It is the slow, slow news weeks of summer, and we are delighted, delighted to have fan favorite, super intelligent bestie Gavin Baker with us from Atreides.

How are you, sir?

How's your summer shaping up?

Fantastic.

It's been awesome.

Stock market is back.

That's good for you because you invest in both public and private companies, yeah?

My firm does, yes.

Yeah.

Gavin, let me ask you a question.

How do you price tariffs today?

So where do you think this ends up?

Obviously, there's a lot of back and forth and

everyone's trying to make a read on what the end game is.

What's your market take as you're making investments right now and where we end up on the tariff front?

It is a good question.

It's open.

We're going to see what happens with sectoral tariffs.

I think it's hard.

You're doing the winning AI summit.

It's going to be hard to win in AI if we put tariffs on semiconductors.

But for a lot of what I do for now,

tariffs are not super relevant.

But, you know, for for the market, for the economy, they are relevant.

But for AI, they're maybe a little less relevant because I think everyone

is maybe a little more sophisticated about the downsides of tariffs for constructing data centers here in the United States.

And ultimately, don't we look at the tariff situation and say,

despite the shock and awe of the opening salvo, it's quite a boring position.

Now, it just seems to be reciprocity and reasonable reciprocity at that.

Yeah, that's how we would sort of categorize the end game here.

I would say for everyone but China.

You know, it is, and you know, we've clearly reached some sort of deal

with China, you know, rare earths for H-20s and MI308Xs.

But it's interesting.

And one of the

trade deals that has been finalized is Vietnam, and there's a special carve-out for goods that were transshipped from China through Vietnam.

So they are clearly focused on China more than almost

any other country, rightly or wrongly.

But yeah, and I do think there is,

you know, there was maybe

three months where Trump said he did not care about the stock market, but now he's back to quoting the market at all-time highs.

Yes.

He clearly cares and is clearly very sensitive to market feedback.

So I think that that will be a

dampening mechanism on tariff volatility.

But, you know, they passed the bill and he immediately went back to tariffs.

And, you know, we'll see where we land in August.

But I just think the most important thing in the market by far is AI.

It kind of overwhelms everything else.

Absolutely.

And I guess the other big story with the market, and we'll get into the H-20s, David Sachs will be joining us in a moment.

So he'll be jumping in halfway through it.

But let's start with

maybe this soft launch of the firing of Jerome Powell.

On Wednesday morning, Bloomberg reported that Trump was likely to fire Powell soon after talking with Republican lawmakers.

Shortly after that, the New York Times reported that Trump had actually drafted Powell's termination letter.

Market instantly reacted negatively, dropped 1%.

Bond yields rose about 10 basis points.

You can see the blips here on these charts starting around 11.30 a.m.

when the article was published.

Polymarket

reported Jerome Powell out as Fed chair in 2025, spiked up to 30% on Wednesday before dropping back down to 20%.

Trump quickly squashed these rumors.

Markets rebounded.

And Trump said, we're not planning on doing anything regarding Powell.

Some people speculating, maybe this was Trump testing the market reaction, as you talked about earlier.

Gavin, he does seem to care about the market as most presidents do.

If you remember, Trump nominated Powell as Fed chair November 2nd, 2017, and he has gone on a tirade the last couple couple of months, calling Powell stupid, numbskull, stubborn, low IQ, a knucklehead, mentally average.

It's a long list of descriptors of the person he placed.

Powell's term ends May of next year.

White House officials have confirmed Trump is in the process of selecting his successor.

Holly Market says that could be Kevin Warsh, 22%, Kevin Hassett, 19%, Scott Besson, 15%.

This hasn't actually ever happened, right?

We've never had a Fed share fired, but we have inflation coming back a bit.

If you all remember, there's a dual mandate for the Fed to keep unemployment low, check, that's pretty good.

And keeping inflation under control, that's been going very well since our massive inflation spike over the past couple of years.

And here we go.

CPI ticked up 10% from 2.4% to 2.7%,

30 basis point increase over May.

So any thoughts, Gavin, on these macro issues around inflation coming back back a bit,

the stock market at an all-time high, and unemployment,

if you believe the unemployment data, and we've had a bunch of debates here about that,

how correct is it being at close to an all-time low in our lifetimes?

Let's go macro.

Yeah, I wouldn't read too much into the CPI bouncing up a little bit.

There's base rate effects.

I think on a month over month basis.

And if you looked at, you know, what economists call core, super core, different

ways to maybe smooth out CPI, I think inflation is still

relatively contained.

As far as, but I mean,

a lot of very smart people are convinced that tariffs will lead to inflation.

We'll see.

There's certainly sound theoretical arguments for why they will, but it does look like maybe the overseas exporters are eating a little bit more of the tariffs than people thought that they would, which is good for U.S.

inflation.

