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All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the AllIn podcast. In the news, in your
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feed. We're ready to go. We've got the original quartet here. The band's back together. All right. First up on the
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docket. A code red has been called by Sam Alman. He sent a memo on Monday. He
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told employees to stop working on side quests, you know, like ads, etc., and
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focus on the core chat. GPT, the core experience. Make it faster. make it better. And I think we all know why
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because Gemini and Grock and Claude from Anthropic have been crushing it. Chat
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GPT5, let's call it what it is, was a bit of a flop. It didn't perform to expectations. We discussed that a couple
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of weeks ago or months ago. Anthropic is beating OpenAI in enterprise revenue
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starting this summer. And I talked about how, you know, previous episodes on the streets. I'm seeing more startups want
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to use Anthropic API and also Google Gemini's API and and
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they don't essentially trust Open AI to not steal their business. So, it's big
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changes right now. Here is a chart based on data from July. Most of Anthropics
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revenue here is corporate. Most of OpenAI's as everybody knows is consumer.
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And here's another chart. OpenAI's new infrastructure deals versus revenue and this is just for 2025 alone. A lot of
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deals being made, but competition is fierce. Chimath, your thoughts here on
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the game on the field. Code red for people who don't know in our industry is when everybody reports to the office and
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gets focused on one thing. And uh that's apparently what Sam's doing. How do you
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interpret it? Look, I think that there are two things. Let's do the strategic lens and then the tactical lens. the strategic lens is
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that this is an incredibly vibrant and dynamic market and I think it's too
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difficult and too early to pick winners other than at the silicon layer where largely that die has been cast. I think
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that it's going to grow. So we can talk about how there'll be more competition but it's roughly Nvidia plus AMD plus
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Google plus a bunch of inference silicon. So that's sort of that market but above it at the model market. It
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reminds me, frankly, a lot of when we were building Facebook. I remember sitting around our senior executive
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team, six of us, looking at MySpace, who was an order of magnitude bigger than us. And at some point, we were like, you
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know what, our product is just fundamentally better than theirs. And they had 100 million plus users and we
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had sort of 15. But we knew that we were eventually going to beat them. Nobody
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else knew. And I feel like this market is similarly evolving, which is that you
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have these early winners, but there's still so much work to do. There's still so many consumer expectations to define
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that it's too early to know who's going to win. And ultimately, what we are learning, especially as all these
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markets converge, is that distribution still matters a ton, which favors Google. It favors Meta, although Meta's
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quite behind. And now it will still favor OpenAI because they have 800 million monthly activives. So then the
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tactical thing is what do you do knowing that this dynamic is set up to have a lot of competition and I think what you
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have to do is streamline the focus and try to make a crisis out of every opportunity because look the companies
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tend to just grow this positive entropy tends to cause people to hire at every
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level and you look around and there's thousands of people that you didn't know even six months ago. And so I think if
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Sam can use different points in time to tighten the core focus, they'll be
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better off. And I think that is what Google did a while back. If you remember the whole black George Washington thing,
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they were able to use that as a rallying cry to streamline the organization and
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to focus and to get their best and smartest people to work on the most highly leveraged tasks. And what you see
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now is an incredible overperformance from where they were. I've said this before, but Gemini is is incredible. So,
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I think that that's what's happening. Too early to call. It's a three or four horse race and Sam needs to batten down
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the hatches. And I think he used this opportunity to stop a bunch of peripheral activities. Yeah. And as we
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saw, Sergey called a personal code red. He said, "I have to get in the office. I have to inspire everybody because this
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is existential for us if we lose the search franchise, which they
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haven't. The code red works." So David Freeberg, maybe you could discuss a little bit code red as a management
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technique. You were at Google. I don't know if they were calling code reds back then because you didn't have any competition, but we're in a much
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different world here. This is the most competitive thing we've ever seen in our lifetimes. I think Google had an early
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lead in search and then Microsoft launched and it formed a code red model
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at Google that was called Project Canada as the code word for Microsoft. And there was a weekly war room meeting and
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a whole bunch of strategy and product decision-making that was driven around the impending threat from Microsoft
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because Microsoft was such a big behemoth, so well capitalized, had incredible engineering talent. Part of
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the response was to set up an office in Kirkland to recruit engineers up in
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Seattle to aggressively grow that base. There was a whole bunch of tactics that emerged from the strategic lens of
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project Canada. It is a very powerful method. It is how the United States got to the moon in a race with Russia. It is
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how we are now in a race for supremacy in technology and AI against China.
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Having an impending threat is a very strong motivational tactic. It is a very focusing setting and it drives
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innovation. And so we'll see what happens. Chat GPT
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was basically the market monopoly in AI or LLM chat interface and it only had
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one way to go which was down. Google I think at this point has roughly 14%. So here you can see OpenAI is on the
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decline. Obviously a little over a year ago they were at 90% plus market share in generative AI traffic and today
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Gemini is at 14 15%. the depth, the flywheel that Google has built gives
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them such extraordinary advantage. Okay, let's go to Emperor Palpatine. Uh, this is coming together as exactly as
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you orchestrated you as thesar of AI and crypto. Thank you for your service,
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civil servant David Sachs. You wanted to see vibrant competition. Well, here we have it. Assess the playing field as you
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see it from DC. Well, first of all, let me give credit to Sam for calling this code red,
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breaking the glass, and pulling the the alarm. I think it's so easy for CEOs in
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general to engage in happy talk and ignore problems, especially when
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discussing them is going to create a PR story that they don't like. And I do
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think one of the things that's unique about Silicon Valley is just that the founders and CEOs do treat the situation
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of their companies in a more existential way because we actually do have tremendous competition. And so anytime I
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think a CEO is willing to again take a bad PR story in order to focus their troops on a real business problem, I
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think they deserve credit for it because I think when you look at the rest of the Fortune 500, you know, these CEOs are
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just kind of managing PR all the time. Now with respect to the ecosystem as a
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whole, it is very competitive and I think we've got five major companies and they all have their strengths. So chat
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GPT is the leader in consumer. They have something like 80% market share in
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consumer use of LLM chatbots. But then Google came out with their new Gemini 3
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and they were starting to take share based on the strength of Gemini 3 and the integration it has obviously within
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Google search cuz it's very easy for people to discover it when they do a Google search and now they're seeing that it's actually pretty good. So they
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were starting to take share from Chat GBT and I think that's why Sam issued the code red. Then you've got anthropic
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like you mentioned where I don't particularly love what I've called their regulatory capture strategy, but I have to acknowledge their products are very
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good. Everybody seems to say that they have the best coding assistant and they're carving out a very lucrative
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niche in enterprise. And then you've got XAI which I think is the best at current
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events because of the integration with X. And also Elon seems to be able to
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scale his data center, his training cluster the fastest. He's got, you know, he had Colossus one, now he's got
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Colossus 2, and that portends good things for Grock 5. He's going to be
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trained on the largest cluster of Blackwells. So, in any event, you got all these companies that are doing
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pretty well. I guess Meta has sort of hit some headwinds, but they're going to continue investing tremendously in AI
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and they've got deep pockets to do it. So, I think that they'll come back. And you know what you see is all these
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companies are kind of leapronging each other. you get a new version and then they sort of leaprog each other in terms of
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the leaderboards are showing that yes saxs when you look at the leaderboard it's constantly Grock comes above Gemini
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Gemini comes there's a lot of leaprogging going on there's a lot of also I'd say specialization now going on in the ways
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that I just mentioned all these companies are developing strengths there's sort of verticals happening
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yes and so I've described this as sort of a a goldilock scenario where you're making a lot of progress in AI but the market
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is remaining very competitive ideally it does not consolidate just to on monopoly player like we've seen in other tech
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markets because then you end up with a big tech company that's got too much power and control. That's not generally
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a great thing for consumers versus China. What does it say versus us versus
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China? That that was the dialogue a year ago. Oh my god, China. Oh my god, China. Where are we at today? Because this is
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impressive this vibrant competition. Well, look, competition brings out the best in the American system. And I think
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that that is what creates the most progress and that's what's going to allow us to win the AI race against
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China. China has a lot of competition too, but they do tend to anoint national champions more. I guess they usually do
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it more after a competition stage. So, you know, maybe it doesn't prevent competition, but look, China's formidable. They got a lot of good AI
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companies, too. And this is going to be a horse race, but again, there's no question that the system for sure. But look, there's no question
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that in the American system, uh, the it's competition that brings out the best. And that's what we're seeing right
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now. Jason, what do you think? Interestingly, I just want to build a little bit on what Freeberg showed. The
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way I'm sort of seeing this is now chat GPT versus the world 36 months ago, chat
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GPT, OpenAI had 100%, right? They started the category as you pointed out correctly, David. And um, their decline
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in market share is increasing in velocity. Uh if we were looking at just 12 months ago, they had 84% of the space
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and uh now they're at 68. So they they've this is accelerating. You
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pointed out Chamath correctly why it's accelerating. Distribution matters. We've talked about it countless times here. Meta is forcing you to use their
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AI search, which is pretty bad. I'll be honest. every time you do a search on Instagram, it's annoying. But those all
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count as users using the product just like Slack face competition from Microsoft Teams when it bundled. And so
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I just tracked this out and this is what I think is going to happen over the next four years. I think we're going to see
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Open AI go down to about a third of the market and I think the other players are
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going to take two/3s. The reason I think this is because to Sax's point, specialization's happening. If you look
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at Nano Banana, which is the image processing over at um Google, it's
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fantastic. Grock image is fantastic. So, you're going to have four different five different choices for images. You're
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going to have four or five different really credible choices. Now, you have to look also at the competition and what
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Sam is facing. I've known Sam 20 years now. He is a consmate dealmaker, perhaps
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too good at dealmaking. He was incredible at recruiting and his PR game was very strong. Everybody realizes
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that. And look at who he's facing. Freeberg. Elon Agra Sergey and Sundar at Google. Zuckerberg at Meta Dario
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Sati at Microsoft who's his partner who's now his competitor. Elon was his benefactor now his competitor. You got
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the open- source projects, Deepseek, etc. Sachs in China. And then his former
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employees are trying to kill him as well. So you have Ilia doing safe super intelligence which hasn't launched yet
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and Meera doing thinking machine. She's you know obviously was doing all the video stuff. So I think what we're going
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to see here if we're sitting here I don't know next year they're going to be in the next 12 to 24 months under 50%.
