs? Well, I think that the the Alaska summit
00:55:16
was major progress. I think that first of all, the president deserves enormous credit for reestablishing diplomacy and
00:55:22
communication with the Russians. There literally hasn't been a meeting between the US president and the Russian
00:55:27
president since 2021 while this war is going on and while the war has continued to escalate. I guess the Biden
00:55:33
administration's policy was just to ignore the Russians and roll their dice and hope that the war didn't escalate out of control. In any event, I think
00:55:41
Trump deserves a lot of credit for again reestablishing that diplomatic connection and trying to use diplomacy
00:55:46
to end the war. And it was shocking to see how much Democrats in the media were
00:55:52
openly rooting for him to fail in these efforts to end this war. And effectively, they're rooting for
00:55:57
hundreds of thousands of more people to die or get maimed. They were pretty hysterical, right, on the news. It was pretty crazy.
00:56:03
Yeah. And by the way, they they claim that they care about the Ukrainian people, but the Ukrainian people by
00:56:08
large majorities now want this war to end and they're willing to make meaningful concessions to do it. So
00:56:14
there was a poll by Gallup, which Nick, maybe you can throw this on the screen where a year or two ago something like
00:56:21
70% of Ukrainians wanted to keep fighting the war. Now that number is down to 24%. Again, the vast majority
00:56:27
are looking to achieve a peace. And I think that President Trump and President Putin made some important progress in
00:56:34
terms of getting to an eventual peace deal. And I think there are a few planks here. Number one was the recognition
00:56:41
that we should try to get to a comprehensive peace deal, not a ceasefire. A ceasefire is temporary. And
00:56:47
the Russians have already said they wouldn't do it because they understand from their point of view that this would just give the Ukrainians time to regroup
00:56:53
and rearm and try to reset, but it wouldn't end the war. And the truth of the matter is that when you're fighting
00:56:59
a war and losing, you don't get to call a timeout. So the Russians have been rejecting this idea of a ceasefire for
00:57:05
months. And I think that it was wise, if our ultimate goal is to get to a deal,
00:57:11
to recognize that the comprehensive peace deal is what we want to get to. So that's point number one. Point number
00:57:16
two is that President Trump acknowledged that Ukraine would not be joining NATO, which was the key source of the friction
00:57:24
and the thing that ultimately led to this war. So I think that definitively taking NATO off the table I think was a
00:57:31
very important precondition to getting to an eventual peace. And then I think the third thing was that the parties
00:57:38
both the Russians and the Americans agreed that there would have to be territorial concessions of some kind.
00:57:44
And we don't know all the details yet. There was some conversation about land swaps. But the point of the matter is
00:57:50
that we're not going back to the prewar status quo ante. The Russians have taken
00:57:57
the big chunk of territory. The Ukrainians have not been able to get it back. People are trying to blame Trump
00:58:02
for this somehow. But the real cause of this is the failure of the counter offensive in the summer of 2023.
00:58:08
Remember, we gave the Ukrainians something like hundred billion dollars worth of weapons to retake that
00:58:14
territory. And it was an abysmal failure. They didn't even make it past the first Survivican line. That is the
00:58:20
real cause of why the Ukrainians are going to lose territory in this war is they're simply not able to retake it.
