All right, everybody, as you know, there was a big verdict that came out today in the Trump trial in New York City. However, it came right after we were taping.
So enjoy this episode. And then at the end, we'll go around the horn and get quick reaction from each of the besties on what they think of the Trump guilty verdict in the New York hush money trial.
And a little update on the market close and tech stocks tanking and after hours trading stick with us man what a week i've had oh you have an intro i smell an intro tell us jacob what kind of weekend you had what kind of week have you incredible you know i got uh you know i've always been a fan of howard stern and uh his agent, called me. He saw the show last week.
This is all true. And they said they want to start a production company.
So I started a production company and I've already got my first show. I've signed my first show, The Pilot.
What is the show? Well, here it is. Let me show you.
Thanks for asking. What you are witnessing is real.
The besties are not actors the cases are real both parties have agreed to settle their disputes here in our forum jay cow production the rain man's court yes law fair on today's show chamob guilty of first degree unbuttoning Friedberg accused of plastic perjury Jason appealing his grifting conviction throwing the book at Thelonious Fauci welcome to the stand Judge David Sachs hot water burn baby that's really good it's a first show from J.C.O.. If I'm the judge, then what does that make you? Are you like the bailiff?

Yeah, I'm kind of like the host.

You know, like I'm the, um,

who's this guy who does American Idol?

Ryan Seacrest. Ryan Seacrest.
I'm like gonna be

the new Ryan Seacrest. That's what they envisioned

for me, and that's my first spin-off show.

So here we go.

We'll let your winners ride.

Rain Man

David Sackett.

And instead, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you, Ben.
I'm the queen of kinwaf. I'm going all in.
There's a lot of news. My inbox is blowing up.
I went over to Threads to see what was going on over there and I got absolutely savage. Threads is like all the hall monitors left one one school like if they took the four hall monitors from every school in the country and you put them all in one place that's threads what is threads is like uh zuckerberg's twitter revenge killer that he created but all the journalists and woke folks went there and then all the conspiracy theories took over x and twitter and like freedom of speech in one place and then the hall monitors in the other but my lord the inbound i'm getting sacks on apparently you're having a party this thursday and uh a couple of people are coming a soiree well it's my having it's my birthday party oh yeah okay so there's a little soiree happening sackss, enlighten the audience.
What are you up to?

We're hosting an event for President Trump.

Used to a spit take.

I'm sorry.

What did you say?

You just put all your water out.

What?

Yeah, we're hosting an event for the once and future president.

45 and soon to be 47. Who's we? As I saw from your own polling data that you tweeted this morning jason god it's so dark it's so dark he's i mean the betting markets are just basically they they seem to have already made their decision the betting markets right and the betting markets they're not always right but they were wrong actually about hillary trump so who knows and polling historically has underestimated Trump's support because people have been reluctant to say they're supporting him for some reason.

So, yeah, things are looking very positive for Trump right now.

But in any event, we're hosting a fundraiser for him.

And he said that he wants to come on the All In Pod at some point.

So we just need to schedule that.

And by the way,

we did this for,

let's not forget.

We did this for RFK jr.

He appeared on the pod.

We did a fundraiser for him.

We did it for fake Ramaswamy came on the pod.

We did a fundraiser for him.

We did it for Dean Phillips.

Yeah,

that's right.

Chris Christie came on and Chris Christie came on.

Although I don't think we technically did a fundraiser,

but we would have.

And we've asked president Biden and we have not heard back.

And when we say we... Sorry, let me just parse that out.
So first of all, who's we? And Chamath, would you host a fundraiser for Biden as well as Trump? Absolutely. Look, here's the thing.
I am an apolitical person who has to make a difficult decision every four years. And I think most of us are like that.
I don't think it's so easy to wake up in the morning and say, oh, I'm clearly a Republican or I'm clearly a Democrat. There's parts of both sides that appeal to me.
And so you have to make these reasoned decisions. And then that gets even more complicated, right? So the most important thing for me is get as many people on in a position to tell their version of the truth so that you can see an unfiltered version of that truth and decide for yourself.
So I was really blown away when I heard Dean Phillips and Bobby, and I thought there's parts of both of those platforms that I agree with, there's parts that I disagree. And the same thing happened when I sat down with Vivek.
I thought that I wouldn't agree with much. I ended up agreeing with a lot.
There's a lot of stuff that Trump, in hindsight, again, as I've said before, that he did, which was really helpful to America. And one big thing, which had he done, frankly, sets up our children, which is these hundred-year bonds and defraying the cost of all of this indebtedness far out into the future.
So there's many things. And I think there's things that Biden has done that I think will look back and say, those were good things that he did.
And then there are things in the future or today that I think that we could disagree with as well. So the point is, I would like this place to be a place where impartiality rules, where we can be on all sides of an issue and just decide what makes the most sense after looking at the facts.
And I would like four years from now, every major political candidate for president to look at all in as the first place. And I think if we can earn that trust and have the integrity to allow all sides to tell a fair story, that is going to be a really powerful thing and an artifact to leave behind for people well in fact rfk believes that we shot him out of a cannon is i think what he said or something and that that we got the sort of candidacy going vivek i think also kind of debuted here in a major way to be clear all in isn't hosting the fundraiser sacks you and chamath are i'm not donating i'm not going freeberg you're not donating i don't know if you're going or not i think you told me you're not going you're not donating or going got it okay you waved his hand um and so i don't know look donating to a local candidate is a individual choice that each person's gonna have to decide if they want to do it right as americans we can do that yeah if you're willing to open your pocket book which i know jason's not something that you're inclined to do very often i mean i i don't i'm not like big into politics and the idea of giving money to politicians to me not my thing you know i have i'd rather invest in the next startup to be totally honest if i'm going to put 50k towards something or god forbid 250k for me i'll put that in a startup that's what i like to do but you know everybody's different and you know for the people who are asking me to not be friends with sax anymore i'm going to be friends with sax forever we love each other besties and he can have a different opinion than me i i'm getting totally absolutely crucified that i'm supporting trump and how could i be friends with sax go yourself sax is my friend we can have a difference of opinion on some topics.
Good for you. That is that maybe you could learn something.
Sorry. Good for you.
Sorry, I'll just say I've heard the same thing. And I told friends and others that have reached out.
Why are you associating yourself with people that are doing a fundraiser for Trump? And I said exactly because I think it's really important that people can have different political interests, different points of view, different beliefs, and still be friends and still have a conversation. If we can model that in any way, I think it moves the needle because this whole thing where you only speak with, only hang out with, only talk to, only have dinner with people that you agree with, I think is exactly what got us in the mess that we're in today.
People need to have a broader perspective. So well said.
And I'll support you guys with whatever, in terms of like being your friends, I'm not going to ever judge you guys in terms of what you believe in or choose to do. We've said this before, but you know, in the end, what do you have? You have your family, you have your children, you have your friends, and hopefully you have work that gives you some purpose.
And in all of that, if there are random people that are judging you for one thing, they'll eventually judge you for another thing. And that is not a path to any sort of contentment.
I've donated to Bobby Kennedy, I've donated to the Democrats massively, and I'll donate to Donald Trump. And if there's an opportunity to talk to President Biden, and really where he's at, I donate to him as well.
And so the point is that I would like to be an organizing principle. And I would like to replace today the places that I don't trust to organize and give unfiltered access to knowledge.
And those things are the mainstream media. And so I'm willing to put my resources behind being that organizing principle.
And I think having a broad cross section of friends who have different political beliefs is actually a useful thing for a lot of these candidates. Because as it turns out, most people are sort of in the middle.
And most people in any given election can be persuaded one way or the other. So the most thing that we could do is get all of them give all of them an opportunity to really tell an unfiltered version of their truth and then let the chips fall where they may that is the right thing to do for america that's what democracy means so this kind of like cajoling and bullying in either side i find really distasteful and very immature.
Yeah, it's not going to work. What's amazing is, I mean, I really haven't gotten any blowback.
You know, there was a question about, people ask me, have you gotten blowback from this thing? And no, not really. I mean, other than the reporter knocking on my door and that kind of stuff, but people really- Same.
It hasn't really created blowback. And I think you guys are getting more more blowback and that's an indication of just sort of the cowardly response to it which is you know it's like a cancellation tactic we're going to try and like go behind your back and ostracize you instead of even telling you to your face what you think and i think the reason why they're doing that is because quite frankly there's a lot of preference falsification going on in Silicon Valley.
I know there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley. Well, we know because we know who's coming.
You have a list of people who don't. I mean, look, nobody is excited about Biden.
Okay. Nobody's excited about Biden right now.
So the only question is, do they hold their nose and vote for him or do they vote for Trump Or do they vote for Bobby Kennedy? But there's a lot of people who I do think support Trump. And look, we've a be tested this, right? It'd be different if we didn't have four years of Biden, four years of Trump, there's a lot of people who can look back and say that the AB test we ran indicates Trump.
So I know there's going to be a lot of people who support Trump, but they don't want to admit it. And I think that this event is going to break the ice on that.
And maybe it'll create a preference cascade where all of a sudden it becomes acceptable to acknowledge the truth, which is a lot of people support Trump. And it's not just this, it's also Steve Schwartzman came out.
I think Bill Ackman's on the edge of coming out for Trump. So there's a lot of people who are now like flipping.
And I think it could really start to cascade on itself. I think the thing that hasn't happened yet is we haven't actually now started to talk about the contours of a handful of policy things where there is some deep diversion now, where these candidates are diverging from each other.
And I think that that's going to be really interesting to see how much people value that differentiation. I'll give you an example, which is President Trump in the last few weeks has become incredibly pro-crypto.
Now, the contours of that, I think we need to define, right? But the question is, is a pro-crypto environment, especially in a world where we think that there's just going to be continued dollar debasement, an important issue, an unimportant issue, or a thing that is a small issue today, but that will be critical for us in 20 and 30 years to get right? That's an example. And there's a handful of these other things that I think that now we have a chance to really double click on, where there really is some differentiation amongst the three presidential candidates.
And I think that's healthy as well. And so it's important, again, get their specific thoughts on the record, so that we can really figure this out.
And I think that over these next few months, I think it's going to be important to do that. So I hope President Biden also comes on the pod, quite honestly, and allows us to ask him the hard questions.
And I hope Bobby comes back on actually, and I think Bobby will if we ask him, just to tighten up where he's at now a few months before. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of great follow-up questions.
I would love to interview Trump. I'll ask him hard questions.
I'll respect him as President 45 and as a candidate so for people who like are like you have trump derangement syndrome like that's just like a childish thing to say i disagree with his policies i'll ask him questions hey why don't you support evs like that's a valid question to ask him why is he anti ev he said all these crazy things about evs and then apparently he's courting you on privately i don't know if that's true or not but you know there's there's hard questions and i'm sure he'll answer them and he's more than capable of doing i'm excited for me i'm really excited for president trump to come on the podcast and for me i'll be totally honest i think the democrats have to wake up for a second and just like take the temperature of the room like read the room democrats you have put up a candidate that nobody wants. His policies on the border and some other issues are not, you know, in sync with the majority of the country.
At some point, the Democrats just have to take a deep look in the mirror. James Carvel is doing it, a bunch of them are doing it, and say, we feel that a bad candidate who's too old and people don't believe will stand up to scrutiny of like, say, being on the all-in pot two hours, or in the debates, or with a hostile interview or any of those possibilities.
And so I think if that's the case, we really need to have the Democrats think deeply about maybe fielding a different candidate. I believe that's what's going to happen in the next 30 to 60 days.
So I'm predicting there's gonna be a switcheroo. 100%.
if you just look at the polls, it's 100% there'll be a switcheroo. Who's the switcheroo? I have no idea.
Could be Gavin. It could be anybody.
Anything's possible. I think Trump's going to demolish him in the debate.
I think he'll sink to 30% in the polls. And then the Republicans are going to find, I'm sorry, the Democrats will find a way to give him a graceful out.
And then they'll field somebody else. When's the first debate? June 17.
Can I respond to that, Jason? I saw your tweet basically saying something very similar, that Democrats need to wake up and, you know, recognize the situation they're in. I think this is a case of once you've made your bed, you have to sleep in it.
Look, the Democrats have set the table pursuing certain policies for the last three and a half years. We've had an open border.
We had so much spending that it fed into this inflation, which jacked up interest rates. We had Ukraine become the central obsession of focus of our politics, which blew up in Biden's face with the whole summer counteroffensive.
I mean, I could go on. You have the hostility to crypto, which they're now trying to desperately backpedal on, but you had three years of Elizabeth Warren and Gensler basically making crypto the enemy.
And now all of a sudden, we're at first single, we're at the 10-yard line, and you're all of a sudden saying, well, just read the room and make all these changes. You can't.
I don't think people are going to be fooled by that. We've A-B tested this thing.
We've had three and a half years of Biden, four years of Trump. Who do you like better? And we're, what, how many months are we from pulling the lever? Five months? Never too late.
I'm telling him to do it. Don't take Sachs' advice.
He is a hardcore partisan and wants to win desperately. Take J.
Cal's advice. Field another candidate.
The worst thing the Republicans could ever deal with is a great candidate who can speak and who's nimble on their feet because I think people are looking for a choice that's not these two individuals. I'm not going to say I'm anti-Trump.
I'm not going to say I'm anti-Mudgen. Why don't you support Bobby Kennedy then? I don't think he's going to have the platform behind him to get enough votes i think the democrats need to immediately this month in june do the switcheroo and if they do i think they went in the landscape they had their chance they had their chance they could have gone for bobby they drove bobby out of the party that's not his own he didn't start as independent he started i know by his last name a democrat kennedy democrat you had dean phillips yeah deanillips took the chance yeah and of course he was pushed out not of the party but basically ostracized they had their chance i think you know if i want to be a strategist this is just a conspiracy theory i don't want to go to like chinfoil hat corner i think the democrats as cynical as it sounds we're waiting to see what happens with this trump trials conviction what you call lawfare what other people call fair use of the law and then they are going to see how he does in the debates that's why they moved the debate up in june and i think they know to pull the plug on this if it gets too far gone and they have the ability to do that because all he's got to say is you know what i i'm i'm feeling old and i want us to win and i'm going to slot somebody else in but listen let's go get to this yeah i mean let me translate what you just said which is the democrats hope to put trump in jail using lawfare and when that fails they realize that they're going to lose the election to him and they've got a big problem so they're going to try some desperate strategy to find a new candidate but it's way too late for that i think precisely thank you for repeating back to me and i think the only disagreement we might have there is i would agree like there's law for in two of the cases and i think two of the cases i think are should be pursued but you know we can intelligent people as we said at the start of this can agree to disagree about it and i think you should all take if you're a listener to this podcast you're smart if you're here you're smart.
You're not listening to two hour podcasts with us going this deep on issues if you're not a brilliant, smart, and attractive individual. So let's get to the docket.
Present. Yes, that's right.
Just say he heard brilliant and attractive and he's here. All right, listen, I hate to go into another controversial topic, but the four of us were all on fire about this.