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And these companies are explicitly trying to kill open AI. They the amount
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of bad will that Sam has built is colossal and I think it's from doing too
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many deals. And if you look at what he did to Nvidia, Nvidia put out a statement recently that they have the
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option to invest. So we were sitting here two months ago and I know people in the industry were staying up late at night worrying about all these deals Sam
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were was doing. All those deals apparently are coming out that they're options. These weren't real deals. A lot
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of them were options. And so Jensen came out and said, "Hey, we have the opportunity to invest in OpenAI." But
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you remember Sam did that AMD deal the week after he or two weeks after he did the OpenAI deal. A lot of this is
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creating bad feelings. And I think we're at peak OpenAI right now. I said it on
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the show a couple weeks ago. I think the pair trade is to to bet against every it's Chat GPT versus the world. And I
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think the world wins two/3s. They can still be in a good place. I think you're right that this market probably gets split up three or four
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ways. And so the winner probably gets a third of the market. Most other markets that end up in a three or four person
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race ends up in that space. But a third of a market can still be very valuable
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if that market has five or six billion people using it. Absolutely. It's going to be tremendous.
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Yeah. And that can still support a multi-t trillion dollar market cap. So I don't think it's it's by any means a death
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nail for open AI, but it does mean that a lot of these projects probably need to
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get shuttered because you need to just do a few things very very well because consumers will start to split their
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purchasing decisions if you will or their usage decisions across vertical
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things for specific purposes. So yes, I may use Grock image because I love that
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and it's just much better. But then I may use Enthropic for codegen while I use Gemini for deep research and then I
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use chat GPT for conversational search. Yes. Now all of a sudden I'm using all four.
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That's highly realistic that outcome. In fact, I look at my phone now. I try to limit the number of apps on the phone,
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but I have Gemini and Grock as the two anchor apps. Mhm.
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Because I'm so reliant on both of them and I just keep going back and forth between them. Interestingly, I have four. I have Claude also in perplexity
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on my on my desktop. And I go through all four of them. Here's what Google and other folks are planning. They're going
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to take the main revenue stream of OpenAI and they're going to suck the oxygen out of the room and they're going to try to strangle Sam and the team over
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there by making it free. So, right now, if 75% of that metaphor,
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very, very vital, but this is war. This is the greatest battle we've seen since like Netscape versus Microsoft and the
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internet. They're going to make Gemini free for life for the best models.
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That's my prediction for Google and I think Meta will be right behind them. Why? They have the ad network already
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built and they know in that fierce competition which you were part of Chimoth and Freeberg how fierce that
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competition was that duopoly does not want to become a a throppple with Sam. I think this is going to be very analogous
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to what happened with Netscape. People used to pay 50 bucks for a Netscape browser and then the idea when Microsoft
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came in and made it free and uh Chrome became free and Dolphin browser and a million other uh providers. Same thing's
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going to happen to Chat GPT. Right now 80% of the revenue comes from $20 subscriptions. That's going to get
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decimated to zero. I don't think consumers are going to pay for this product just like they won't pay for search and they won't pay for a browser
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because Google and Meta will make it free. I think it's different reason actually. The reason why they will do it,
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yeah, is because they have such an inordinate amount of cash and that cash is valueless on the balance sheet.
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So, you might as well just rip it in. If you look at the companies that have a need to spend money right now, it's
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Google, it's Microsoft, it's Meta, it's Nvidia,
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and maybe Broadcom, but let's just keep Broadcom out of it. But Apple's there, too. And Apple. Yeah.
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All of those companies have so much cash. If you actually look at the DCF of the enterprise value of these businesses, it gets very little credit
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for that cash almost to the point where it's worthless. And so you either need to spend it on M&A, spend it on
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buybacks, or spend it to subsidize a product so that you can maintain your leadership in the broader market. And so
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what you're going to see is these big companies do this capital allocation model in a much more aggressive way. So
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there's only so many share buybacks that these guys can do. they approve 50, 60, 70, 80 billion dollars in buybacks. It
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just doesn't lift the stock price the same way it does when you actually show
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leadership in a product category. Right. So to your point, if you're just going to underwrite a decision, just look at the last 3 weeks of Google's stock
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performance, it basically doubled once we thought that Gemini was incredible. And so
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if you want to make Gemini even more incredible, just get pour another billion users into it. And if that cost
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you 50 billion, it's okay because you'll make a trillion of market cap. It's like a no-brainer. Yeah. And and think about all the
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reinforcement learning that those big players have at scale. I think it's going to be just, by the way, the other the other thing is
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if we're playing conspiracy theorist, I think the reason why Sam did those deals to your point, he is a consumate, very
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talented dealmaker. Yes. is probably because he needed to continue to generate the type of
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momentum required to raise the quantum of capital that he needs. So if you're silent, it's much harder to
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raise a hundred billion dollars and you're shucking and jing and you're just putting a lot of things out there that
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could convince people that there's a level of momentum that's worth underwriting at a much higher valuation. So you have to keep that in mind, too.
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Yes, I think that that is his highlevel, you know, 4D chess. I think Nvidia is
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predicting it now. I think Nvidia is not going to take their option to invest in OpenAI or they're going to really downgrade it 70 80% and they're going to
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allocate it to other players. Freeberg, any final thoughts here as we wrap up on this? What is your B what's your basis for
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that prediction? I think that Nvidia is wants to own more of the other players. I do actually have
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a basis for this. I think that they were very pissed off at the other support he gave to their competitors.
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How do you know they closed that deal? I know a lot of people in the industry.
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You sound like the New York Times. Okay. Well, great segue. Everybody knows. What's your source?
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Everybody reveal my sources say sources say open secret.