But, you know, the combination of a very weak dollar and tariffs, theoretically, should lead to a little more

inflation.

Firing Powell,

I worry that the market only went down 1%.

I do think the market would go down quite a bit more if Trump did fire Powell.

I think it would be a mistake.

I hope he doesn't do it.

And, you know, there are very sound reasons for the Federal Reserve to be independent.

And

I hope he does not read from that trial balloon down 1%

that that's all that would happen.

Look, the world would continue spinning.

America would go on, but it would be a mistake.

Freeberg, we have this idea that there would be a couple of rate cuts, and maybe we get monetary velocity going again.

People will be able to take more loans out, invest more in business.

But with the stock market tearing it up, there's a lot of wealth being put into the system with the big, beautiful bill.

There's a lot of spending in there, as we've talked about here.

Putting that aside, it feels like the economy is in really great shape.

Chances of a rate cut has now flipped.

No change is now the favorite option for September, whereas a week ago, the favorite option was 25 bips.

So, this idea that we're going to cut or the Fed's going to cut, that seems to be changing as well.

So, your thoughts on the

macro picture here?

So, I'm not sure

the firing of Jerome Powell necessarily solves the U.S.

fiscal challenge, which is

rising interest rates on the long end of the Treasury curve.

So if you look at the 30-year Treasury yield over time, and Nick, maybe you could pull this up while I'm talking, but as of today, we're at exactly 5% on the 30-year.

And you can see that this 5%

yield, which is what the market is demanding the United States government pay in order to be loaned the money to make the bill payments that the U.S.

government has to make every year, is the highest it's been.

The borrowing cost is the highest it's been since going all the way back to 2007 as of today.

And I think this is the real story for the United States.

We have $36 trillion of debt.

The average interest rate we're paying on that debt today is 3.3%.

That's the average of all the treasuries that the federal government has issued, the Treasury Department has issued, to borrow the money that it is using and has used to pay all its bills.

And if you look at the 5% number, that's a 1.7% hike.

At 3.3%, which is the current average rate we're paying across $36 trillion,

we have a run rate interest expense.

So just the money we're paying each year on the interest of the outstanding debt is $1.2 trillion a year.

And if the spikes up to 5% from 3.3, we're talking about nearly $2 trillion a year in interest expense.

And that number is only going to get bigger as we borrow more money each year and the loan balance goes up, the outstanding debt goes up because we are still running a deficit.

The government is spending more than it's making every year.

So the crisis that America faces is a more profound fiscal crisis.

where the rates that we're having to pay are a function of what the market is telling us.

The market does not want to loan the United States money over a 30-year period for less than 5% as of today.

And so making adjustments to the short end of the treasury curve, making overnight loans cheaper, which is what the Fed can do, will stimulate the economy and make more money flow easily because now you'll be able to borrow money overnight to do stuff like build a building and then sell the building next week or next month or take out a car loan and pay it down and use your car to go drive for Uber and grow the economy and other things.

So the theory is that if we can drive rates down on the short end of the curve, we'll grow the economy such that we'll be able to make those payments on the long end of the curve.

But there comes a point where, again, you're only going to be able to move the market so much until the more important fiscal situations are going to be addressed, which is spending, taxation, and some of the other key policy issues.

So I think what the market is saying is it's not as much about Jerome Powell and frankly, getting rid of a prudent individual may be more challenging than it is beneficial when the real challenges facing the United States need to be more heartily addressed.

So I think that's my kind of take on this whole point.

Yeah, go ahead, Gavin, build on it.

So point number one, the 30-year has gone up since Powell started cutting rates.

that is just empirical proof that what David is saying, I think, is right.

And second,

the deficit has been

a feature of American politics dating back to Ross Perot's

1992 presidential run.

But it never ended third party.

His independent third party run.

Here we go.

But yes.

But the deficit never really mattered because interest rates kept going down such that even as our debt grew, interest expense has kind of a percentage of the government's budget stayed relatively low.

Now that rates have gone up and don't seem like they're

going down anytime soon, the deficit does matter and it really matters.

And

you can kind of run a couple of scenarios, but like

pick your metric.

If the deficit kind of continues at current levels and we were to refinance the debt at the prices that

David was talking about.

It's only a few years before spending on interest is significantly larger than spending on Medicare and Medicaid or Social Security or the military.

So pick something you care about.

But our current course and speed,

it's in the not too distant future where interest expense is the biggest line item for the government.

And that is not healthy.

And that's why the deficit finally matters.

It's just that rates are higher.

But the great thing is, is there is a virtuous cycle here.

As you close the deficit, rates should theoretically come down.

And then those both feed on each other to kind of help the problem.

And it is possible, there's no silver bullet here, but some combination of slowing government spending, extra revenue, and

tariffs are effectively, we've never had a consumption tax here in America, which I think is a good thing because consumption taxes are very regressive.