Apparently, the COVID-19 investigation is leaning towards a massive cover-up.

There's a subcommittee going on right now.

The world's not paying attention to this, but I think some savvy people are, especially

over on X.

There's a lot of great journalists who are doing incredible investigative work. Let me just catch everybody up in the audience real quick here and get the besties involved.
Over the past year and a half, a House subcommittee has been focused on the origins of COVID-19, and they've been investigating the NIH's ties with gain-of-function research in Wuhan. The subcommittee was painted early on as like, this is angry Republicans, this is about mask mandates.
It it was like highly politicized but it's actually turned out to be very effective bipartisan investigation we'll get on we'll get in on that in a minute but so far most of the investigation is focused on nailing down this timeline of communication between nih officials and an organization called eco health alliance this is a non a nonprofit that's focused on infectious disease research. Now, these committee videos are online, we'll play you on in a moment.
But through funding in the NIH, the EcoHealth organization was awarded research grants to various labs. This included the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the infamous one.
EcoHealth violated terms of its grants by failing to report that gain of function experiments were being conducted in wuhan eco health was supposed to report any experiment that exhibited characteristics leading it to being 10 times more infectious but when that happened it failed to disclose this research to the nih and on may 17th a deputy director of the nih acknowledged that the agency funded gain of function research in Wuhan via EcoHealth. This is the key because Fauci initially denied this.
During his 2021 Senate hearing, Fauci said, quote, I totally resent the lie you are now propagating in response to questions from Rand Paul about the lab leak theory. So Fauci either didn't know or he lied under oath.
Let me pause there for a second. There's a lot more to the story.
But when you hear this sort of setup, Friedberg, our sultan of science, in this initial setup, what rings concerning to you, true to you, and then we'll go on and play some clips of this testimony, which is pretty wild. I don't think that pre the emergence of the pandemic that there was nefarious motives.
In other words, their funding of this was not done to create a pandemic. It might have been a mistake in hindsight, but yeah, for many years, particularly following the original SARS pandemic, there was a lot of conversations around how do we get in front of the next pandemic? How do we figure out what's coming? And how do we prepare for it? And there was a lot of conversations around how do we get in front of the next pandemic? How

do we figure out what's coming? And how do we prepare for it? And there was a lot of research

that was launched to try and resolve that key question. This is like the movie 12 monkeys.

You guys ever see that movie? It's like, does the effort to try and stop the problem cause the problem? I think that for my point of view, there's a very high probability that there was some leak that meant that the work that was going on to try and get in front of the next pandemic and understand what we could do to prepare ourselves and when vaccines can be developed and so on, actually led to the pandemic. So then when that happens, how do you respond when you're sitting in that seat? That's, that's the key question that I think this committee is uncovering.
Do you think there was a cover up free break? What is your intuition on that? Yeah, I think that these guys definitely didn't want, I think what they were trying to do was prevent that from being the focal point and protect their own asses at the same time. Do you think they should go to jail? I don't know the extent of it yet.
It'd be good to get more information from this whole thing. Yeah, so let me queue up those next details.
I will say this guy that gave testimony last week where he was like deliberately changing the names of people in the email, Anderson, and he put the dollar sign so that you couldn't find that email when you did a FOIA search. He knew what he was doing.
I don't understand how you could say this wasn't nefarious. This whole thing was nefarious from top to bottom.

Well, yeah, let me cue this up here, Saxon, then get your...

Why are you exonerating it?

Hold on, let me cue it up.

All right, so we started to see some consequences and accountability.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Health cut all funding to EcoHealth

in response to the committee's investigation.

They disbarred its president, Peter Daszak?

Daszak, yeah.

Daszak.

And so we don't have direct evidence to be clear that the pandemic was the result of a lab leak and you know just even saying the lab would have gotten this the furin cleavage site makes it clear that this was a lab leak that's not a naturally occurring virus the furin cleveland's sites were engineered let's go to

that in just one second and thankfully this isn't going to get our youtube channel shut down because we have freedom to speech back a little bit but this is where it gets really interesting emails were written as eco health with a tilde that's that little squiggly line uh instead of an o and they would spell Anderson with a dollar sign in the e Christian Anderson in this example is a biologist who was reportedly awarded 9 million grants from the NIH two months after publishing a paper claiming didn't COVID did not come from a lab and so let's get to some of these clips here's a clip of Fauci's former top advisor David Morin's getting grilled getting grilled in the hearing. And I'll play two clips and then I'll give it to you.
On October 25th, 2021, another scientist wrote, quote, David is concerned about the privacy of text and other messages from his cell phone to you and me because he has been using a government phone. This came from Tony, end quote.
Sir, did you ever have any conversations with Dr. Fauci regarding using personal phone or email to communicate with Dr.
Daszak? I don't remember it. It's possible.
You know, I probably wouldn't have remembered it and I don't remember it. On January 18th, you testified that you did not have any conversations with Dr.
Fauci regarding eco health. On October 25th, 2021, you wrote, quote, Peter, from Tony's numerous recent comments to me, they're trying to protect you, end quote.
You meaning eco-health and Dr. Daszak.
Dr. Brantz, did you ever have any conversations with Dr.
Fauci regarding eco-health? Well, the ones you just mentioned, I don't have any recollection of

that. No recollection.
No recollection, no. All right, so we're on the no recollection train, and then I'll give this final clip here.
This is unbelievable, Sachs. Apparently, there's a FOIA lady, Freedom of Information Act lady, working at NIH to train and help and mentor people on how to avoid having their communications.
These are people who work for us, and she's the FOIA lady at NIH. Play the clip, Nick.
And as you've said, you previously testified that you did not delete any federal records. But on February 24th, 2021, you wrote, quote, I learned from our FOIA lady here how to make emails disappear after I'm FOIA'd, but before the search starts.
So I think we are all safe. Plus, I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to Gmail, end quote.
And the next day on February 25th, 2021, you wrote, quote, but I learned the tricks last year from an old friend, Marge Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs.

End quote.

Yes or no?

Is Marge Moore the FOIA lady you were referring to?