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Sources say sorry. I'll just let me just wrap up on the on the and I'll just I'll just echo a little
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bit what Jim said. I don't think that the battle is going to be won and lost on LLMs. I think that there's several
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fronts and we're so early in AI. It's not going to necessarily just be about
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textbased token production. These non-extbased models, the nonLLM
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models, the complexity to them and the differentiation is so much wider than it
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is in LLM. Kind of think about it in I I think about it in terms of like a Holde versus Omaha game. Like the difference
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between the median and the best player in an Omaha game is so significant compared to the median and the best
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player in a hold game because it's just so much more complex. I don't know if you remember this guy Chris Ferguson. He
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used to win every Omaha tournament back in the day because he was one of the first guys to figure it out. So everyone that knew Holde thought that they could
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just step into Omaha and because he figured out how to do Omaha, he just wrecked everyone consistently. Anyway,
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in video for example, right, they use diffusion models and then they also use a transformer architecture and then they
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use these convolutional neural networks to create structure within the frame and continue structure between frames and
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video. There are multiple models that have to interact and work together to render video. So you have to have good
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training. You also have to have unique architecture. And so the amount of differentiation that's possible in video
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AI is I would say this point today so much wider than the differentiation in
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textbased AI like what we see with LLMs. As those things start to become more mainstream, I think that applications
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that we are not necessarily thinking about today are going to become a bigger use case for how we spend our time. And
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that is really when you'll start to see, you know, this horse race start to kind of play out a little bit more differently than it does today where
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everything's all about usage on a chat interface. We're going to look back at that one day. It's going to be the equivalent of everyone on AOL Instant
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Messenger or Yahoo Instant Messenger. It's like, who gives a That's not really where the game's going to be played. While we're speaking, Gemini just
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released Gemini 3. Deep Think is here. So, the race is continuing even as we're
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taping the show. Let me add one more thing which is I don't know just a few months ago on this show maybe it was three months ago maybe it was six months
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ago we were all like giving eulogies for Google I wasn't I was not I took the other side
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well I mean I don't know there are a lot of people were and I I was definitely I think the majority of the industry was I I did take the other side of it yeah
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I think Brag Gurley and uh sorry Brad Gersonner and Bill Gurley were Brad Gurley the bragly show
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bragly show it's one person Brad Gurley definitely were and look and the argument made a lot of sense which
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was this, which is even if you believe that Google's going to come back and have a credible AI product, remember
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they were caught completely flatfooted by this. They figured out the transformer architecture back in 2017, but then they didn't really do anything
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with it and then OpenAI grabbed on to that and then like you showed on that chart, they basically had a 2-year head
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start on LLMs. So, a lot of people were basically saying that this was it for Google
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because obviously LLMs are so much better at web search than the 10 blue links. And moreover, for monetization,
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why would you need to have, you know, ad links or paid links in an LLM world? And
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and I think the point that Brad and Bill were making is again, even if Google catches up, they'll never have the
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dominant position in AI that they have in search. It still might be true. Who
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knows? But the point is just everyone was saying that Google was in deep trouble just I don't know 6 months ago
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and then like you said I think Sergey came back and that gave them a major shot in the arm and they got more
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focused and now they've launched what appears to be the best or one of the
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best models a competitive but look these other companies there's there's a lot of leaprogging going on. I think really importantly it's not just
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about Sergey coming back it's about giving themselves permission to take risk. The reason Google didn't lead into
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AI for years, even though they had the technology sacks, is because they were nervous about cannibalization to search,
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they were nervous about the the quality of the product. They didn't want to release things too early. And then they changed their posture and they became a
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more risk-taking posture. And that gave them the permission to run, which by the way, I would argue is the opposite at
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OpenAI in the last couple months. I used to use advanced voice on chat GPT all the time. I cannot stand it anymore. I
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do not use it. It has basically hedged away all of the value because it tries to be polite. It tries to make sure that
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it's giving you warnings all the time. It doesn't want to give you data because it's scared that it might give you the
00:23:49
wrong data. You can see it used to give you data all the time. I cannot get it to give me numbers anymore. I'm like,
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give me the numbers and it just says these kind of highle arching statements and I'm like that's not what I want. I went over to Gemini. It gave me the
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numbers. And I think that Google's willingness to take risk has really kind of highlighted the difference in posture
00:24:07
in the last year. Chat GPT is now acting and OpenAI has been acting like an incumbent, fearful of losing market
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share and fearful of getting attacked in the media and attacked by consumers for saying the wrong thing. And so they've
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taken this kind of defensive posture that I think has fundamentally damaged the product and the brand. I'm just having a great time thinking
00:24:24
about I'm thinking about Freeberg yelling at his AI assistant in his car. It's like we need to get make a short out of that. Keep going. Well, just
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Google did one other important thing. I mean, in addition to Sergey, there was putting Demis Hassabis in charge of all
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of AI because before I think he was just in charge of Google DeepMind, it was sort of a subset and then they put him
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in charge of the overall and I think that made a huge difference as well. Yeah. And the PI is growing. So, the
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number of searches, the number of queries is increasing dramatically. I think we'll have 20 30 times the amount
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of queries being done because the answers are better. It's not just queries. It's It's not just queries. This is my point. It's like more than
00:25:01
you're not using it to do search anymore, right? You're using it to watch video. You're using it to book flights.
00:25:07
Yeah. The agentic stuff. I'm putting that all together. So, the amount of utility that you can get from it is so
00:25:13
great that it's going to go 20x. The same thing's happening with ride sharing. It's more than just search is the whole
00:25:20
point. This has now become such an instrumental part of everything we do in our lives and it's going to take over
00:25:25
more of how we spend our time in our lives that it's not just about search anymore. It's a whole new paradigm.
00:25:30
The pie will be 20 times bigger. Let me ask you a very question. Do you think that OpenAI's sort of more conservative risk posture, do you think
00:25:37
it's a function of the fact that whether by luck or design they decided that the
00:25:43
consumer market was sort of their core market? Whereas you look at something like Anthropic, right, and they've carved out enterprise, but if you're a
00:25:50
consumer product, there's so many more things you have to address and you're going to be attacked at so
00:25:56
many more different ways. Yeah. And and by being the market incumbent, it actually ended up creating a fantastic foil for Google because they
00:26:02
started getting all of the arrows and slings from the media about health advice and suicides and hallucinations
00:26:10
and sending wrong information and all the risks and damage that that causes. Meanwhile, everyone's ju laughing and
00:26:16
joking about Google and ignoring them. It was more than that. Remember, remember last summer there was the court case where the judge said that they were
00:26:23
guilty of having the monopoly and then he was going to rule on what the remedies were going to be. And I think
00:26:30
that was in what was it September and the judge said that during the summer and then whenever it was that he
00:26:35
ruled on the remedy that they were existentially threatened in their search business and so everything had changed.
00:26:40
Yeah. I mean so the company didn't get broken out. remember they were thinking about whether to spin out Chrome, YouTube. Yeah. All these kind of
00:26:48
in a way no greater blessing has ever happened to Alphabet than OpenAI's rise. And I think
00:26:54
that that rise not only did it create the foil for Google in the monopoly sense, but it also took the attention
00:27:01
away from Google, focused it on Open AI, and that attention fundamentally damaged OpenAI strategic product capabilities
00:27:07
because they had to start to be so much more careful about what they said, how they said it. and it fundamentally
00:27:12
damaged the product. And the opposite was happening at Google at the same time, which is Larry, Sergey, and Sundar being given permission by the board to
00:27:19
take risk, to go hard, to figure this out. And boom. You know, it's amazing how the horse race has changed. Okay, we
00:27:25
had an amazing time in Vegas. I want to thank our friends at the Venetian. You guys were the best host we could have
00:27:31
ever imagined. What VIP treatment you gave the besties and our friends and partners. And we had a great interview
00:27:38
with Molly Bloom from Molly's Game, the movie, etc. Thanks to our partners, Oracle, OKX, and the New York Stock
00:27:45
Exchange for partnering with us on a very successful F1 weekend in Vegas. And
00:27:51
we had a great lunch with Oracle. Congrats to them on Red Bull's Big Win in Vegas and an amazing dinner with OKX
00:28:00
where my new bestie, Jose Andreas, the chef, came from Bizaarre Meats and he
00:28:05
cooked for us. He hung out with us. He play a little cards with us. He's just a true gentleman in a mench. Uh looking
00:28:11
forward to hanging out with Jose Andreas a little more in the future. All right, there's another thing that went on this weekend. Big tech story and at the risk
00:28:19
of being a little naval gazing here. We're going to cover it. The New York Times versus Mr. David Sachs. On Sunday,
00:28:26
the New York Times published an article titled Silicon Valley's man in the White House is benefiting himself and his
00:28:32
friends. Saxs are obviously the man they're referring to. Five reporters worked on this story for approximately 5
00:28:37
months is what we hear and the story attempted to frame you Sachs as conflicted first that your firm Craft
00:28:43
has investments in companies. New York Times key claim quote Mr. Saxs has
00:28:48
positioned himself to personally benefit. He has 78 tech investments including at least 449 stakes in
00:28:54
companies with ties to artificial intelligence. And for background Sachs Elon you all
00:29:00
joined as special government employees SGES. These are different than cabinet members in a bunch of different ways.
00:29:06
Basically, they can't work more than 130 days. They're allowed to split time between their day jobs in DC.