00:58:26
And I think there was a a general recognition coming out of that Alaska summit that there would have to be
00:58:32
territorial concessions. And I think in these three pillars, I think you have the basis for a comprehensive peace
00:58:39
deal, which is again, number one, we're going for a peace deal, not a ceasefire. Number two, no NATO. And number three,
00:58:45
we have to recognize the realities on the ground. Now, I think the big question mark, I think we could get to a
00:58:50
peace deal pretty quickly if Zalinsky and the Europeans were willing to acknowledge these three points, but so
00:58:56
far they have not been willing to acknowledge those three points. And I think this is one of the things that if
00:59:02
you're listening to the remarks the following Monday when the Europeans came to the White House, there was no
00:59:07
recognition. They were still clamoring for a ceasefire, you know, again, which the Russians had rejected as opposed to
00:59:12
a comprehensive peace. They were still clamoring for NATO and they were still rejecting the idea of any territorial
00:59:18
concessions including even Crimea which was lost over a decade ago. So I think
00:59:25
that the issue we have right now is that Zalinski and the Ukrainian government, not the
00:59:31
people, but the Ukrainian elite and some of these European countries that are backing him are not willing to make the
00:59:38
compromises necessary to achieve a peace deal. And as President Trump has said, at the end of the day, you need the
00:59:43
Russians and the Ukrainians to agree. So I think that President Trump deserves enormous credit here for reestablishing
00:59:49
diplomacy, for making substantial progress towards a comprehensive peace deal. But at the end of the day, unless
00:59:55
Zinsky starts being willing to make compromises, I don't know how you're going to get to that deal.
01:00:00
Yeah. Freeberg, Dave, any thoughts on this? No. Negotiation? Shim, anything? Well, I was
01:00:07
pretty curious about the historical pattern of this. So, I just went back and here's what I learned.
01:00:14
What's interesting to note is that since 1945, so not assuming, you know, conflicts in
01:00:20
Africa because they are not really quite part of the western political global
01:00:26
order per se, it's important to ask the question like how have other territorial disputes panned out. So
01:00:33
there are disputes that end in stalemates and when you end up in a stalemate you basically arrange a DMZ
01:00:40
demilitarized zone type arrangement. So there's one in Korea right 1953 to now.
01:00:46
There's one in Cyprus 1974 to right now and there's one in Kashmir 1947 to
01:00:52
today. And then there's this kind of thing in between Israel and Lebanon. And
01:00:58
then second, there are disputes where there's some action taken by one country to take something by force, but then
01:01:04
there's no consensus internationally as to who owns a territory. So Crimea,
01:01:11
as Saxs mentioned, 2014 to present, and then Israel and West uh East Jerusalem,
01:01:16
sorry. So I think the point is that unless President Trump figures out a way to do
01:01:22
something that's frankly truly unprecedented, the historical pattern is that it's been nearly impossible for
01:01:28
even the most powerful and influential person in the world to frankly draw deals
01:01:36
in these kinds of situations, especially when they become protracted. And I think that's what he's getting to when he
01:01:43
reinforces these things never would have started or gotten this far had I been president. You know, that's what he says
01:01:50
in quotes. And I think this is what he's referring to, which is that the longer these things get drawn out and
01:01:56
particularly with Russia, Ukraine, and Israel, Gaza, you're talking about conflicts and historical
01:02:03
issues that have been simmering for hundreds of years and in some cases thousands of years all the way back to
01:02:09
the antiquity. So, I don't know. I I just think that it's an incredibly incredibly difficult position and
01:02:18
I just don't know what's going to happen. But I think that for modern progress to happen, I think it's
01:02:24
important for both of these two issues to get put to bed as quickly as possible.