She was at the time.

I believe she's retired since then.

Did the NIH FOIA office instruct you on how to delete emails or avoid FOIA?

No.

All right, Sacks.

There's your red meat.

Smoking guns everywhere.

What do you think?

Please give me a couple of minutes to kind of lay out what happened here.

Okay, so Fauci knew very early, as early as February 1st of 2020, that COVID came from a lab leak. The scientists said so.
All they had to do was look under a microscope and see the furin cleavage site, which is not naturally occurring. It's something that was added, basically bioengineered to the virus in order to make it more transmissible in humans.
So they knew right away that this somehow came from a lab leak. And Fauci and Collins said in emails that they were going to begin a brutal takedown in order to conceal this fundamental truth of the lab leak from the public.
Now, why would Fauci need to conceal this? Because he had funded gain-of-function research programs via Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance to conduct, again, gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Moreover, Fauci was personally responsible for reversing an Obama-era decision to prohibit gain-of-function research because it was so risky.
Fauci. Moreover, Fauci was personally responsible for reversing an Obama-era decision to prohibit gain-of-function research because it was so risky.
Fauci wrote op-eds justifying gain-of-function research. He wrote a paper in 2012, which was actually quite candid about the risks of gain-of-function.
He describes the kind of lab leak that could occur in the type of virus that could escape from a lab because of gain-of-function, but then he says that it's a risk worth taking. So this is somebody who funded the Wuhan lab.
He funded gain-of-function research. He was personally responsible for lifting the ban on gain-of-function research.
He had a lot of reasons to want to hide the fact that COVID was engineered in a lab and was lab leak. And so we know that even before this conspiracy to basically defraud the FOIA request, that Fauci had done things like organize that letter to the Lancet, which smeared and demonized scientists who were trying to tell the truth, saying that the so-called zoological theory was nonsense, this had to be from a lab.
He was doing things like this. And now we have this added piece, which is this longtime colleague of Fauci and Collins at NIH, Dr.
David Morens, developed a strategy for evading FOIA requests that would expose the truth. He did this by deleting government emails, which is a crime, by using private email to conduct government business,

which is also a crime,

and then strategically

misspelling names and titles

to frustrate the FOIA searches.

And then the craziest part

is that Marenz

foolishly detailed his schemes

in emails

that Fauci would have seen,

that Fauci was on

the distribution list stuff.

So he has no plausible deniability.

It's literally like, they're like, here's how we can avoid getting caught in an email. You have to see the FOIA piece within the overall picture here, which is Fauci from the get-go was lying about the origins of COVID in order to cover up his role in funding this type of research yes and there was a comprehensive effort by people at nih likely at fauci's direction to again not just cover this up but to smear scientists were on the offensive in addition to trying to cover their their asses yeah people like jay bhanacharya who then got banned censored and banned on social media okay by the way who is a stanford professor yeah was banned for speaking up chamath let's zoom out here and start thinking strategy and theories of what's going on here i have my own but i'm curious to hear you as first as we go around the horn here what's your take on this i would like to make four make four points, I think, that kind of summarize my view of this.
I think what happened here needs a really clear accounting because the implications are far greater than I think people realize. And I think why maybe the four of us have always been tugging on this little thread is because each of us instinctively understood that.
So the first is, if you just look at the macroeconomic consequences of what COVID did and our reaction, we broke the seal of having absolutely no accountability on massive spending, right? So there are subsidies, there are kickbacks, there are government programs that now number in the trillions of dollars a year, incremental to what we were going to spend if things were the status quo. And the problem is that, and Freiburg has talked about this really eloquently in the past, it's creating a massive debt issue that us and our children and our grandchildren would have to deal with.
If we had responded to this pandemic differently, those issues would not have occurred. If we had just kept the economy open because we understood what was going on, we would not have reacted the way that we did.
And we would not have nearly as much debt as we had. And we would not have made it okay for politicians to spend trillions of dollars.
That is a direct consequence of our reaction to COVID, not COVID itself. The second is we caused billions of people all around the world to take immaturely tested drugs.
They were called vaccines. We found out that they were modestly effective at best.
And then some of them were designed in some ways to manipulate our DNA. And we just don't know what the long-term impacts will be.
We see some small issues of myocarditis, we see other issues of all-cause mortality, but the point is we just don't know. And that would not have happened had we not rushed to force people to stand in a line and get a jab in order to get back to their normal life.
That was a direct consequence, not of COVID, but of a reaction. The third is what we're realizing right now is that we had this power drunk apparatchik.
And this is similar to the quote that Mike Pompeo made. When he took over the CIA, what he found, and he said this after when he left, was there were people on the top floor of the CIA building, the seventh floor of the Pentagon, that fundamentally believed that it wasn't the Democrats nor the Republicans that ran the country, but it was them.
And I see a similar level of arrogance here, which is this belief that they know better. And so what they did was they committed the greatest sin, which is where the cover up is way greater than the crime.
And they created a setup where all of these things were amplified by their prestige, their perceived scientific knowledge. But what they were really doing was keeping critical information to themselves, and then trying to cover it up, Jason, that is so unacceptable when you think of the broad consequences of what happened.
And that's what needs to get documented. And I do think there needs to be some form of accountability for that.
I think as well said, and you know, just looking at it, I think we are now at the part point of this conversation and investigation where you can say this is not a bipartisan this is an issue and everybody knew like we had these conversations on this very podcast the public knew something didn't seem right about this and if you just think about this from first principles of what occurred here just what occurred here shreyberg we funded gain of research to create these super viruses that what I think other people could just as equally call a bio weapon with the Chinese. Now, we're supposed to be arch rivals here.
We're like these competitors. And then when it came out, and it leaked, and of course, I don't think it was released on purpose.
When it came out, the people who work for us and we trust with our family's safety, who funded this in order to save their own reputations, to cover their asses, then lied about it. And then, like as you said, Sax, perfectly, they went on the offensive.
These people were not elected by anybody by anybody that's right these people work for us and they failed us this is a crime against humanity of the greatest cause people committed suicide people died because they had depression our kids lost two years of school this generation has lost their education and now we have burdened them with billions hundreds of billions of dollars in debt from this this is trillions trillions trillions tens of this is a failure of leadership it is a crime and when people said prosecute fauci they were like you're being hysterical this is ridiculous these people need to be prosecuted if you hit this stuff from a FOIA request you need to go to jail this needs to be accountability here I think for what they did to society our children in the future I am infuriated by this imagine what happened in the situation room or the equivalent wherever the president of the United States all these world leaders were coalescing to try to make decisions in that period, they all looked at this quote-unquote expert. They pointed at Fauci and said, lead us out.
And so do we not think that at any point he was thinking, how do I do this in a way where I have no fingerprints? Clearly the answer is, in fact, he was leading from a position of how will I not have any fingerprints on this and so do we did we get the best advice on the margin I think it's pretty fair to say we could not have gotten it because he was too conflicted he was figuring out how to cover up what happened as opposed to just own it and then help the world get out of it yeah I mean talk about like incinerating your entire career and legacy, but putting that aside, the morality of covering this up. And, you know, so then you have to think, Shemath, and this is why I was like, what is the strategy? What goes through somebody's mind when they decide to do a cover up this level? Is it just fear of getting caught and their lives being in their mind ruined and they're going to do this incredible cover-up, I actually think that they thought this would become a globally destabilizing moment between the United States and China and that there could be revolutions.
Now, I know that this is now sounding really conspiracy theory, but if you're sitting there and you're like, what if the public finds that we created this and their grandparents died from from it, and their kids didn't go to school because there'll be riots in the street. But if enough time passes, maybe there's not riots in the street.
But you know what, this is something that is just so abhorrent that I mean, people need to really be held accountable. Freeberg, your thoughts, what would you guys do if you're sitting in a policymaker's seat today, and you're being offered by scientists this ability to go and figure out what the next big virus will be, and start to make plans for getting in front of it by understanding the biology of these viruses, by seeing where they're going to evolve to, and by trying to get in front of the next pandemic so that we can protect the population? Do you guys support that sort of research? And what are the questions you ask? So let's, you know, rewind 15 years, pretend Fauci doesn't get to make those decisions.
You guys are the policymakers. And folks say SARS just happened.
We want to do this research. We want to figure out how to get free to do and how do you how do you answer that? There's a really simple.
There's a really simple question. If anybody who's watched any kind of science fiction or knows the history of this kind of research which is don't do this in a population center and what how will you prevent it from breaking out like literally that's job one if you're gonna even if you're not going to like literally every science fiction film it's so has this it's like put it on an island and there's an island off long Island where they keep these things.
I forgot the name of it. It's Plum Island or something.
Well, look it up. Yeah.
And by the way, there are internal NIH emails that suggest that COVID leaked from a level two facility. They call it BSL-2, which does not operate with the top level biohazard safeguards.
So they knew the Wuhan lab was not at the level of safeguards that it should have been. But look, I would go deeper and say that why would you do this kind of research at all? I mean, you are deliberately manipulating viruses in order to make them transmissible in humans.
This was a bat virus that was not transmissible to humans. It was bioengineered.
They had the furin cleavage site to allow it to gain access to human cells. Yeah.
So, Saks, I am going to push back because that is not conclusively true. What you're saying is something that some people have claimed, but there are other scientists, including papers published recently in The Lancet and other pretty reputable medical journals and research journals that indicate that the evolution seen in the fear and cleavage site can be traced back to an evolutionary origin, not necessarily to a human engineered origin.
So I want to just make that clear that that is a possibility. I'm not dismissing it, but I'm not supporting the other side.
I'm saying we have work to do to figure this out. Just to be clear.
It's a possibility that's so remote. I mean, look, I heard Professor Jeffrey Sachs talking about this in in a recent interview and he went through the whole history he said there's like 200 of these coronaviruses in this like class or category and there's not one fear and keep it to sight among any of them so right can you say that there's not a one billion chance of it happening naturally i guess but it's a very very very low event.
Let me punch up your question, Freeberg, because if your question is, what should you do? I want to ask you guys, what do you do? So forget about, oh, there's bad guys. Fauci's a bad guy.
Like, what do you do to protect the world against the next pandemic? Number one, you don't do this type of gain of function research. Number two, if you are going to do it, you don't do it at a level two facility like the Wuhan lab.
Number three, when the virus leaks in the lab, you don't basically lie about and conduct a cover-up campaign that smears the reputation of honest scientists. Number four, when you're hauled into the Oval Office in response to this once-in-a-century pandemic, you don't pretend like you're America's doctor and you have all the answers.
And in fact, you're the guy who created this problem. You own it.
There's an idea. You own it.
And you know what? The question really embedded in your question, Freberg, I think is, is there any argument to doing gain of function? If so, how? And then is there any reason to research the bat dung or whatever material they get it from you know from those caves and take it out of the caves i could see the latter chamoff of like hey this existed nature you studied on an island somewhere far away from everybody with massive controls the gain of function seems like it literally feels like the speech from jurassic park like i think it's why would would you do this and jurassic park took place on an island for a reason there were many scientists who are opposed to ganifunction research they thought it was unduly risky and didn't have offsetting benefits and that is exactly why obama banned it very good decision to me this whole idea that we need to to amplify these viruses in order to find out what would happen if this happened naturally is insane you didn't have this problem until you created it yes this is nutty this is nuts go ahead there are there are examples we know i'll just point to two let's just say the attempted overthrow of the ukrainian government in 2014 you can go back to. Contra has yet another example.
And you can add gain-of-function research now, which is, again, I'll just go back to when there are these lifelong bureaucrats that believe they're above the law, that there's this sensation that they can pull the levers of power silently behind the scenes because they know better. And then what they're doing, as you guys said, is they are controverting the desires of the people.
So whether you like President Obama or not, he's duly elected by the people. And when he says this isn't allowed, it shouldn't be allowed.
And when you instantiate chaos and wars and all of this other stuff, overthrows in all of these other places that then create all these long tail effects, they're not done with really America support. They're done by a small group of people who think they know better.
And I think that we've created that kind of a problem that needs to get fixed. And so I think that this has to be an example where you can make them an example, because otherwise it will keep happening.
And there are other parts of the American bureaucracy where people are in charge of very critical and important decisions. And I suspect 99% of them are good, earnest, honest people doing the right thing for America.
but it's just the law of large numbers. There will be one or two, and all it takes is one or two, who get drunk with that power.
And so unless that there's a check and balance on that dynamic, we'll have more issues of this. And as the world gets more sophisticated, and we rely more on experts, I hate to say this, guys, but you have to be more skeptical of experts.
As much as you think an expert is an expert, you have to fight the tendency of saying, I'm going to abdicate all of my intellect onto you and you decide. I think you have to find a way of just gut checking.
And Sachs said this critical thing. If I was the president of the United States in a pandemic, I didn't need the COVID to teach me this example.
But if I'm trying to solve a very technical and hard engineering problem, what I always do is I bring a cross section of people in a room. Typically, some of them have to have disagreeing opinions, and I make them intellectually fight it out.
And my job is to observe. And in that I apply my judgment.
I'm not nearly as smart as them. I'm not nearly technically as trained as them.
But that is a process that works. And I'm just questioning, it couldn't have happened here because as Zach said, if you basically bury the reputations of the folks that are pushing back, you could never bring them inside the room in the oval and and have a conversation with them and say, hey, Jay Bhattacharya, give us the red team version of what you think is happening.
Yeah. And that is a real problem.
Steel man the opposite side. Let me build on a point Chamath made, which is, I think we have to ask the question, what type of government do we really have? You know, we call ourselves a democracy, but are you a democracy when the elected leaders come and go and the really powerful bureaucrats running the government, running these agencies stay for decades and decades? And if the president disagrees with their policy, they can just wait them out.
Fauci wanted to do gain-of-function research, maybe, by the way, at the behest of DOD, we don't know, could have been a bioweapon or biodefense program. There's a lot more to this that we don't even know about yet.
In any event, it's clear he was passionately committed to funding gain-of-function research. He just waited for his opportunity and implemented his will.
Victoria Nuland, in the State Department, passionately committed to basically bringing Ukraine into NATO and using that to essentially provoke a regime change operation in Russia. Again, she just had to wait for her opportunity to basically keep pushing these policies for decades.
These are the people who are really running the American government. How would you change it? We have to turn these things over, these organizations, or get rid of them? We talk about term limits for politicians.
Maybe we actually need term limits for the administrative apparatchik that runs all these critical organizations. Right.
It's called the deep state, right? You ever hear the expression deep state? It sounds conspiratorial. It's not.
It's just the permanent bureaucracy. We elect a president, but how many people does the president actually appoint? A couple hundred? 99.9% of the people running the government are there permanently.
Well, and then I'll just say here, I want to give a shout out to the journalists, Catherine Aban and, uh, Catherine Aban and Emily Kopp. I know that people also have no faith in journalists.
These are two journalists I think you could have tremendous faith in who are going to win Pulitzers because they've been doggedlyly pursuing this and you have to wonder why this is not the top story on the news networks and why this isn't the head of you know the new york times or the or the washington post like there needs to be much more coverage of what's going on here i don't understand why because yeah because the trump takes every headline yeah i don't think it has anything to do with trump i think it's got everything to do with the fact that that the New York Times was covering for Fauci. Fauci has been there for decades.
He is a major source for the New York Times, just like he was a major funder of grant programs, right? So there's a lot of people who have developed a dependency on Fauci. I mean, everyone, again, you think access journalism is what's going on here.
He gave them access. There's no question that the New York Times was covering for this.