But the reality is, like, even when Obama controlled the House, the Senate, and was the most popular Democratic president of our lifetime, I don't think federal government tax receipts have a percentage of GDP, got above 18, 19%.

So that's kind of the ceiling.

And it for income taxes alone, and tariffs are really just a consumption tax that kind of incense domestic manufacturing.

I mean, there's all sorts of reasons they're bad ideas.

You know, David Ricardo, the theory of comparative advantage, 100% correct.

Free trade is a good thing.

But introducing some sort of a consumption tax, growing the economy a little bit faster through deregulation, and slowing government spending.

I think there is a way out of this for America.

But it's important to find the way because the deficit finally does matter after really never mattering in my political lifetime.

It is interesting.

We've never had to worry about our debt.

It was always manageable because it wasn't that large.

And even when it got large, it wasn't compared to GDP because the country was doing so well.

We had the PC revolution.

We had the internet boom.

I mean, we've had boom after boom after boom in efficiency that we've led the world.

When these companies like Google or Apple take over the world and all those tax receipts and income comes into our country, that does sort of make you not look at it.

I guess I have been talking to you, Gavin, and not to make this super political, but both parties have proven that they have no interest historically and in the current one with cutting spending.

It's just the nature of it.

So we can sit here, whether you're a Biden fan, Trump fan, put it all aside.

Both parties love spending and they're not stopping.

One of our friends has proposed, hey, maybe in in the midterms we have a couple of these House positions, a couple of senators, maybe we try to flip them and create a new party that cares about this issue.

What are your thoughts broadly on that?

If a couple of more Joe Manchin types were in the House, the Senate, could this country maybe start to make this

the deciding issue?

And maybe could we see some movement on the other two parties, some pressure on them by a third party, an America party, perhaps?

Yeah, well, I think a few things.

I do think there is room for a much more centrist party in America.

You know, the way the primaries work,

it, you know, leads to more maybe extreme candidates

than anyone would actually want,

you know, being each party's candidate.

So I think a third party would be helpful.

You know, and, you know, I think there's plenty of room for a party that is, you know, kind of,

fiscally conservative,

reasonably socially liberal, pro-American energy production,

all kinds of energy production, including solar, importantly.

So I think there is room for that.

And I think it is right that if you just target a few races, you can have a big impact.

But I would just say,

humbly, I think the American Party is a great idea.

I just don't know that it is the highest and best use of Elon's talents at this moment in time with what's happening with AI.

And just,

you know, to the extent Elon is a friend of the pod, I just think staying focused, AI, Mars, that might be the highest and best use of his particular talents.

100%.

Hasn't that been the case for some time, Gavin?

And anytime there's something, whether it's Neuralink or Boring Company or some other new project, that there's these claims that this is a distraction away from the highest priority work that should be done.

I mean, is the political stuff unique?

And then his point of view on the political stuff, just like it was with Twitter, is that it's existential to society and civilization and our ability to function and to do,

you know, to achieve the progress that he aims to achieve and his core function.

So obviously he is succeeding being the CEO of many different companies.

But, you know, I think a big part of what makes him kind of exceptional as a CEO is the perfectionism, the drive.

And, you know, politics is not a game of perfection.

It's a game of compromise.

So I am sure if he sets his mind to the America Party, that he will succeed.

But I think there are other things for him to focus on.

And, you know, the boring company, Neuralink.

These are games of perfection.

These are, you know, this is about engineering.

This is about solving a problem.

It's not, not, you know, compromise in the art of the possible.

So I think he would succeed.

I just think that there are other things that

maybe a higher calling for him.

Yeah.

I mean, and the cost of being away from his businesses this last time around, as he said very publicly, was severe.

It was intense.

And he's had to really regroup.

We got this incredible news when Grok 4 came out.

And I think we should maybe talk a little bit here about what that big prize is.

The big prize, I think, is most,

well, it's actually going to be an open question, Freeberg.

I think the big prize is whoever wins general intelligence, super intelligence, or the biggest cluster, or the most power to power the biggest cluster that powers general super intelligence.

where do we sit on the language models today, Gavin, and Elon's recent,

let's just call it what it is.

I mean, incredibly dominant release of Grok Grok 4.

I don't think people expected that.

They didn't expect him to be able to leapfrog everybody.

And let's be honest, people are leapfrogging each other every four to six months.

So I fully expect Gemini will leapfrog Grok and OpenAI will have their time in the sun again as well.

But this was pretty impressive, right?

I would say this is the biggest leapfrog we've seen in quite some time.

And I think the benchmarks that matter are Arcade GI2 and Humanity's Last Exam, where it did, in the case of Arcade GI2, it's called semi-private, which is important because it means that some of the questions were held back because the criticism of these models is they memorize the answer.