00:29:13
They don't have to be approved by the Senate. And they provide special expertise as Mr. Sachs is doing as the
00:29:18
Zar of crypto and AI. Second major claim, raising the profile of Allin. Quote, "Mr. Sax has raised the profile
00:29:24
of his weekly podcast, All In through his government role and expanded the business, which is super hilarious
00:29:30
because they think our traffic peaked right before the election. Uh, but Saxs, uh, obviously you got a ton of air
00:29:36
cover. People thought the story was biased and a hit job and it fell pretty
00:29:42
flat. What's your take on this? Maybe take us behind take us behind the story.
00:29:48
Well, I think maybe a good place to start is with the reaction to it. Like you said, there was this huge outpouring
00:29:54
of people in Silicon Valley who reacted in a way that showed that they
00:30:00
understood that this story was a hit piece, that it was biased, and I'd say
00:30:05
most importantly, it didn't even live up to its own headline. It didn't prove the thing that they were asserting in the
00:30:10
headline. And so, everyone could just see on its face that it was a hatchet job. And so, everyone started reacting
00:30:16
that way. And it was nice to kind of get that outpouring of support from so many different people in Silicon Valley,
00:30:21
including many of the companies who we just talked about are so vigorously competing with each other. I mean, I think this might be the only thing that
00:30:27
Sam and Elon have agreed on in the last year. Yeah. Didn't you tell everyone to put these
00:30:33
tweets out? I mean, like, so that that was sort of the next that was the next big lie that the media tried to perpetrate was somehow that
00:30:39
this response was coordinated by me. No. And the reality, by the way, was crazy because you told
00:30:46
me explicitly, "Stand down. I don't need you to do it." And I was like, "Leroy Jenkins." And I just went in and I was like, "I'm tweeting about this
00:30:52
bullshit." No, I never told anyone to do anything except for you guys. And I told you guys not to react to it cuz I didn't want to
00:30:57
striand the story, you know, where you basically draw even more attention to it. That was my media plan. And and then
00:31:03
what happened is the story just went viral anyway because all of Silicon Valley reacted on their own in a
00:31:08
grassroots and authentic way because I think they were actually genuinely offended by how bad the story was, how
00:31:14
ridiculous it was on its face. And so they react and then that became the story. And so this whole coordinated
00:31:20
narrative became in a way part of the the media industry's cover up for itself
00:31:27
like their attempt to explain away why everybody thought that the story was so bad. Let me just say I do think that
00:31:33
this outpouring of support does illustrate something important which is just how much power and respect the New
00:31:40
York Times has lost. You know 10 years ago if the New York Times ran a hit piece on somebody even if other people
00:31:46
didn't like it they wouldn't want to say anything because they'd be afraid that they would be the next target. And that
00:31:53
mystique and that fear has completely broken down. people can kind of see the New York Times for what it is, which is
00:32:00
basically a bunch of political activists who are pretending to be reporters and
00:32:06
essentially they just launder the point of view of their anonymous sources who are basically left-wing Democrats
00:32:14
and try to portray those viewpoints as somehow being neutral or objective
00:32:19
truth, right? Because they're kind of presenting themselves as these neutral arbiters of the truth. And I think
00:32:25
everyone can kind of see through that sham at this point. Yes. The thing they started with was the headline.
00:32:30
And that was the one thing they refused to change no matter how many times we refuted their narrative. You know what
00:32:36
they would do is every couple weeks they'd send us a new fact check. And we would basically debunk it. And we can show you some of those fact checks if
00:32:41
you want to see them to see where the story started and what they're trying to prove. Yeah, let's do that. I think audience
00:32:46
would really and what would happen is every time we would debunk one of their accusations, they would just come back to us with a
00:32:52
new one every couple of weeks. The only fix point in their reporting was this idea that I had to have these conflicts
00:32:59
of interests that were benefiting myself. Let me ask you a question. So, one of
00:33:05
the statements that was made and then Governor Nuome repeated it at Andrew Ross Orcen Steelbook Conference
00:33:10
yesterday is that you did not put all of your investments into a blind trust. You
00:33:16
should have done that is what Newsome said on stage. Can you just address that like and what actions you actually took
00:33:22
when you chose to take the office? What were you legally required to take and maybe why you didn't do a blind trust or
00:33:28
maybe you did? I don't know. Well, no, we looked at that. Sorry, S. Just give me a second. I just want to say this because you're not
00:33:34
going to say this yourself, but I remember when you were going through this, you were so concerned about the
00:33:40
perception of a conflict of interest that you took such extraordinary measures about the degree at which you
00:33:46
were selling things and getting rid of things to make sure that you could do the job cleanly and holy. I watched you
00:33:54
do this and I watched you do something that I thought was so over the top. I'm like, "Holy you really are doing this for the country." And I was so
00:34:01
shocked and surprised by it. And I just want to say that because I've observed it and they still came out with this piece which was so shocking to me given
00:34:07
what you did. So you guys know what I went through because I was LPS and some of your funds and you know that I devested them
00:34:13
which you could argue was above and beyond the call of duty, but I was just trying to avoid any potential conflict. And that I think is the central lie of
00:34:20
this piece. Not only is the piece not true, it's the anti-truth. Yeah. Because the truth is that I devested hundreds of
00:34:26
millions of dollars of positions in promising technology ventures at a substantial cost to my net worth. So not
00:34:32
only is this job not benefiting me, it's actually cost me a lot of money to serve, but I did it because it's an
00:34:38
honor to be asked by the president to serve and it's something I wanted to do and I thought I can make a difference.
00:34:44
So the whole premise here is just false. And the New York Times through its 5 months of investigations knew this, but
00:34:51
they just refused to budge on the premise of their story. Now, to your question here, if you look at one of the
00:34:57
the key paragraphs that Jason, you mentioned is when they they try to mention that I have 449
00:35:04
investments tied to AI. And they say their investigation uncovered this and some of their reporters on podcasts have
00:35:10
tried to portray themselves as Woodward and Bernstein here having uncovered. How did they get this crazy list of
00:35:15
companies? I wonder I disclosed them. They didn't uncover them. I disclosed them. They're in my
00:35:21
available to everyone. They're on the White House website in my ethics letter. So, every government employee, whether you're a full-time or
00:35:27
SG, files disclosures with the government and my ethics letters basically contained these pages and
00:35:34
pages of all these different positions. Now in that ethics letter they said that
00:35:39
I had devested I had initiated or completed devestment of over 99%
00:35:45
of the positions that could pose a conflict for AI and it's in there and
00:35:50
this is where I think you know again they were very deceptive is it was the OG the office of government ethics the
00:35:57
career civil servants the lawyers the accountants at OG who approved that
00:36:02
letter and all the contents of that letter who reviewed all those disclosures and they're the ones who
00:36:07
concluded that I did not have any conflicts. So really what the New York Times' beef is with the career civil
00:36:14
servants at OG. Maybe walk us through what you actually did do. Why did you didn't do the blind trust and and help us get the context
00:36:20
there. So on the blind trust. So it's kind of funny. One of the New York Times reporters was talking about this on a
00:36:25
podcast which is where I think Newsome picked it up from. My ethics lawyer who teaches a course on conflicts of
00:36:31
interest at Harvard said that that reporter should really take his course because he would actually learn something about the the conflicts laws.
00:36:38
The blind trust idea is rarely used and in my case it would not have worked because I have minor children. You can
00:36:44
only use the blind trust to have your kids be beneficiaries if they're adults. That's the way the conflict laws work.
00:36:51
So it just wasn't even applicable in my case. And what I did instead of creating a blind trust is I devested the
00:36:57
positions at great cost said were a conflict at a discount to
00:37:04
their fair market value in the case of my LP interest and all these funds. I devested almost a hundred funds that I
00:37:10
had invested in, venture funds, things like that, angel funds at roughly a 50% discount to their fair
00:37:17
market value because that's insane because well they're private investments, right? And you know that selling an LP interest in a fund,
00:37:22
there's no liquid market for that. So in order to even find a buyer, you have to make it super attractive for them. God.