The New York Times definitely promoted the idea that anyone pushing the lab leak theory

was somehow a conspiracy theorist or a nut.

And you have to lay on top of all this sacks in the political environment.

They were pushing that whole crazy wet market theory.

Well, the wet market theory.

Pangolin.

The pangolin.

Remember the pangolin? We needed Jonart to dismantle the pangolin theory you know in relation to that these wet markets have spread massive viruses and and you know all kinds of things and they do need to be there was like a un report on like hey we have to upgrade these people have to stop doing markets that's why i don't know that it was a great cover story i think it was a logical theory to pursue to the end point of eliminating it because they around wuhan there are a lot of these wet markets it is completely conceivable that a person who was in that lab went to a wet market and it spread via the wet market this is why we need a full investigation folks because all these theories could come could come together. And there are more cards to turn over, which one of you alluded to, like, who knows what the turn in the river are going to be here? Like, what did China know? What did our government and China know? Maybe they are making bioweapons.
Maybe they're doing even worse stuff that we don't know about. Maybe there's all kinds of rogue programs that are occurring here.
That's why we need to keep digging and digging the American public must hold these people accountable. And they need to tell us who else was involved.
Because if Fauci is involved, and this guy's involved, there's other people. I want to hear from everybody.
There's many crazy parts of this. But I think maybe the craziest part of the whole thing is that when the pandemic happens, and the elected of the united states the president needs to pull in the resources to manage a policy response who do they pull in fauci the guy who created the problem it's kind of like when they have newland be our chief diplomat in the state department and she's fomented the coup in kiev in 2014 it's again these these bureaucrats are doing the exact opposite of what they're supposed to be doing.
They're not protecting public health. They have to take ownership of this and being honest, yes.
But I think to answer your question, what do we do about it? I think we just got to clean out the stables here. Yeah.
I think we just got to disband some of these government departments. Why do we have so many? This whole alphabet soup of three-letter agencies.
I think Vivek Gramoswamy had the right idea. Let's just get rid of a bunch of these things zero base budget the whole government start over yeah and just go right through each one like if and and you know what it should be a bipartisan issue but there's so much money involved this is one of the challenges in a capitalist system is there's so much money there's so much grift to go around that when something like this happens and there's an opportunity to i don't know make a and, you know, put a couple of billion dollars into this Lightspeed thing, which was a great idea, seemingly, everybody lines up, okay, yeah, sure, we'll get involved, we'll take some of that money, yeah, buy a billion shots from us.
President Trump was really on to this, because he's the one that really coined the term the deep state and went after it. And if you think about the other side, right, the people that are there, it must be very discomforting to hear because a lot of those people are folks that worked hard, tried to go to good schools, get educated, and join an infrastructure to move a country forward because they believe in the country and the values of America.
Sounds like a noble mission, right? But over long periods of time, most people come and go. And then there's a small cohort of folks that sort of end up ossifying and running the top parts of this permanent bureaucracy.
And I think Sachs is right. They start to observe just the simple principle that all these folks come and go, yet I'm still around.
President comes, president goes. Undersecretary comes, undersecretary goes.
The secretary of this comes, and then they go. And so they start to believe that they're really in charge.
And that's where the deep state idea comes from. At least we're in a democracy where these hearings are occurring.
I just want to give kudos to, in addition to those two journalists, to the people on this subcommittee who are doing it in a bipartisan way and they will be, and they're being relentless. I think that's the honorable thing to do.
I encourage them and those investigative journalists to be relentless. And kudos to Rand Paul, too.
Remember when he was in the fourth. Profile and courage.
People were like, this guy's a loon. No, Rand Paul had a right.
To your point about what does this mean for our democracy i want to just bring up the summit for article where they pulled young people and young voters they despair over u.s politics they describe the united states as a dying empire led by bad people i mean after what we've learned about covid and i would argue also the whole background they're not wrong is this right exactly their intuition is their intuition is right yeah from the mouths of babes i mean it bad is i mean if they covered this up in the way it's looking like i would call this behavior not bad i'd call it evil because it was premeditated and then look the point is we're supposed to have this check and balance from the media but when the media is compliciticit, because they like to be in those halls of power, that's where that's where these feelings come from. I think the latest stat that I saw is I think more than 52% of Americans now believe that the mainstream media is untrustworthy.
And that's a really terrible place to be, which means you're basically where do you get truth? You're consuming something that's just fundamentally not true. I mean, burn it down.
I mean, that's the conclusion any logical person would come to is just burn it down. This makes no sense that they would try and cover this up.
The right thing for Fauci to do is say, hey, listen, we didn't do gain of function. You know, under Obama, we did do it here.
It's obviously been a mistake. We need to never do it again.
And here's the roadmap to make sure that we protect people from the next one. Thank God this one didn't kill children the way it's killing old people.
And by the way, this is going to crack open. I encourage you all to be vocal about this and to watch on Monday because Dr.
Fauci is scheduled to appear in a hearing for the same subcommittee. And that is going to be explosive.
Live streamed on YouTube. We'll put the link in the show notes.
Since we're in the don't trust anybody and have your own sovereignty and we're in libertarian moment let's go to our crypto correspondent it's crypto corner with shama it's part of my production company i'm now doing crypto corner with shama that'll be next week's cold open i thought it would be good to talk about crypto for a couple of reasons. One is because we just had the halving at the end of April.
When did that happen? The halving is where just for folks that don't know, the way that Bitcoins are created is by solving these complex mathematical algorithms that take a lot of time and energy and money. And when you solve it, you rewarded with some number of bitcoin and roughly every four years that reward gets cut in half it's called a halving and this week i saw somebody who reminded me all of this and i just want to give this guy a proper shout out so his name is wences casaris and wences in silicon valley i would say really was agent zero of bitcoin he was the one in 2010 that introduced it to me i remember he reminded me of the story actually we were at orange hummus and he's like he's argentinian he's a great so i'm going to try to copy his acts that's your math you have to buy the bitcoin so i heard the story i fell in love with it i remember i called my family'm like, buy me a million of these things.
And he was like, or a million dollars worth. And he was like, Are you crazy? And I was like, No, there's just a little appetizer.
We'll get to the main main course. Anyways, he has done a phenomenal job of understanding and proselytizing Bitcoin.
I want to thank him because he really put me onto this. But he mentioned something to me

when I saw him a couple days ago, which is you should really look at the pattern of Bitcoin

after a halving. And so I was really curious.
And so I had a guy on my team, Quentin, put this

together. So Nick, let me just let's go to the first page.
So why is this interesting? So here's

a little Bitcoin price analysis for you guys. So there's been a couple of halving cycles that

have happened. And I asked him,

Thank you. So why is this interesting? So here's a little Bitcoin price analysis for you guys.