01:02:29
Jake Al, what do you think? And we saw the media attacking Trump for even daring to hold negotiations with the Russians. Do you think this was a good
01:02:35
idea or do you think that somehow uh Trump was caving to Putin? I give Trump a lot of credit. He is incredibly good at foreign policy and
01:02:43
specifically with dictators. If you look at our past presidents, they didn't want to meet with Putin. They didn't want to
01:02:48
meet with Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il. They thought uh isolation was the best policy. It's not. I think talking to
01:02:55
these folks and trying to find common ground is the best policy. Even if it's a 5% chance of it actually working out,
01:03:01
which is what I think any president dealing with a dictator and a death spot like,
01:03:07
you know, Putin is going to have. I think you have a 5 or 10% chance. And I
01:03:12
think Trump and Biden actually had a lot in common that worked. the lone leasing
01:03:18
of the weapons and not costing the American taxpayer any money where a lot of partisan people said, "Oh my god,
01:03:24
this is costing the Americans so much." It's actually Trump has figured out a way to make it profitable. He's selling more weapons to Ukraine and he got us
01:03:31
the mineral rights. It turns out Trump was able to turn a cost center or a supposed cost center into a profit
01:03:38
center in terms of this specific war. And if you look at the sanctions, Trump
01:03:45
has increased the sanctions. So Trump had my exact position that I fought for here on this podcast for the past couple
01:03:51
of years in this conflict, which was keep the pressure up on Putin. And Trump
01:03:57
took it over the top by going to Putin's main client for his oil now, which is
01:04:03
India, and putting a massive tariff on them and threatening them with a huge tariff. That was a bold, audacious way
01:04:09
to deal with Putin. So, I give Trump a ton of credit for trying to make peace
01:04:15
here. And Putin has been, Hold on, let me just finish. And Putin has been absolutely humiliated. He can't even get
01:04:22
to Kev, let alone take over Finland or Poland. And this has cost Russia, their
01:04:28
greatest customer, which is the EU, Germany. These people are never going to buy his oil again. Not after what
01:04:34
happened here. And that you can give a lot of credit to Trump because he told
01:04:40
them when they built their oil pipelines that the Germans were lunatics for doing that and for creating a massive
01:04:49
revenue stream for a dictator who is in my mind a war criminal. What he did in
01:04:54
invading Ukraine makes him a war criminal. What he did in kidnapping these children makes him a war criminal.
01:05:00
I think it's awesome that Trump is doing this intervention even if it has a 5 or
01:05:05
10% chance of working and then making the NATO alliance pay their fair share
01:05:11
and selling them more weapons. I think also brilliant. So I I give Trump a lot of credit here. He's aligned exactly
01:05:17
what I said we should be doing, which is holding dictators who invade other countries accountable for it. And he's
01:05:24
added to it the fact that he can connect with people. So I give him a ton of credit for it, Zach. I know that's maybe not the answer you want, but that's how
01:05:30
I look. I think you use this highly moralistic language and you engage in a lot of name calling and I actually think
01:05:35
that's which one which name is inaccurate, please. Dictator or war criminal? Well, look, you're complimenting Trump
01:05:42
for engaging in diplomacy with Putin, but then at the same time, you want to call him a dictator and war criminal,
01:05:47
and that's not going to be conducive to actually trying to reach a peace agreement. Now, it's fine. But I'm not doing the negotiation. If I was doing the negotiation, I wouldn't
01:05:53
come in and say, "Hey, dictator, war criminal, let's fight for peace." I'm giving you my personal belief person not
01:05:59
negotiating. So you're praising and you're praising Trump for increasing the pressure and leverage that he has with
01:06:05
the Russians which I think is fine. My question for you is would you increase the pressure or leverage with respect to
01:06:11
Zalinski? So for example would you tell Zalinski in no uncertain terms listen
01:06:17
stop demanding to be part of NATO because it's not happening. In fact the president has done that. Uh what about
01:06:23
um yeah the the answer to that question is yes. I would say listen, it's not realistic to join NATO. You can get some
01:06:28
security guarantees. There's sort of talk of this NATO light. So, I would agree with that. I would say
01:06:34
listen, we're going to take and I said this on a previous episode, we should just take off NATO inclusion for like 20
01:06:40
years. Okay. What about territorial concessions? I think that's a decision Ukraine has to
01:06:46
make. We should encourage them to make whatever decision is best for them. But if they want to keep fighting this
01:06:52
thing, that's going to be up to their people to decide if they want to fight for their land. Well, the people have said they don't
01:06:58
want to keep the the problem you have right now is that 70% of Ukrainians say they don't want to keep fighting.
01:07:04
They're ready. Sounds like they're ready to make concessions. Yeah. So, it sounds like Zilinsky should listen to his people. Yes.