00:37:28
And then I sold you know XAI, I sold my interest in in Grock and those were all at substantial discounts to the next
00:37:34
round which has now taken place. So joining the government is not a money-making scheme. The simplest way
00:37:39
for me to make more money would have just been to keep doing what I was doing. Yeah. Right. Just go back to the 449. So again,
00:37:45
they're kind of pretending like they did this unbelievable investigation and they find the the 449. Can you just put up
00:37:51
this paragraph on on the screen here? Because really every sentence in this paragraph kind of reveals the sham of
00:37:59
this story. Mr. Sax has positioned himself to personally benefit. Not true. I mean, I was already an investor in all
00:38:06
these companies and I positioned myself to devest. Then it says I had 449 stakes
00:38:12
in companies with ties to artificial intelligence. By the way, that whole phrase ties to is total journalism
00:38:19
weasel words because ties to can mean anything and every company in the economy is going to have ties to
00:38:26
artificial intelligence. And then they said could be aided directly or indirectly. That is not what a conflict
00:38:33
of interest is. The standard is having a direct and predictable effect on an
00:38:39
interest. Not indirect. And there's nothing in that story that shows that I had a direct benefit.
00:38:46
This article has nothing to do with everything you guys just spent all this time talking about. Okay?
00:38:52
There is nothing here. Okay? There was no crime here. There's no smoke here. There's no fire here.
00:38:58
What you did get right though is the headline was the goal. And what is the
00:39:04
goal of that headline? The goal of that headline is to insinuate and to pressure
00:39:10
Sachs, but subtly it's to pressure everyone else that looks like Sachs. Now, what does it mean to look like
00:39:16
Sachs? It's not just about Republican folks. This could be a Democratic person
00:39:21
as well in the future. You're in industry. You know something very specific. You've done very well applying
00:39:27
that knowledge. Now all of a sudden you're in a position where you could go and positively impact the trajectory of
00:39:34
the United States. You're asked by the then sitting president of the United States to do something. What this
00:39:39
article does is it tries to intimidate those kinds of people to say, "Wow, this
00:39:45
is not worth it. This is just too much of a headache." The whole point was the headline and the whole point was to get
00:39:51
enough chatter about the headline so that people like Sachs and then other people in the future just say, "You know
00:39:56
what? I'm not going to try this." And what do they want instead? What they want
00:40:02
instead are people that they can work with very closely and ultimately co-opt. If you look at people like Zoron Mumdani
00:40:10
who's beloved by the New York Times or if you look at Lena Khan who's beloved by the New York Times as well, what's
00:40:16
the through line? It's a total and complete lack of experience. And so what you're creating is essentially a very
00:40:24
simple litmus test. If you have experience, we're going to paint you as conflicted. So stay away. But if you're
00:40:30
completely inexperienced and have no experience whatsoever, have never done anything and you're probably going to
00:40:35
screw it up. but at least you'll be in our pocket. We'll work with you and so we will leave you alone. That is the
00:40:41
point of this article and that is what is on trial here. And I think what we all need to do is understand that simple
00:40:48
thing and push back on it. Not just if you're a Republican, but also if you're a Democrat because there are tons of
00:40:54
really smart people on both sides that will eventually be asked to do something for the United States and you need to
00:41:00
ignore the idiots at the New York Times and do it. Yeah, this is well said and this literally was going to be the the
00:41:06
point I was going to make as well, which is we're we're setting up two worlds. Do you want otherwise you will only Exactly. You'll
00:41:13
only have inexperienced morons in the government even help. It doesn't. And here's ex such a good
00:41:20
point that we have a choice right now. Do we want to have lawyers and academics
00:41:25
with no experience in the real world setting policy in Washington DC or do you want to have experts? Do you want
00:41:32
more Mike Bloombergs? Do you want more Jeff Bezos, more David Sachs, more Bessant, also a Democrat? Lutnik, also
00:41:39
previously a Democrat. We want the smartest people in Washington DC. That's what the founders wanted. The founding
00:41:46
fathers of this country wanted people to do short stints. We want short stints. We don't want career politicians like
00:41:52
Nancy Pelosi or, you know, Mitch McConnell in there for 30, 40, 600
00:41:57
years. Like literally these people are like look like zombies in Washington DC.
00:42:04
They're glitching out. We want people in their prime of their careers to go in there chimoff like you're saying and
00:42:10
kick ass for us for four or eight years and then come back. By the way, everybody benefits when you go to
00:42:17
Washington DC and you make some connections. Of course, when the Clintons left office, what did they do? Clinton Foundation book deals, Obama's
00:42:25
book deals, Netflix deals. Everybody gets a little shine when they come out. That's natural when you come out. But we
00:42:30
want the best and brightest there. It's a gift that you went there, Sachs. It's a gift. I think Yeah, we can debate all these
00:42:36
issues. And yes, civil servants should be under scrutiny. Whether it's Lena Khan or USA, people should be held to
00:42:41
account for anything they're doing. You did it right. You went above and beyond. And now they're trying to punish you and they're trying to dissuade the next
00:42:49
group of great Americans from going there. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. Go ahead. There are two quotes from Thomas Jefferson. I'll just read because I
00:42:55
think it's actually very important. He said in a letter in 1788, I apprehend
00:43:02
that the total abandonment of the principle of rotation in the elected offices will end in abuse. And then he
00:43:09
also later said in 1809, nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science,
00:43:16
which is what he was into by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have
00:43:23
lived have forced me to take a part in resisting them and to commit myself on
00:43:28
the boisterous ocean of political passions. The founding fathers to your point Jal
00:43:33
and Chimath were vehemently committed to the United States being a free market,
00:43:39
being a place where people could pursue with absolute liberty their interests in business, in science, in life. And the
00:43:49
action of political office of getting elected to a political office was out of a requirement to serve out of civil
00:43:56
service to this country service to the nation and service to the enablement of the freedoms that allow us to do the
00:44:01
things that we choose and want to do. And if you look at the wealth that's been accumulated by these career
00:44:06
politicians, it is no surprise that they are attacking Sachs and Bessant and Lenik
00:44:14
and Kelly Laughler and all of these other elected or appointed officials in this government who have had success in
00:44:22
private life and who have chosen out of a commitment to patriotism to spend
00:44:29
their time rather than making money in private life. they have enough money but
00:44:34
to try and get the government and the country on the track that they hope it will go on. And I think that that is the
00:44:40
key difference between those who see this article for what it is and those
00:44:45
who read it to reaffirm their I would say violent opposition to what is this
00:44:52
current administration and the challenge that's ahead. So, I think it's a real roar shock test when you read these
00:44:59
articles and you look at Sachs and others in this administration and the choices that they've made to say, are
00:45:04
they doing it to grift or are they doing it because they don't need to grift? Let me just also say this, proof is in the
00:45:10
pudding. If we send experts to Washington DC, if you look at Sax's early track record, you got the stable
00:45:17
coin stuff done. We just talked about how competitive the AI market is. We
00:45:23
talked about building more energy. This, you know, and again, I disagree with a lot of the things in the Trump
00:45:28
administration. The thing I don't disagree with and I fully endorse is the experts and the great job they're doing.
00:45:34
Howard Lutnick's crushing it. You're crushing it. All these regulations that you've gotten done early and often are
00:45:41
making crypto legal, a legal framework for crypto, which by the way, the last two administrations, the 45th and the
00:45:47
46th didn't get done. You got it done in six months, right? There's already a track record here. If you send experts,
00:45:52
they'll get expert done on time on on on startup speed. So like what? Let's talk
00:45:59
about the results as well. Yeah. I mean, look, they don't want the results. I mean, they consider the results to be a negative. And what
00:46:04
they're trying to do is criminalize policy disagreements. That's really what's going on. Now, at one point, my
00:46:10
comm's person who was dealing with the New York Times asked them, you know, what friends are you talking about? Like what friends did he benefit? And they
00:46:17
couldn't name a specific one. I think this is why you guys why they mentioned all in tequila and the all-in summit is
00:46:23
I think maybe they're trying to portray you guys as the friends who benefited somehow we sold more say I summit. Let me just say one thing on allin. We
00:46:29
can't get speakers to come on the show because of the association with the Trump administration. We lost money on
00:46:34
that event in June that I spent 12 days of my life working on. It was a pain in my ass. There was no personal benefit to
00:46:40
us for any of this. There's no grifting going on. It's honestly a pain in the ass. We do it for Sachs because he
00:46:46
wanted us to help him out with putting that event on. Saxs, now you're part time on the show. We have You're here.
00:46:52
From the get- go, it was a nonprofit event. We did not sell tickets. We gave them all away for free. If we wanted to
00:46:57
make money, you sell tickets. We didn't do that. Two sponsors that put money in to help defay the cost cuz we spent like a
00:47:02
million plus dollars on this thing. They got their logo on the video. Not even in the live event. It was just on the video
00:47:08
when we put it on YouTube, which was our Disc. Let's move on. Disgot the odd to the New York Times. But there's no benefit to all in.