So there's been a couple of halving cycles that have happened. And I asked him to go back and look at the price performance one month after a halving, three months, six months, nine months, 12 months, and 18 months after a halving.
And what you notice is that there are these moments, initially, where essentially when you go through a Bitcoin halving, people are sort of reassessing what's happening and they're trying to figure it out. That's sort of what I would say happens in the first month and roughly what also happens in the first three months.
But then within six months to a year and 18 months of these things, there are these crazy price appreciation cycles that happen. So that's what this page shows, which is, you know, 18 months after the first halving, the Bitcoin price returned 45x.
After the second halving, it returned almost 28x. And after this third halving, it returned almost an 8x, which is really incredible returns in such a short period of time, if you go to the next page.
And so if you if you graph that, this is what it starts to show, which is what is this price performance after each of these halving cycles. Now, why is that interesting? Well, it's interesting, because on top of this halving, which theoretically, if history is a guide, we should see some price appreciation.
Obviously, the other thing that's happened is we've commercialized Bitcoin. And we talked about this sort of as my big prediction for 2024, which is these ETFs are really going to allow Bitcoin to cross the chasm and have its sort of central key moment, right? And so if you apply the averages, and again, these are just averages, they're by no means predictions.
Okay, so I just want to qualify that. This is not financial advice.
It's not financial advice. These are just guesses.
We took these and we applied it to the price of Bitcoin. And if you go to the next page, you start to see what could happen if you just take the average of the last few cycles, because the first cycle was so extreme, and you start to...
Oh, so you're just doing cycle two and three here, to be clear. Just the averages of cycle two and three, and what you start to see is some really meaningful appreciation.
And when I talked to Wences about this, how he explained it, which makes a lot of sense to me, is there are a lot of countries that will never look at Bitcoin credibly, even if they support it. The US may be one of those.
But there is an increasing body of countries that will become dual currency. And they will look at their local currency, and then they will look at Bitcoin.
And they will say both of these two things are needed. One, when you're transacting on a daily basis for random goods and services.
And two, when you need to buy a permanent asset that needs to have residual value, you'll use something like BTC. And I think that's a very powerful concept.
And if you look at what this price chart could indicate, is that if this thing starts to get to these levels of appreciation, it is going to completely replace gold and start to become something that has transactional utility for hard assets. And I think if you marry that with this worry that some folks have about dollar debasement, you start to see some really interesting opportunities.
So I just thought that this was an interesting thing that he put me on. I thought I'd share that with you.
I'll publish this on Twitter, but that's your crypto corner for the year, folks. I think it's really interesting how the crypto community is getting organized into basically a lobby to advocate for its interests.
It's been so lobby in america did you know that they've been so targeted over the last few years because gensler and warren have been on a crusade to basically make crypto illegal or drive it offshore well every action has a equal and opposite reaction and now the crypto people have basically had a political awakening and realized they have to get involved in the political system yeah this is a matter of defense self-defense shout out spf so they're getting a pioneer well not like that i mean that guy i mean he was dropping money on everybody yeah yeah did you guys hear this did you hear this rumor that he was doing that to basically push for regulatory capture remember yeah i think it's a nuanced point did you guys hear this rumor did you guys hear this rumor that sbf was going to put a billion dollars into the election and convince tom brady to run as a republican and give no give the billion to trump oh sorry give the billion to trump he was going to give trump a billion to not run okay and then get tom brady to run i mean this person had delusions of ground he thought he was a jedi knight and he's like literally in job as powers right now i don't know what this i mean what a lunatic he was i mean talk about delusions of grandeur sacks this guy thought he would just drop a billion dollars and convince somebody not to run for government i think we're gonna i think we're gonna get a regulatory you, back to the young people we talked about in the previous story. I think the reason they're attracted to crypto is because it doesn't have government control.
And since if you don't trust the government, and you see the government over and over and over again, cover things up or the grift or make decisions that are not in your generation's best interest, why wouldn't you opt out of their financial system? And you know what, there's a them and they have and they're getting organized to your point sacks i think we're going to have a crypto framework and it's worth probably five points in this election what do you think sacks how many points is being the pro-crypto candidate worth in this election one two three points of votes four points it's it's got to be some significant It's hard to quantify. up it'll be it'll be it could be 500 basis points i mean young people do not show up to vote because there isn't an issue that they care about correct but there's 50 million americans that own crypto 50 50.
okay so if 10 of them are like let's say that's their single issue that's five million votes no no there's a there's a plausible case where 40 million of those folks show up because you're talking about a structural part of their wealth creation, right? So, for example, like, you know, Biden, President Biden talked about giving people a head start by eliminating their debt. That's a narrow issue.
And the reason it's a narrow issue, there's just as many people that don't have debt and just as many people that paid off their debt and it creates a lot of haves and have-nots, right?

And there's all these rules around

who will get the debt relief, etc.

You end up touching

four or five million people maximum.

But if there are 50 million people

who have now decided

to have at least a hedge

against the establishment

and the traditional financial system and you are threatening to take that wealth away. Yeah, I could see how 80% of those folks show up to the ballot box and say, all right, which one of you will just leave me alone? And if the answer is President Trump, then they're all going to vote for President Trump.
I think this is like such a great issue for political candidates to embrace. And it's just such a simple framework, I've said it a dozen times, create a sophisticated investor test, let 1000 flowers bloom, people can make whatever crypto projects they want.
But to buy it, you just have to take a simple test like a driver's license, so that you don't risk your entire net worth or whatever. If you do, you're an informed buyer of crypto, just make a sophisticated investor test.
on chamoc just since we're in crypto corner before we leave crypto corner when is my ape going to be worth money again when will my ape go back up never okay so my apes not coming back okay so i guess i shouldn't have done that all right how's uh sax coin doing we had sax coin and we had uh my coin went, but that was a pump and dump scheme that we had nothing to do with. I will never sell you a coin until I do.
I just want to let everybody know that. If you get a DM from me, I am not selling Jcoin until you hear it first.
I would literally do an angel investing coin immediately if there was a framework for it. It would be the greatest idea ever to have like a j coin and i could just like put it into startups that people could buy and sell it and be like this ongoing evergreen venture where's my j dow i love dow and i love i love the idea of an angel investing coin but man a startup coin would be brilliant yeah the jason coin is basically at zero it, it was worth...
The Saks coin is down to eight grand. Yeah, to be clear, I didn't have anything to do with Saks coin either, but I was more amused by it than anything else.
Yeah, well, my friend decided to tell everybody he was going to buy some and then straight to the moon. It was pretty funny.
It's hilarious. I have some...
i've only we've only bought crypto twice we have some doge uh which i bought during like the our doge phase a couple years ago and then uh my wife presently bought bitcoin you know at a very low price when everybody was talking about it around thanksgiving and uh my my heart bitcoin went phenomenal and my doge is at break even now so i've spent two years just on the pendulum but who knows maybe those should become a thing again i love doge all right we have a bellwether of sorts here salesforce dropped more than 20 after reporting earnings we should talk about the state of sas software as a service if you're not in the industry. Salesforce had its worst day in the markets in nearly 20 years on Thursday, and that's when we tape this.
They lost about $40 billion in market cap or as we say in the industry to figmas. On Wednesday, Salesforce missed Q1 revenue estimates for the first time since 2006.
Revenue was up 9.1 billion 11% year over year, but about 40 million below Wall Street expectations. So they're doing great.
But Wall Street is concerned for a reason. We'll get into what that is net income was 1.5 billion seven x year over year, because they've been doing a lot of cuts over there.
Free cash flow 6 billion up 43%. Profits are up huge.
Because if you remember those activist investors came in and had Benioff really rethink the structure of the business and the footprint of the business. But guidance for Q2 down.
Salesforce projecting 7% growth, relatively low for them. Freeberg, you and I were talking about this.
What are your thoughts here on what's happening in the markets? And then And we had the side discussion, which we didn't dock it, but I think it's worth bringing up here and dovetailing, which is, it does seem like the consumer, which is an enterprise story, but the economy is cooling off consumers, I think are running out of money, the YOLO economy is finally, I think, at its end. What does this say to you, Freebird? Well, I think the key question to your point, is there a macro economic reason for a slowdown in their business? They're forecasting for this next fiscal year, revenue growth of only eight to nine percent.
And for this next quarter, it's basically a flat revenue quarter relative to the past quarter. So for this fiscal year, 38 billion of top line revenue, 9 billion of operating cash flow.
And with the market cap coming down by 20%, the stocks at a $200 billion valuation. So it's trading at, you know, call it roughly 20 times, their operating cash flow forecast with sub 10% revenue growth.
And that's basically where

treasuries trade, right? Because Treasury yields for 30 or Treasury can get 4.7% today. Yeah, it's about to say almost five, you know, that's about 20x, right? So that's about where the multiple is on this Salesforce stock.
So I think it really begs the question on, you know, is there a macroeconomic force where the enterprise is spending less? Because of, you know,

a revenue slowdown in the economy, which we saw in the latest GDP report, that's number one,

that could be driving this and will affect ultimately the multiple for all these enterprise

SaaS companies. Or number two, is there a shifting underway in the SaaS business model, that the premium that SaaS companies were able to charge in the pricing model on a per seat basis and the dollars that they're able to charge per employee or per user is so significant, relative to what that enterprise can build themselves now, with the commoditization available to them under this new era of AI, and the ability to build tools internally, or the ability for competitors to emerge with significantly underpriced alternatives, because they can use generative AI to make software that can compete.
And then there's this other question, because Salesforce has been leaning and heavily on the generative AI capabilities that they're offering their customers. And it seems like the question is, are enterprises waiting to see the value of that generative AI service capability? Is it worth paying for today? Should I wait and see? Or is it actually indicating that there's a big commoditization and generative AI underway? Okay.
Meaning, why do I have to pay Salesforce a bunch of money when I can use some open source third party tool or some more freely available tool? So Chamatha Freberg presented two options here. One of them, macroeconomic slowdown.
The other one, hey, software, you know, belt tightening is happening inside the enterprise, and it's cheaper to make. So maybe we have a deflationary kind of situation inside companies, I guess this is adjacent, that last part of his theory is adjacent to the 8090 mission you're on with your new startup.
And maybe this is this an or or an end in your mind, Chamath? Is it both these things? But sorry, before you answer the third point I made was that generative AI, I might yes. And the third point may not be a product line, it may not be enough to charge for given all the open source tools.
Yes. And there's a big question mark about the AI new software, will people pay for it? So Chamath take those three, what are your thoughts? I think that if you look at what happened before, we had a cycle where very large monolithic

software was replaced by these SaaS vendors and Salesforce led that charge and they led

the, in many ways, the definition of the cloud.