01:07:09
That's his decision to make. I think he has sovereignty and the people get to make that decision in his country. Well, but the the problem you have is
01:07:16
it's not just Zilinsky, right? It's his ruling click. They have canceled
01:07:21
elections and they will remain in power as long as the war continues. So they there's a conflict of interest there and
01:07:27
there's a lot of money flowing into Ukraine because of the war. So what if the ruling elite wants to keep the war
01:07:32
going forever while the people want it to stop? Yeah. They're going to face a revolution
01:07:37
right quick. And so I think they have to take the
01:07:42
citizens of Ukraine into account. And it's a tough decision for them to make. But it's not our decision to make for
01:07:48
them. Is that a reasonable position? It sounds like a reasonable position. I think it's reasonable. Yeah. I mean, I don't I look, at the end of the day, the
01:07:55
Ukrainians and the Russians have to agree. Yes. And I I think that of of the major parties, I think President Trump cares
01:08:02
the most about peace. I mean, I think he is pushing the hardest for there to be a peace deal. I I I you know, I know people are like a
01:08:09
little flabbergasted that I really believe that Trump is great at this. I think he's great at this. He is great at
01:08:16
negotiating with difficult people and I think he's going to get it done. I think
01:08:22
he's got a 50-50 chance of getting this done and I think other people didn't even admit it. Just admit it. You like them.
01:08:29
You really like him. It's not about whether I personally like Trump or not.
01:08:34
It has nothing to do with that. I think I I call balls and strikes here. It's all balls and strikes for me. No, no, no. You You're in like with him.
01:08:41
You may be in love with him. I loved it. I loved it. love with my guy, Vice President J.
01:08:47
Wait, wait, wait. And you you loved it when he said, "Even Jason, you loved it." Well, I thought it was hilarious as a
01:08:53
troll. How many people did you send that link to? Be honest. I just tweeted it. I didn't send it to
01:08:58
anybody. I tweeted it. Okay. So, everybody a million people. I mean, it was a it's a it's a surreal
01:09:05
funny moment and a great troll. Is it the high It's not a troll. It's not a troll. I mean, it was a troll Sax's part. I
01:09:11
think I think Saxs may have encouraged it. It's an incredible thing that you got. Let's keep these great debates going
01:09:18
here on the All-In podcast. A platform for important discussions. Another amazing episode summer months uh coming
01:09:25
to a close and we'll see you all in Los Angeles for the fourth edition of the
01:09:32
Allin Summit. Back to the office next week. Back to the office. Love you guys. Back to the office and then back to the
01:09:37
grind. Summer has ended. Summer 2025. So sad. come way too soon.
01:09:42
Way too soon. Can't believe it's over. That's ridiculous. The only thing that I is giving me some hope is that ski
01:09:48
season is is going to be coming. You know, when your kids like I Sax, you can relate to this. Actually, Jason,
01:09:53
your kids are pretty old, too. The summers go by so quick and it's like you just start to see like they are Saxs,
01:09:59
what what are you like? I am now 18 months from my oldest leaving the nest. It's the It's the craziest.
01:10:05
Same here. Oh my god. It's so I can't deal with it. My son sits for his ACT in like 3 weeks.
01:10:12
He's he's getting his driver's license in a week. Are you sad about it? Are you feeling melancholy, like leaving the nest kind
01:10:18
of thing, or are you excited for that new chapter? I feel like all of my kids deserve to have their own adventure.
01:10:24
And so what I tell my son is like, "Listen, you're packing your bags, you're building your little toolkit, you're about to leave, and you're just
01:10:30
going to go on an adventure." And I'm so happy for him. But man, yeah, guts. My oldest is applying to colleges right
01:10:36
now. Oh my god. Oh my god. All right everybody, another amazing episode. All right, love you besties and we'll see
01:10:41
you in Los Angeles in Summit. Love you boys. See you next week.
01:10:46
We'll let your winners ride. Rainman David
01:10:53
and we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you.
01:10:59
[Music]
01:11:06
Besties are gone. That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway.
01:11:14
Oh man, my dasher will meet the endless. You should all just get a room and just have like one big huge orgy cuz they're
01:11:20
all just useless. It's like this like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.
01:11:27
wet your feet. We need to get merch.
01:11:34
[Music] I'm going all in.