00:47:14
There's no benefit to all in. and and and the fact that they had to throw that in kind of show if you ask me, but yeah, I concur.
00:47:19
It's because they kitchen sink this thing to try and create the illusion that there was something there.
00:47:26
All right. So, we knew this would take over the show because we're all hot onto the collar and we all know you're doing
00:47:31
a great job there. We want more experts. The job description is to have us win AI. Yes, that's what they're accusing me of
00:47:37
is basically doing my job. Congratulations. You did a great job and now we're going to lie about you in the New York Times. But you're friends with
00:47:43
Jensen Hang and now Jensen can sell chips. Oh my god. Do you want to show the fact check? It's
00:47:49
so crazy. It's crazy. The fact check. This guy is the CEO of the largest company in the world for years.
00:47:56
He's been meticulously designing these chips for 30 years. Before Before Sax
00:48:01
could even spell H100, he had made them for gamers. He was making video game
00:48:06
cards ago. Okay, wait. We got I got to show this an example of how dishonest they are. So, they would send us these fact checks
00:48:12
every couple weeks. Okay. Okay. So, here's the real email, Sachs. They were sending you bullet point after
00:48:19
bullet points. This section starts at bullet point number 33. It's obviously one of many emails you got.
00:48:25
What they do in these fact checks is they basically take the story that they're planning to write and just break it up into chunks and then they give you
00:48:31
like 24 hours to respond to each sentence or paragraph and say whether you know you agree or disagree with it
00:48:37
and give you the chance to make a statement. That's what a fact check is. So this is the story they were planning on writing which is in the spring Sax
00:48:44
had dinner with Nvidia CEO Jensen Wong in Washington. They discussed several foreign export issues. During the dinner
00:48:50
Sax heard a convincing counterargument that selling American chips to rivals including China will get those nations
00:48:56
hooked on US tech. Sachs then took that argument to the White House and pushed officials to eliminate binary
00:49:02
restrictions etc etc. There's just one problem with this narrative. There was no such dinner.
00:49:08
We checked my schedule. They made up the dinner. No, we checked everyone's schedules. There is no dinner. So, they've got a
00:49:13
source who's just making this up. And how does the New York Times respond? They just delete the dinner, but they
00:49:19
don't delete any other part of this. But if your source has already been caught fabricating a dinner at which this
00:49:26
conversation supposedly took place, it's totally discredited. They're trying to intimidate you. They kind of create this insinuation
00:49:32
that somehow I'm being influenced through friendships. But then it turns out that those
00:49:37
friendships don't even exist. I mean, they're just people I met after I joined the administration in a lot of cases.
00:49:43
So, in any event, look, I think the audience of the show knows my views on AI because I've been publicly advocating
00:49:49
for them for a past year. And you've had scrutiny. We ask you hard questions every week here. We bust your chops and and force you to explain these
00:49:56
positions and and we uh we we stress test them with you and the audience stress testes them. That's that's like a gift to the American people. And I think
00:50:03
it's very hard for people to contemplate the idea that folks who are
00:50:08
significantly wealthy don't actually need to self-deal. Like they just don't need it. And the
00:50:17
truth is the folks who are trying to build a career in politics are the ones
00:50:23
who are necessarily going to self-deal because that's the path to wealth for them. And if you've already found your
00:50:30
found your path to wealth, you don't need to self-deal. And I think it's just so hard for people to gro that.
00:50:35
Yeah. It's hard to understand that somebody is losing a massive amount of money serving their country. I for one thank you for
00:50:42
losing all of his money and going and serving the country. I'm very proud. Even if people don't agree with your politics, even if I don't agree with
00:50:48
everything you say or do, Saxs, uh again, I never doubt your integrity and your intentions. And I never once
00:50:55
thought that you would be someone who would ever selfdeal or engage in any sort of grift or corruption. And I'll
00:51:01
say that just personally having known you for a very long time. Great. I appreciate that. Thank you. I'm mad at you because you didn't sell
00:51:07
me everything at 50% discount. Yeah. Where's the first time I heard it? I was
00:51:13
I've been so angry this whole clip thinking what what where was my call?
00:51:19
Oh my god. I would have given you 55%. Give it to me. Hey, I would have bought it.
00:51:24
Another story that's been uh trending is the uh new poverty line and some of
00:51:29
these incoming tax laws. Mike Green, an investor and fund manager, went viral last week for claiming the US poverty
00:51:36
line math is very wrong. Historically, the poverty line has been measured as three times the cost of a minimum food
00:51:43
diet in 1963 adjusted for inflation. Based on that measures, the poverty line for a family is set at $31,000 in 2025.
00:51:52
Green says the real number is over 4x higher at 140,000. He gets that number by factoring the cost of childare which
00:51:59
has surpassed housing as the largest average expense. He says measuring this number for decades has quietly broken
00:52:06
America and it could explain why America's middle class feels poorer despite healthy GDP and historically low
00:52:13
unemployment 4.x which we've talked about here. Chimath, your thoughts. I read this I found his claim to be
00:52:19
pretty shocking. So, I just I wanted to dig into it. That's why I asked that we talked about it. Nick, you can probably link to it, but yeah, this thing went
00:52:26
viral. And basically, it's exactly what you said, Jason. Food costs used to be a
00:52:31
third of living costs. And so, food used to cost 10,000. You would multiply it by three and say, well, the total cost of
00:52:37
living is 33,000. That's the poverty line. And then what the government did
00:52:42
was they created a whole bunch of staircase incentives to get people from
00:52:47
about 33,000 to about 2x that number to about 65,000.
00:52:53
And then after that you were mostly on your own where there were no real benefits like SNAP or other things.
00:52:59
But what this person was saying is like hey hold on a second food costs are now five or 6%. And so if you gross it up
00:53:06
for the other components, shouldn't the poverty line be something closer to 140k? And that's a shocking claim. And
00:53:14
so I just spent a little bit of time looking into it. Now he has subsequently
00:53:19
come back and refined some of the things he said. I think he may have written it in a heated moment. So for example, when
00:53:26
he looked at that number, he wasn't looking at national averages. He was looking at a bunch of data from a
00:53:32
high-cost suburb of New York City. I think it was like Essex County. And so if you look at the food costs plus
00:53:38
transportation plus energy plus housing plus child care in other places that are
00:53:44
more a median American city. The example that I think other people were using was
00:53:51
Lynchburg, Virginia, just as an example. It does change pretty drastically. You can use this thing called the MIT living
00:53:57
wage calculator which we did. And if you are in Lynchburg, Virginia, the income required for a family of four to meet
00:54:04
all expenses there is not 140k, but it's about 93k. That's still quite a big difference. And when you double click
00:54:10
into where these variances come, a lot of it looks like it's around housing and childare. And I didn't depreciate how
00:54:16
much and how expensive child care has actually become from anywhere between$1 to $3,000
00:54:23
per month, which is obviously a lot of money. The other thing is that his
00:54:29
original article was claiming that if you're above 33K but under 65K, you're
00:54:34
actually better off staying at 33 because every time you go up, you actually lose a benefit. So the net
00:54:41
effect is that you are becoming poorer. And it turns out that that math was actually false. When you calculate the net resources, meaning income plus
00:54:48
benefits minus taxes and expenses, a family
00:54:53
actually as they step up the staircase does earn more in disposable resources
00:54:59
than a family that's earning less. There is a very specific part of though
00:55:05
what he said which I think we should focus on which is there is an area
00:55:10
between $45,000 a year and $63,000 a year which actually looks like a bit of
00:55:17
a stagnation zone. So to the extent that one is to read this article,
00:55:23
take away the kind of the buzzy title and whatnot, the thing that is important
00:55:28
is to narrowly focus on this one issue, which is that we do have some policy failures in this zone where earning an
00:55:36
extra dollar often results in losing a dollar of benefits like SNAP and other things. But that's a good thing to know
00:55:43
because now we can narrowly say okay what are states and what can the federal government do for people in just this
00:55:49
part of the valley this sort of like death valley. The last thing is the article was saying look there is no real
00:55:56
middle class. There are the people that are above 140k and then there's everybody else in poverty. And if you
00:56:03
look at the census data and you look at the percentage of Americans that are struggling, those that earn between 100
00:56:10
and 200% of poverty, that percentage has actually fallen. So the good news is the American economy seems to be doing a
00:56:17
good job of not just getting people out of poverty, but getting people out of that struggling bracket, out of that
00:56:23
death valley, and into a place where they're making 200% of that poverty
00:56:29
line. So they're moving up. So the article was important because I do think it starts to say, look, this
00:56:35
affordability thing has become a buzzword. A lot of people on the left and the right are using it to try to
00:56:41
implement and affect policy. It's really important for us to be grounded in the
00:56:46
facts of it. And the facts are that child care costs have become an overwhelming burden for many families.