So that was amazing.

That was this one big cycle.

And before that, that monolithic, those monolithic software vendors were replacing like mainframes and very archaic stuff. This is sort of this third disruptive cycle, we're going to go through a process of ripping and replacing these legacy products.
And so Gen AI is just a, an enablement layer that allows you to deliver functionality to people. And I think what you're going to find is that it allows you to deliver that functionality at much, much cheaper.
To your point, that's the whole point of 80-90. We always joke, is Salesforce going to get 80-90? Yeah, because you can deliver 80% of the features at a 90% discount pretty easily today.
And what you can't deliver today will get much, much easier in a year and two years and three years, for sure in 10 years. So I think what the market is voting with their dollars is that these large, lumpy, monolithic software companies that need big 50, $100 million customers, they're not going to find them soon because those customers will realize that you could get, you know, what Freeberg said, what you need for 10 million or 5 million or 1 million or 500,000, and in some cases free.
And so the cost structure of your organization makes no sense. And so you're going to have to go through this very complicated cycle of recycling, you know, the business model, which unfortunately will mean tons of layoffs.
And that's not a today thing. But over these next five and 10 years, that's probably what's going to happen.
And it doesn't mean Salesforce is a bad company. It's just that it is on the wrong side of the life cycle.
And the odds are overwhelmingly such that a bunch of small companies will flood this opportunity and provides cheaper, smaller, more flexible capabilities. Sachs, obviously, you made your bones in the SaaS business over the last two decades, at least.
What are your thoughts here on the challenges? I just interviewed Owen McCabe from Intercom. And he says he thinks the seat

model is going to change. And obviously, if there's less people at companies, there's less seats.

And that may be a headwind that you just can't win against. So maybe a consumption model has to happen or a different pricing model.
But what are your thoughts on what's happening at Salesforce, and then open the aperture there and tell us what you think is going to happen in terms of how corporations either decide to make that, you know, build or buy decision. Well, I think it's pretty amazing that Salesforce lost something like $40 billion of market cap because of a revenue miss of $40 million.
You know, it's amazing how these relatively small in percentage terms misses in revenue or earnings drive such huge changes in market cap. It's quite a ripple, isn't it? Yeah.
I mean, look, my view is that I don't have a strong view about the stock, but my sense is it's probably a buying opportunity. I mean, I think Salesforce is still a great company.
Mark Benninghoff is a great CEO. He's always positioned the company to chase after whatever the current thing is.
So obviously, he was one of the first to realize that software was headed to the cloud, evangelized for the cloud. Then when the social networking revolution happened, he launched Chatter, which was a competitor to my product Yammer back then.
But he was ahead of the curve on social and the enterprise. Then it was big data, and they launched Einstein.
Now they've got AI, and they're going to be doing a bunch of different things there. So my guess is he's going to figure out how to take advantage of this AI trend for the company.
They're not going to miss it. They're not going to get caught totally flat--footed so you look i don't have a super strong point of view on it as an investment but what about the bigger picture open the aperture there with the well i think the bigger picture pricing and how many people work at these companies and then if the per seat model is the model and then people are going to have less humans working at companies and do more with less how what does that mean for SaaS writ large? I'm honestly not worried about the per seat model.
I mean, the point of a pricing plan should be to align revenue expansion with ROI, meaning the more value that a customer gets from your product, the more they're willing to pay. And you just need some proxy for measuring that.
Seats are a good proxy. It's a good way to measure how much value the customer is getting out of your product because the more seats they're buying, the more value they must be getting.
Yes, you could do it some other way. You could basically meter data usage.
You could meter API usage. Sure.
Those models will work for other kinds of companies, but I don't think there's going to be a huge disruption to the C model is my sense. Look, I think the bigger issue here is that their forecast was soft, right? They are forecasting what sub 10% revenue growth.
They're going to, and this is why the stock got punished. And I'm seeing that a bunch of SaaS companies are kind of hurting today now in the wake of this.
They're down like 5%, not 20. So I wonder if what the market is wondering is whether there's a more general slowdown that we're on the precipice of.
I don't think that that explains a 20% drop in a day. I think typically these public market investors internalize a bunch of fears, and they don't execute on those fears.
And then when given an opportunity, they just barf it all out because it's like now it's acceptable. And so to your point, David, like it was such like a, an insignificant revenue miss so as to not even be important, quite honestly.
But the reason it's down 20% is I think folks have internalized a different set of risks, and then they've found an escape hatch where they have plausible deniability for selling. That's just what a lot of public market investors do.
I don't think it's a coincidence that we just had the GDP forecast revised down for the latest quarter. What was it? It's down to like 1.4%.
One yeah we talked about this last week because it's this number's fake the economy is looking pretty soft right now which is i guess a good jumping off point uh which is what do we think is happening here with the economy and then interest rates because the whole goal here was to get us under you you know, get us close to 2%, get rid of

the free handle, at least in terms of interest going up and maybe get the consumers to not be spending so much money, which is crazy to think about, or maybe get more people laid off and have the unemployment not so low. Remember when everyone was talking about soft landing? Yeah.
The reason why they were having that conversation is because the Fed jacked up interest rates really suddenly from roughly zero to five, five and a half percent. And it worked.
That has an impact on people's consumption because debt is much more expensive. So again, it's hard to buy a house, harder to buy a car.
Anything you need to finance gets much harder. It took a long time for this to work its way through the economy, but I think we're finally seeing it now.
I think that's exactly right. I think think we're here when you see that three handle like does it go down you know it's very interesting about the two percent target i went down the rabbit hole to try to figure out that two percent target like i was like who came up with two percent as a number like why isn't it three or 2.5 or 1.5 or one it's a guy in new zealand who is you know came up with what he thought was a good target two percent the world adopted it so going back to our conversation about experts yeah but he just freely admits it he's just like yeah i just thought three percent seemed like the right number it wasn't too high wasn't too low and it's kind of healthy to have things go up in price because that means like the economy's growing it's just a random target two percent it was his gut incredible right incredible yeah i mean if you look at this we are at what is it 3.6% annualized CPI inflation and 1.3% annualized GDP growth and a 4.7% 30-year treasury yield this is I don't know what else is more definitional of stagflation the economy is not growing prices are going up and the cost of borrow has gone through the roof yeah someone's got to give and then also if they keep raising taxes well it's good like their plans are then affluent people are going to be trying to protect their assets and who's they i'm just thinking like a politician like if a politician were to raise taxes dramatically but i don't want to i don't want you to have biden derangement syndrome here sacks okay well i can promise you this i don't think trump's gonna raise taxes but biden will he has the trifecta absolutely absolutely that's why i'll see you thursday night with my 50 000 check i can't wait to be there yeah it's gonna easily be paid for my tax cut.
Just to jump back for a second on the Salesforce point. So, you know, Salesforce faces these challenges, but it's still led by Mark Benioff.
Absolutely. That dude's tremendous.
And if you look at the performance of the average public company, regardless of the sector that that business operates in, that is run by a hired CEO versus run by a founder CEO. Yeah, the founder public companies that have that have gone public, achieved a $10 billion market cap, and are still founder run as the CEO from there, outperform nearly any index you look at.
Okay. And this is, I think, like a really key point, you could probably put together, I think some people people have done this put together a founder portfolio.
But I wouldn't count out Benny off just because of some of the stuff that we talked about.

That's my view.

Because founders can and will maneuver their way to success. That is the hunger of the entrepreneur.

Okay, let's do our draft. The one founders you should not bet against.
which founder would you least want to short chamath your first in the draft who do you got who would you not want to bet against worst person to bet against sorry what do you mean like founders any entrepreneur in history i already know what happened when people tried to short elon they got incinerated barbecue sauce okay you got you. You picked Elon in the draft then? That's number one.
Jamath, who you got? Yeah, that's easy. I would pick him too.
Okay, but we got to pick somebody else. That's why it's a draft.
He already took Elon. I got to take the next person.
It could be anybody. It doesn't have to be alive.
It doesn't have to be in position right now. Who would I? Sorry.
Who would you least likely to short? An entrepreneur you least want to short.

Larry Ellison.

Okay, Larry Ellison, yours, hold on.

Now, Freyberg, you get to go in the draft.

Who do you got?

I don't know the, I mean, all these founders,

I don't know how to pick one.

I mean, what do you have?

I'm going to go with, I'm going to go with Bill Gates.

What?

He's not always dogging over anything.

No, I said it could be

any period of time.

Yeah, now that you know

the stock performance,

what are you talking about?

I just think even

in the next company,

you do...

So your position is...

Your position...

You're going to go out

on a limb.

You're going to go

on a limb and say

that when Bill Gates

was doing his legendary run,

I wouldn't have shorted it.

Absolutely.

I also wouldn't short Michael Jordan or LeBron James.

Steph Curry definitely wouldn't have been against him.

All right, everybody.

Breaking news.

Today in the law being fair.

I'm sorry.

Today in law fair, depending on your view, Trump was found guilty on all 34 felony charges.

You can choose your own framing here.

Some say it's election interference.

Some people are referring to this as the hush money porn star case. Other people are calling it the deep state lawfare case.
The jury deliberated for about a day and a half. Trial lasted six weeks, including testimony from 20 witnesses.
key moments seems to have been Trump's CFO Weisselberg, who's I think in jail right now

for other charges, outlining the terms of the payments

to Michael Cohen, the disgraced lying attorney who recorded Trump's conversations.

And that's, I think, all I can tell you about this, except for maybe the sentencing is coming

up. It's going to be July 11th, which is but four days before the RNC.
Clearly a sad day for America. I'm not sure if anybody on the panel has any opinions on the Trump verdict, but let's just randomly start with you, David.
Any thoughts on Trump being convicted of 34 felonies in this case? Well, first of all, in terms of understanding this case, I think it's important to understand that both Merrick Garland's DOJ and former Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, they looked at this case, they looked at these charges, and they passed on bringing this case. Alvin Bragg, who's a Soros-funded DA, he won a hotly contested race to succeed Vance by pledging to get Trump.
And that's why he brought this case. And in order to bring these charges, he had to use a creative legal formula that turned a misdemeanor charge of falsifying business records, a charge that would have been passed the statute of limitations, into a felony by claiming it was in the service of a second crime, but he never named exactly what that crime was or proved that it happened.
And I think it's safe to say that a case like this, which is novel and creative and torturous, would never have been brought against anybody but Trump. Now, there's about five different grounds for appeal on this.
Number one, the judge is a Biden donor with a daughter who works for Biden. Number two, prejudicial and irrelevant evidence was admitted that should have been excluded, including Stormy Daniels' testimony.
Number three, Trump was not able to call his expert in election law, former head of the FEC, Bradley Smith. Number four, the prosecution never named the second crime.
And then number five, the judge let the jury pick from a range of options for what the second crime might be, including tax crimes for which no evidence was presented and federal election crimes for which the court had no jurisdiction. So my guess is that at the end of the day, this case is going to get tossed on appeal, but that's probably going to happen after the election, after November 5th.
And Democrats now have what they wanted. They wanted to get out of this case four words, Donald Trump convicted felon.
And you're going to be hearing that phrase, convicted felon repeated ad nauseum from now until November 5th. And I think that's the whole point of this case.
Freeberg, your take? No, I mean, it felt like this was always a win-win trial for Trump. If he gets convicted, then, you know, the conversation that we're hearing now, you know, this was an unfair conviction.
How could they do this? This is lawfare. And if he doesn't get convicted, they tried to burn him at the stake.
How could they try and do that? Clearly, he's innocent. He was made innocent.
So, you know, it never really struck me as being a smart. I'm not a political guy, but the political calculus just seemed off on this entirely.
It certainly wasn't clear what they were trying to accomplish. Either way, Trump looks good.
And I think we saw tonight reports that his website for making donations crashed. A lot of people started making public statements on Twitter that are not typically Republican donors that they're donating a lot of money to Donald Trump coming out of this.
And so it is clearly infuriating a lot of people that as Sachs points out, you know, something that some people are considering to be, you know, a bookkeeping or accounting crime has turned into 34 felony convictions, it feels unfair, it feels like the

wrong decision. And it's going to infuriate people because people worry about the quality of the justice system.
Anyone who's sitting in the middle, as an independent or an undecided, I think it is much more likely that they're going to have sympathy for Donald Trump coming out of this not admonishment. Shemaf, your take? I think that if you went into this, looking to confirm your hatred of President Trump, you were the one that was given red meat.
And I think that if you were undecided or pro-President Trump, you probably found more reason to support him for all the reasons that Friedberg said. And The thing that's unique about this specific trial that I found rather interesting was the diversity of people who just couldn't understand what this trial was about.
Whether it was Bill Barr, who worked for him, but was not a huge fan of his, nor was Trump or vice versa, right?

To an Alan Dershowitz, to a Cyrus Vance.

You had Democrats and Republicans and independents, legal scholars, legal experts,

some who liked President Trump, some who did not, some who got along with him,

some who did not, some who fought with him, some who did not,

some who got fired by him, some who did not.

And they were all categorically confused about what this whole thing was about. I'm not legally well-versed enough to understand what it was.
So as a layman, you then tend to go to this next obvious thing, which is you have to bucket this decision as here are some experts and what they know is better than what I know. And we talked about this earlier on the pod today when it came to Fauci and it turned out to not be so true.
Or you go to this other place where are there systems of government that can be convoluted and turned in the favor of the majority who's in power against someone that they feel is a threat. And we've talked about that as well with respect to how some of these governmental institutions have targeted some of our friends.
So I think that we're in a very precarious moment where the systems of governments in the United States are a little bit more fragile than they were the moment before.

Okay.

If people are wondering what the case is actually about, falsifying business records,

this is a pretty serious crime in New York City.

Basically, when people don't keep correct records, when they're committing crimes, this is taken seriously in New York because it is the financial capital of the world.

They've got a long history, whether it's Bernie M bernie madoff enron etc of uh pursuing these i don't know why this didn't get communicated well to the public um but there were obviously tons of business records falsified here and they basically admitted to it michael cohen had pleaded guilty to it already and so it really feels like a misdemeanor. And then to understand what happened after that, there is a law in New York, as Sachs correctly pointed out, on top of the falsifying of business records, which New York takes deadly seriously.
And they put this in every indictment when people do it because they want the accountants, lawyers, CFOs to behave themselves and not cheat the public. The election interference also taken very seriously in New York, there's been tons of cases, again, typically minor things, but people who do things like try to stuff ballots, etc.
And so you put those two together. If you do falsifying, if you falsify business records, and you do it as part of a second crime, which he did, which he was convicted of, then you get these penalties.
So that is the explanation of the case. That was why he was found guilty.
It's pretty easy to figure this all out. If you don't know all this, it's because you didn't take the time to read anything about the case in terms of the basic heuristics of it, which I think is because people are burned out on this.
Trump has committed so many misdemeanors and crimes over time that we're kind of used to it. And, you know, my personal take on it, and I'll just leave it at this, is I think it's going to be a speeding ticket.
I do think it's going to get overturned. I think Trump has done this his whole career.
I lived in New York.

All these real estate guys were doing all these kind of like little ticky tacky cheating things. And I do think that this was politically motivated.
What was the second crime, J. Cal, if you understand the case? Election interference.
Election. What does that mean? You're not allowed to interfere in elections theory here which the you know the the jury unanimously voted in front of in over these six or seven weeks

election interference was because trump was in dire straits he after the access hollywood

tape came out that weekend when he admitted to assaulting women the grab them by the blank

Thank you. he after the access hollywood tape came out that weekend when he admitted to assaulting women the grab them by the blank came out his team in this case admitted including his assistant michael cohen alan weisselberg and of course the guy from the national inquire pecker all of them agreed testified and just were completely honest that this payment and the reason they bought these people off was because they were scared that it would reduce his chances of being elected.
They were in panic mode. They all testified to that.
The jury found that they committed these crimes, the falsifying of business records, in order to save his election chances. So that is the legal concept.
This legal concept was available to everybody for the last, you know, since it's been filed in the New York Times. Anybody who doesn't read these basic things and comments on this case is just a partisan who doesn't want to accept the reality that these are actual legal concepts that are completely valid.
Now, I do think, despite all of that, and me making it abundantly clear to anybody that you don't want people falsifying business records, and you also don't want anybody interfering in elections, I do think it was politically motivated. So you got to keep two things in your mind at the same time.
It's politically motivated. Trump commits crimes regularly, often, but they tend to be ticky tacky.
You just said it was going to be reversed on appeal. So if you're so confident it's a crime, then why do you also say it's going to get reversed? Yeah, because I think, well, let me restate that.
I think he's going to get a speeding ticket. I don't think the case is going to reverse.
I think there's going to be some sort of a pardon. Now, this is a state kind of situation, it wouldn't be biden who would pardon it it would be the uh the governor and i think what's going to happen is somebody like trump teflon don he's called that for a reason he gets away with it every time he's rich he's powerful like all rich and powerful people you have to really do something heinous to wind up in jail so i think it's going to be a speeding ticket i do think the the documents cases, that one is a pretty legitimate one with obstruction.
And I do think the election interference, those are the two he should be really worried about. Because if he is found guilty on those, those are legit.
But I do think this country is going to need to come together. I hate to be the bigger person here.
But I do think the company, the country needs to get together and get us two new candidates.

And we can't be having this lawfare and politically motivated lawsuits every time somebody loses or they're afraid of losing an election. Let me ask you a question, Jason.
You're a famous, successful person. Over the next 10 or 20 years, the odds are pretty good you'll be more famous and more successful.
Say more, Jamal. Do you feel the less, the same, or more?

Okay, you have to say less, same, or more.

Okay.

If somebody in government doesn't like what you're up to,

after today, are you less, the same, or more in terms of the risk that the laws could be used to fight you?

I think we're kind of in the same area i think there's always been politically motivated prosecutions that have occurred that's part of you know the flaw in our legal system and i do think appeals pardons exist as the the relief valve for those things and i think for rich and powerful people with great representation they always get off unless they've done something incredibly incredibly heinous and i don't think this is incredibly heinous and so when it's framed

as simply oh it's a porn star he banged a porn star who cares it was consensual and she got a

payoff or maybe she was um extorting him even you know i i don't know if those details were ever

determined if you could frame it as extortion or not i think none of that matters like this this

Thank you. extorting him even you know i don't know if those details were ever determined if you could frame it as extortion or not i think none of that matters like this this falsifying business records thing is just something they did they should just own it they should have just pled it out and it should have probably never been escalated to the next level with the election interference i thought that was a little bit of a stretch but not that much escalated because alvin bragg got elected to pursue this case and that's the only way you could get it from a misdemeanor to a felon yeah exactly so i think that is part of the lead you sound you sound i know you're really giddy about this jake how i can hear your voice no i'm not honestly all you're doing no no i'm gonna stop you right there nope sorry sax you don't get to say i'm giddy i'm not gonna tell you how you feel you don't get to tell me how I feel.
I actually am sad for America. I'm not.
Honestly, I wish. All you're doing is repeating.
No, no, no. I'm going to stop you right there.
No, sorry, Sax. You don't get to say I'm giddy.
I'm not going to tell you how you feel. You don't get to tell me how I feel.
I actually am sad for America. I'm sad for America that Trump and Biden are our choices.
Okay, great. So speak for yourself, not for me.
Okay, great. Well, maybe I'm just detecting enthusiasm in your voice.
I'm not quite sure what it is. No enthusiasm.
Not at all. You're presenting these documents on the screen that are basically from Alvin Bragg's case.
It's all you're doing is repeating his theory of the case, which I must say is extremely tortured. And it's novel.
I don't think a case like this ever been brought. And if you are going to bring a case against a former president, it should be for something more than ticky tacky type stuff, stuff that you yourself admit is politically motivated.
It's obvious. Bragg was out to get Trump.
This is a campaign strategy. You have to bend the law into a pretzel to create the case that you're describing.
Listen, you know, I think Trump will continue to do these. He's had these long before he was in public office.
He got tons of speeding tickets like this. He'll get them after he's out of office.
He's always committed crimes. He's always done these minor things.
What this reminds me of is, you remember Ken Starr and what they went after Bill Clinton for

with the whole Monica Lewinsky thing? Sure.