00:56:53
We probably need to figure out a way to deal with that. Housing costs are out of control. For younger people, student
00:56:58
debt is problematic. But on the other side, the American economy still does an
00:57:04
incredible job of getting people from those lower rungs to multiple hundred
00:57:09
percentages of that poverty line to get them on the way. And we just need to figure out how to push people up that
00:57:15
staircase faster. So, and it feels like this dovetailes cham with a discussion we had a couple of weeks ago when a
00:57:21
viral clip of Ben Shapiro talking about, hey, just opt out of New York City, opt out of San Francisco, and this whole
00:57:27
thing looks completely different. You know, the the idea of somebody who is up
00:57:33
and coming living in Manhattan or San Francisco is a bit crazy. And in other countries, we don't look at living in
00:57:39
Paris or Hong Kong, you know, or Dubai as like that's where you start your
00:57:44
career and you live in the the city center. Yeah. Freeberg, you're saying people
00:57:50
like would move. I'm not sure. The the point I'm making is to define a poverty line for in San Francisco versus
00:58:00
Austin or Houston is incredibly different because the cost of living is
00:58:05
dramatically different. two, three, 4x. You know, the cost of a nanny in San Francisco or New York is dramatically
00:58:11
different than if you live 30 outside of a city center. One of the challenges America faces is
00:58:18
government programs create an anchor. They are a shackle. They hold people back when they were supposed to be
00:58:24
support payments. And the problem with this that this article highlights is that the supposed support payments
00:58:32
actually create an incentive or a challenge in moving up the rung or up the ladder. It's probably the case that
00:58:38
it is a lot easier to move up the income ladder if you're in certain parts of the
00:58:45
country than if you're in most of the country. And so most of the country is stagnating wages, but they still feel
00:58:52
the effects of inflation. And these government programs keep them stuck in the position that they're in. This is
00:58:59
the spiral of socialism. The government programs that are meant
00:59:06
to provide support to people require an increase in taxation. That revenue has
00:59:11
to come from somewhere. that taxation ultimately leads to an attrition of economic value in that
00:59:18
region and then you have to increase taxation more and then you end up in this spiral and we're seeing this now
00:59:26
not just in New York where Mandani is proposing to increase taxes but across the entire West Coast. We talked about
00:59:32
the 5% billionaire tax that's being proposed as a constitutional amendment to go on the ballot in November. There's
00:59:39
also a major challenge underway in Oregon where the governor is now trying to figure out how to keep businesses in the state. The CEO of Columbia
00:59:46
Sportsear, one of the biggest employers in the state, came out this week saying that his adviserss have recommended that
00:59:51
he leave the state. And in Washington, there is a proposed bill right now to
00:59:57
implement a 5% tax on the payroll of employees making over $125,000 per year.
01:00:05
and Microsoft, Amazon, Costco, and some of the other big employers in that state
01:00:10
are now trying to figure out what they should do. And in California, as you guys know, in the last couple of
01:00:16
quarters, Tesla, Chevron, McKessan, Oracle, Charles Schwab, CB Richard
01:00:21
Ellis, Hullet Packard have all left the state. Palanteer, SpaceX, I could go down this list because as the tax burden
01:00:27
becomes too high on those companies and there's an alternative to them in the country, they'll leave. And then you
01:00:32
have this spiral that happens where the people that are in that state say, "Wait a second. There's no jobs. There's no
01:00:39
income gain. We need to increase taxation." And the tax bills get passed. Norway 2022 passed a wealth tax. The
01:00:46
wealth tax was supposed to raise $146 million of incremental revenue per year. Instead, what happened? $54 billion of
01:00:53
net worth left the country. And they actually had a $448 million tax loss.
01:00:58
the taxes declined rather than Did they reverse it afterwards or No, I'm actually not sure the state of
01:01:04
Norway. Microsoft's president Brad Smith has said that tech jobs are going to leave Washington state if this payroll
01:01:10
tax gets passed. And this is the the cycle that's underway. And it starts with the government spending. If we
01:01:15
didn't have the government spending the way it does, where the government's running a deficit, California is now expected to have a$50 billion plus
01:01:21
dollar deficit, then they don't need to increase taxes. And this is the core motivation. Once you're hooked on the
01:01:26
government for some sort of benefit, it's very hard to unhook yourself. It's very hard for a company or a union or an
01:01:32
organization to unhook themselves and it definitionally becomes a spiral. You will not give up that benefit. And so
01:01:39
you have to spend incrementally more and more and more and more and as you raise
01:01:44
taxes, you end up losing the tax base and it becomes a deficit spiral. That's
01:01:49
what leads to socialism. And we have seen it time and again. It's not a big revolution. It's not like we see where
01:01:54
where where you go from socialism to democratic capitalism where you have a
01:01:59
revolution in the streets. Socialism emerges slowly. It's like a quiet sort
01:02:05
of hum and then it becomes a roar and all of a sudden you're a frog in a pot and you don't realize you're being boiled.
01:02:12
Pull this up this clip from this is episode 7 of Allin. I don't think democracies end um with a bang. I think
01:02:19
they end with a whimper. And I think that's been the case historically. And you know, no democracy has uh has lasted
01:02:27
our our democracy in the US has has lasted longer uh than many. Democracies
01:02:33
ultimately enable uh freedom of operation and free markets that um that result in in greater progress than any
01:02:39
other governing system. The problem with progress is that progress is asymmetric. You have some people who progress at a
01:02:46
much greater rate than most. And and it is that delta that motivates the end of
01:02:51
that system ultimately. While everyone in the United States or the average and even the bottom quartile of the
01:02:57
population in the US is better off than they were 50 years ago in terms of income and healthcare and shelter and access to food and access to all these
01:03:03
things. The top 1% of the US is further ahead than the median. And it is that delta that motivates the end of
01:03:08
democracy. And it is that is which is then perceived to be unfair about this governing system. And that ultimately
01:03:14
results in fascism or or socialism. And then fascism results socialism ultimately restricts anyone from
01:03:20
progression. And that's why fascism and socialism ultimately end up in in in some sort of, you know, democratic
01:03:26
outcome. And it is a cycle. And, you know, we're kind of in this, you know, awkward phase of trying to figure out
01:03:31
what the hell we're going to be next. And I don't think that awkward phase um is realized in the next presidential term, but it is going to be realized in
01:03:37
our lifetime. And I think that's where we're headed. Midterms probably going to go to the Democrats in the House. And I think you're seeing Ro Kana, Gavin Esome
01:03:44
yesterday on stage at Dealbook talked about redistributing wealth. Ro Kana is talking about redistributing wealth.
01:03:49
This is becoming the Democrat party line and they're going to end up trying to seize this moment to take these
01:03:55
socialist principles because everyone is feeling the burn. They're feeling the loss of benefits. They're feeling the
01:04:00
lack of progress. They're having a tough time moving up the income ladder and they're having a tough time paying their
01:04:05
bills. And so this is the moment where this democratic socialist movement takes foot. And probably by 2028, the
01:04:12
presidential nominee is going to be not necessarily a self-declared, but probably a referenceable, you know, uh,
01:04:20
socialist. Democrat socialist. Yeah, democrat socialist. I mean, best advice, have two plans. One, a state uh, that is
01:04:28
committed to capitalism. Texas comes to mind. And number two, you kind of have to have a country as a backup plan in
01:04:35
case this goes across the whole country. Have you guys been tracking the California wealth tax? As a former
01:04:40
California resident, I'm curious how you're interpreting these recent moves.
01:04:46
I think we're all seriously thinking about moving out. I mean, it's kind of crazy. But did you see I think Nuome came out
01:04:52
and said that he was going to oppose it. Is that right? But it it doesn't matter because if uh the California voters voted in, it goes
01:04:59
immediately into a Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth here. I think this is a moment to thank
01:05:05
Governor Nome for representing the interests of tech logarchs like us. We really appreciate you coming out against this wealth tax.