And when that Starr report dropped, you know, and then hundreds of pages of legalities and they

described all the prurient behavior and, you know, amazing amounts of detail. At the end of the day,

the American people looked at it and decided that maybe there's a tawdry element to this, but it's personal behavior. And after some period of time, Clinton's popularity rebounded and he actually gained seats in the midterms because the Republicans overplayed their hand.
Yeah, totally. And I think in a similar way, it's very clear to me.
And in fact, you've already said this is politically motivated. And they basically have taken some sort of bookkeeping error that was a misdemeanor that was past the statute of limitations.
And they've combined it again with this very novel legal theory about somehow committing fraud in the election, which, by the way, was not actually proven in the case. And as part of the jury instructions, again, the judge allowed the jury to have a multiple choice on what the second crime was, which is what a lot of legal experts think will become the basis for appeal.
So again, this whole case was tortured. It was politically motivated.
I would go so far as to say it's a sham. It's an outrage.
And I think people are reacting it's an outrage and again if you're gonna bring a case not just against a former president but the current front runner to be the next president it better be something important not this ticky tacky thing that the way you describe it as being ticky tacky why even waste the public's time with this why even spend all the money

pursuing this and i told you why yeah no that's donald trump convicted felon that's the reason why the media wants that talking point and by the way if you want to make a switcheroo and get a different candidate than joe biden that's not going to happen now because democrats in the media think that this is their salvation they know they're running it's not gonna be it's not going to be. The obstruction case

and the January 6th case,

those are legit cases they should have just gone after those because those are the ones that are completely legit but here we are the democratic party knows the running a candidate who can't debate who can't put two sentences together who can barely find his way off a stage whose policies are coming home to roost the economy like we like we talked about on the show, is slowing down very rapidly. His foreign policy is a disaster.
But they think that somehow this is going to be his salvation, is being able to say that Donald Trump is a felon. That's their plan.
Yeah. And I think at the end of the day, this is probably not going to work.
All right. There you have it, folks.
there's your quick hot take around the horn with your bestie on trump being convicted by a jury in new york today he'll be sentenced on july 11th and we'll see what happens there the market also after we talked about salesforce a bunch of the sas companies took a dive in the after hours freeberg any thoughts any thoughts there? Not just SaaS, but also Dell. And in particular, Dell reported their stock is down 20% after hours.
So I do wonder if there is a slow reckoning underway right now in technology. That's, as we talked about in the show, a function of both kind of an economic slowdown, enterprises making fewer investments were they've clearly called out the increased cost associated with AI.
So they are spending quite a lot and their their cogs on AI systems is much higher. And so they're showing a cash burn.
And I think this is a point to must been talking for a while it's unsustainable guys. I've been saying this now for a month.
So let's just be be precise again. You cannot spend this kind of money and show no incremental revenue potential.
So while this is incredible for NVIDIA, the chicken is coming home to ruse. Because if you do not start seeing revenue flow to the bottom line of these companies that are spending $26 billion a quarter, the market cap of NVIDIA is not what the market cap of NVIDIA should be.
And all of these other companies are going to get punished for spending this kind of money. Now, Dell is a unique example in the sense that I actually think it's a beneficiary of spend.
And I think that it will build data centers and it will actually do well in the move to AI because it's a very smartly positioned pick and shovels provider. but the threshold question is where are all these newfangled things that we're supposed to see that justifies a hundred billion dollars of chip spend a year 200 billion dollars of energy spend a hundred billion dollars of all this other stuff guys this is we're now spending 750 billion dollars this is on the order of a national transfer payment.
And we've seen nothing to show for it, except that you can mimic somebody's voice. And you can make like a cat.
I mean, making a developer 30 or 40% more efficient, that's actually legit. But I will say I did.
That hasn't happened yet either. No, that's totally happening.
No, no, that's happening in startups right now. I'm seeing startups with four developers do what just a couple years ago, they would need eight to do there.
And that's the premise of your company, I think that developers can go faster with these tools. But these are Yes, but these are aspirational things.
When you take a, for example, a 30,000 person company, it is not true that those engineers now are now all of a sudden as productive as 130,000 employees. It's not even true that a 1,000-employee company is as productive as a 4,000-person company.
And the reason is for one very specific thing. Even as all of these next generation models get released, the practical threshold problem is when you introduce a completely new way of doing things into an existing workforce, what happens is people push back.
And even in the companies that I own, where I could theoretically mandate, you must use these tools because I am the owner of this company. It doesn't happen.
And so I think what you're really seeing, Jason, is a few people embrace it. Those people may be 50 to 100% more productive.
But when you blend that into the entire workforce, it's still a single digit percentage, which means the overall productivity gains are nominal. Yeah, I think that's a fair point.
Because you're forced to spend, again, $750 billion a year, it doesn't all hang together yet. Yeah, I agree, there's going to be a bit of a gap there.
And I am biased because I see startups which are always looking for the most resourceful way to do things. And you're talking about large enterprises, which are slow to adopt, right? And I think we're both to be right here.
Yeah, you get around the innovators dilemma by saying, guys, you need to be AI first, from the outset, which a startup can do because they can they can recruit people that, for example, with 8090, same thing, you must use these tools. For example, we are not allowed to have any administrative staff.
Everything is done by an agent or workflow, but that's because we're a new company and we can make those decisions. But somebody who is an established company, I suspect that these gains are nominal at best, yet the spend is outrageous.
And it gets okay. And when it catches up with when you report, I think the market is sort of like, I think the first, you know, the general statement might be made that perhaps the first AI mini bubble is bursting a bit.
And particularly with respect to the accelerated expectations that public market investors had for public market technology stocks, that perhaps now is the time for a bit of a reckoning, that perhaps this isn't going to happen at the same margin level, or the pace that folks had modeled. And this is going to cause a bit of a setback.
I think pace is a very good point you're making. I also think that with the GDP slowdown that we've seen report that just came out this week, with a sub 2% US GDP growth, we are seeing an economic slowdown underway, there is going to be reduced spending, there is going to be reduced conversion of enterprise customers to buy anything.
And so that is going to dramatically affect the market, we're looking at 5% 30 year Treasury rates, which means that you are going to see multiple compression, that's going to happen across the market for tech stocks. So this could be the beginning of what I think might be a slow contraction.
One thing I just want to make sure I'm not a market. One thing to me, I do have some information on the Dell stuff.
One thing to keep in mind is they had like a 30% run up or 20% run up at least since Nvidia CEO praise them. And like, I guess all these meme stock people's just jumped jumped in so i think it's just like a little ticky tacky correction back to the ticky tacky sax any final thoughts here on ai before we all leave to go to our you know trump celebrations and or yeah maybe the market doesn't like the u.s becoming a.
There it is, folks. The banana republic.
I can still be friends with you guys. All right, everybody.
Four. Who's you guys? Oh, you guys.
I was a friend of those guys. All right.
Four chamaths. Two missing buttons.
We'd like to encourage everybody to enjoy their summer.

Three buttons are coming.

I got short shorts.

You want to see my, I got my short shorts on.

Oh, God, that's so pasty white.

I got to get my sunglasses.

The over under on when Chamath goes for the third button is June 25th.

So June 25th in the betting markets right now for the third button.

Love you guys.

We'll see you all next time on the world's greatest podcast. Bye-bye.
We'll let your winners ride. Rain man, David.
And it said, we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Love you.
I. I'm the queen of kinwai.
I'm going all in. What, what, your winners lie.
What, what, your winners lie. Besties are gone.
Go 13th. That is my dog taking a notice in your driveway sex.
Win it all. Oh, man.
My habitasher will meet me at play. We should all just get a room and just have one big, huge orgy, because they're all just.
It's like this like sexual tension, but they just need to release somehow. Wet your feet.
Wet your feet. We need to get merch.
I'm going all in. I'm going all in.
Okay, last year at the Olinin summit we had a wonderful talk by jenny just and they have a very cool program called power poker they're holding a 2024 summer boot camp and tournament for women only so for the ladies out there if you want to learn how to play poker just like the besties and jenny just you can join this four week training class, get a limited playing time and you play in a tournament, I'm going to come and play in one of the sessions. But here's the great part, we donated a ticket because we think it's worth encouraging women to join the poker community.
And so there's a $7500 all in summit 2024 ticket at stake. There's only 80 spots.
Go ahead and join at pokerpower.com slash summer

dash bootcamp. Pokerpower.com slash summer dash bootcamp.
It's going to fill up quick. I know a number of the women who work at my venture firm launch have joined and they're looking forward to learning poker again, 80 spots.
I think they charge 100 bucks just to make sure you show up. And there's an all in summit ticket there for you.
You can actually see the video of this podcast on YouTube, youtube.com slash at all in or just search all in podcast and hit the alert bell and you'll get updates when we post and we're going to do a party in Vegas, my understanding when we hit a million subscribers. So look for that as well.
You can follow us on x x.com slash the all in pod. Tick tock is all underscore in underscore talk.
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You can follow Chamath at x.com slash Chamath. And you can sign up for a sub stack at chamath.substack.com.
I do. Freeberg can be followed at x.com slash Freeberg.
And Ohalo is hiring. Click on the careers page at ohalogenetics.com.
Three, two. Okay two okay everybody follow Saks at x.com slash David Saks and check out Saks's slack killer glue at glue.ai I'm Jason Calacanis I am x.com slash Jason and if you want to see pictures of my bulldogs and the food I'm eating go to instagram.com slash Jason in the first name club you can listen to to my other podcasts this week in startups to search for it on YouTube or your favorite podcast player.
We are hiring a researcher apply to be a researcher doing primary research and working with me and producer Nick working in data and science and being able to do great research, finance, etc. All in podcast.co slash research.
It's a full-time job working with us, the besties.

And really excited about my investment in Athena. Go to AthenaWow.com and get yourself

a bit of a discount from your boy, J. Cow.
AthenaWow.com. We'll see you all next time on the All In Podcast.

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