01:05:12
Thank you. So thank you. We really appreciate it on behalf of all the techarchs. Thank you
01:05:19
for opposing this wealth tax. In fact, the All-In podcast endorses Gavin Newsome's support of billionaires
01:05:27
and sent to millionaires everywhere. He supports all of us equally, even the
01:05:33
poor sent millionaires and as high as the billionaires and even the deck of billionaires. We have some
01:05:38
Thank you for standing up against the Bernie Sanders AOC wing of the party. Yes. If he it's somebody has to stand up
01:05:44
against this democratic socialism and and Gavin Newsome is the guy. What do you think happens if Fitch just
01:05:49
tax 5% of all net worth and you have a bunch of illquid private assets? What
01:05:56
are you supposed to do? Chaos. Yeah. It's going to be a mess. By the way, what that bill Chimoff says is
01:06:02
you can have a deferral. So, you can actually defer the tax payment, but you
01:06:08
have to have it booked that year. So, well, you you can defer it, but you can defer it into 1/5if payable for a year
01:06:15
for 5 years. So, that's not really a deferral. That's just installments that I think they said to 5 to 7% interest.
01:06:21
Let's just say that we could do a financing for something that we've started, but it just all of a sudden
01:06:27
what is a financing? It's nothing. It's somebody's guess about future value. It's has nothing to do with today's
01:06:33
value. Right. But if a financing for a company all of a sudden would trigger a
01:06:39
bunch of phantom tax that's due right that I I mean I'll be honest, I don't have money sitting around to pay 5% of
01:06:46
an imputed valuation of a company that I'm in the midst of building. Look at what Sach Look at what Sachs just talked about. He had to sell his
01:06:51
private assets at a 50% discount. Oh, I would have to I would have to exact. So, you create this like negative
01:06:57
reflexive downward spiral. And it doesn't it doesn't stop there. So, think about where this goes. So, so
01:07:03
yes, that's a problem for rich people. Great. No one gives a about us. No one gives a about people that have to sell highly valued private stock. But
01:07:11
where does this go? In the proposed billionaire tax, it actually gives power and authority to the California state
01:07:16
legislature that they can actually redo this wealth tax at a different level and
01:07:21
a different rate in the future. Think about what that does. It now gives property seizure rights to the
01:07:28
California state legislature to set a value level. So anyone now that's got over a hundred million net worth and
01:07:34
then it becomes over 10 million and then anyone with a million dollar net worth and the state can take 5% of your assets
01:07:40
every year. very quickly it becomes the process by which socialism and the
01:07:46
socialization of assets that gets seized by the government is realized. So what's the what's the bull work on
01:07:52
this? What how this is why I've been saying for years this is the direction we're headed because the I give you the I give you the victory.
01:07:58
Congrats. But the root cause of it is government spending. I think it's pretty it's pretty straightforward. you just move to a
01:08:03
state that is committed to capital capitalism and but then it becomes a federal decision
01:08:08
and then if that doesn't work you're going to need to have an escape hatch to Dubai. We have a we have a problem in this country and the problem is too much
01:08:15
progress. Too much progress too fast has led to a distribution of capital that is so
01:08:22
asymmetric that Gavin Newsome said on stage yesterday 10% of the population own 2/3 of the assets. That may or may
01:08:29
not seem right to you but that is the reality of what happens when you have progress when you build technology
01:08:34
companies. When you build car companies when you build when America wins globally. You say America, but it's not
01:08:41
all Americans. And this is the point. This is what's going on. Those of us who are on this Zoom and our
01:08:47
cohort of friends are the ones who have mostly benefited from America quote winning.
01:08:54
The rest of America has been left behind. True. And the mechanism and the mechanism for recapture, the mechanism for restoration
01:09:01
of equality as everyone views it is these measures, these voting measures,
01:09:07
these elected officials. Let me give it to you. I understand that's how people feel and it is true that we have this
01:09:12
disparity in wealth. I think the counterargument that most people would make is well what is our unemployment
01:09:19
rate? How many people around the world are trying to get into this country? And what is the status of folks coming up in
01:09:25
this country? If we didn't have the problem with housing and education and healthcare, those are the big three.
01:09:32
That's what I think this is really about. If you solve housing, which was solved in Texas and Florida and Nevada,
01:09:38
they let you build supply. People don't feel as bad about their lot in life, they don't feel as bad about their progress. If we solved tuition and we
01:09:46
paired it, like we've talked about countless times here, and the loans matched the outcomes, we would not have
01:09:52
this. And if people felt didn't feel the fear of going bankrupt from healthcare, I think we would have a much different
01:09:58
country. I think that's what the referendum is going to be in 2028 is those three issues. If you're going to
01:10:04
be president, you got to solve housing and get people out of the way and build housing stock. Number two, you got to give some people some basic health care
01:10:10
so they don't feel they're going to get bankrupt. Number three, they got to fix education. Those are the three horsemen of the apocalypse and socialism.
01:10:18
In my opin, we will solve this problem. I think you're too rational. The way
01:10:23
politics works is you find a group to blame and you blame them and that's how you get elected. The group runs for president.
01:10:29
The group to blame is going to be the tech and the elite. only one of the three four of us that can. So, well, I got a kitchen cabinet, by the
01:10:35
way. We'll just we'll run it as a Fantastic Four. I I'll be the figurehead and then we'll just sit there. Let's solve these three problems. If when I
01:10:41
run for president, I'm going to start 10 new cities with a million houses in each. That's going to be the number one
01:10:47
priority. Number two priority is universal healthcare for everybody using technology. GLPS, Daniel X, 3D scanner,
01:10:54
prunovo, whatever. And then number three, I mean, just trade schools. Let's make trade schools free. just talked
01:11:00
about electricians. We talked about generation tool belt. Let's make trade schools free or make them $20,000. You
01:11:06
can pay it back over 20 years, $1,000 a year, no interest. You know, come up
01:11:12
with that. That's the platform that wins versus let's raise taxes to 60%. Because
01:11:18
you raise taxes 60%, I'll tell you what's going to happen. People going to retire and stop investing in companies. It's not worth it to go to work and give
01:11:24
60 or 70% of your outcome to the government. People will just stop working, which is what happened in
01:11:29
Europe. people just like screw it. I'll just be rich. I'll stop investing. It sucks, man. I think it sucks.
01:11:35
I think there's a clear path out. There is a clear path out. Solve the three big I think. I think look, I think AI is a
01:11:41
path if we get if leverage into the hands of every person in the United States in the world. If we get abundant
01:11:47
free energy through new energy systems and if we can extend human lifespan and
01:11:53
health span, I think those are the three abundance vectors. And if those three vectors hit, I think all bets are off.
01:11:59
and um and we can get out of this nasty spiral. But I do think we have the choice every day. Do we want to go into the enlightenment or do we want to go
01:12:05
into the dark ages? I keep saying that. Let's solve those three big problems. All right, listen. Another amazing episode of the Allin podcast.
01:12:11
I think Jake just announced he's running for president. I'm ask presidentjason.com. Go ahead. Is Jeff Bezos going to be your running
01:12:17
mate? JL is running. He did say Bezos could be your VP. Oh. Um
01:12:23
Oh, no wait. Jamie Diamond and Bezos. Go to boosted. com if you want to buy merch. I got this
01:12:29
great pink hat on the pink hat. Oh, man. We're We're also vested in your success when you didn't
01:12:34
allow any of us to invest in your company. Thanks, bestie. Yeah, we all feel so vested. Uh go I I
01:12:40
supported Freeberg for the last five years, made him famous, and all I got was an Ohalo hat. How about you, Chamal?
01:12:46
You got a quarter the equity? You got a hat? I got a hat. And I invested in his three companies that failed. I got a hat, but
01:12:54
I have no Oh Can you just give us 10 bips each in Ohio so we can end this?
01:12:59
No, I'll take a hat. I'll take a free hat. You'll take the hat or 10 bips. How about five bips in a hat? I'll take a hat. I'll take some advice.
01:13:06
Don't tell people you're running for president. That's my That's my tip for you. I'm being facitious. Can I get a uh Parker? Do you have a mug?
01:13:12
Gentlemen, I got to go. Love you. Take care. All right, everybody. Love you besties. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
01:13:18
We'll let your winners ride.
01:13:25
And it said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you queen of
01:13:33
winners.
01:13:38
Besties are gone. That is my dog taking your driveways.
01:13:46
Oh man. Myasher will eat. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just useless.
01:13:52
It's like this like sexual tension that you just need to release somehow.
01:14:00
Your feet. That's going to be good. We need to get merch. I'm going all in.
01:14:11
I'm going all in.