And so RKGI2, it has not seen the questions before.

And it did roughly twice as good as, you know, the state-of-the-art Google,

OpenAI, and Anthropic models.

And then a humanities last exam, you know, we can call it 50 to 75 percent that are, you know, exceptional humans score 5% on that.

It scores in the 40s.

So this is incredible progress.

And I think it's worth mentioning this model was trained on Hopper.

So this model is probably about as far as you can take the last generation of NVIDIA GPUs.

The next models we see, Grok5,

05 from OpenAI, whatever they're going to call the next Gemini.

They will be trained on Blackwell, and I think that will be a really big step function.

But I do think the ultimate prize here is artificial superintelligence.

Like, I think artificial general intelligence will create a lot of economic value, but, you know, and, you know, maybe we will be able to work less as humans.

But I think ASI, artificial superintelligence is what is really exciting, you know, in terms of maybe, you know, being able to live longer, you know, really kind of fundamentally kind of change the fabric of our lives.

Can you take a stab at explaining that?

difference in definition to the audience who they hear these terms and we kind of bundle them into either a transcendent intelligence that we haven't seen before, that we as humans can't comprehend.

It goes beyond human intelligence, or this is the smartest human on the planet and where we are right now in this journey.

Because I think these terms are all getting muddled together and I think we have an interesting conversation here if we parse them.

I think artificial general intelligence, I would define it as an AI that can take economically useful actions in a variety of domains and be better than the average human in most domains, all domains.

But that's very different than super intelligence.

You know, being,

you know, being able to draft a contract, that's not super intelligence, but it is useful.

Being able to do a medical diagnosis, it's not super intelligence, but it is useful.

You know, being able to book my travel, so on and so forth.

Super intelligence means exactly what you said,

that it is smarter than any human, and it has access to all of human knowledge.

And I think one of the most interesting questions is what will the economic returns to superintelligence be?

And they are definitionally unknowable because we have never seen superintelligence before.

If as humans we have kind of pushed the limits of physics, biology, chemistry, the laws of the universe, then maybe the economic returns to superintelligence won't be that high.

But if superintelligence is curing cancer and inventing warp drives, then the returns are going to be really, really high, and it's fundamentally unknowable.

Yeah.

Okay.

So we're at general intelligence.

Hey, your lawyer, your tax, your accountant's going to go much faster.

They'll have a co-pilot.

This is all going to be great for a business.

Every business gets 10% more efficient a month.

Seems like a reasonable bogey, which means every seven, eight, nine months, every business is going to get twice as efficient at these kind of chores.

Yeah?

I think that...

I wouldn't say that's a reasonable bogey.

I think that might be a little aggressive.

It's, you know, the world, the world always, it's, you know, I think it's a Bill Gates quote, you know, the world always changes less than you expect over the next one, two, three years, but way more than you expect over 10 years.

Just takes time for technologies to diffuse.

You know, maybe really nimble startups will see some of the gains that you were talking about.

But I mean, if we doubled productivity, I mean, that would be like an economic revolution.

I mean, we're seeing it in programming.

For sure.

If you've talked to the average developer, they, I think, would say they're they're getting 5% to 10% better a month, better being defined as faster, shipping more code.

Rule of 72, hey, you know, every year at least, you're going to be twice as good.

I think that actually seems to be happening with developers.

I think it is happening with software.

I think software is the first area where you've seen a real true kind of economic productivity impact.

Generalized, a lot of companies are having incredible success with AI for customers, you know, support for sales.

I think you see it more in startups and big companies, but the impact it has had on coding is undeniable.

Freyberg, let me swing this around to you.

We've got the super intelligence out there.

We've got AGI out there.

One of the things Gavin said was, by definition, you can't quantify the gains of super intelligence.

That is the big prize here.

That's why people are putting this much money into these kind of data centers.

Yeah, in your mind, it's not just the general intelligence.

That would be the silver medal.

People are going for the gold here, not general intelligence, super intelligence breakthroughs that we can't imagine.

Am I, would you say that's a fair way to sum up

the massive interest in investing in these projects?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's something

where everyone has identified this asymptotic return moment where If you get to that moment, you're limitless in terms of the upside.

Is there one winner?

I don't know.

I don't think so.

But I would also kind of reframe this as being some binary condition that I think we're talking about it as being, quote, general intelligence, super intelligence, as being on a spectrum of leverage towards complexity.

Complexity, meaning like, I can do a simple task, like instead of writing a letter and

putting it in an envelope and having some guy carry it to

my mom, you know, and she gets it the next day, I can digitally get her that message instantly over email.

That creates an incredible amount of leverage and solves a lot of the complexity of getting her that communication from me.

So if I as a human said, I would like to harness fusion power, similar to what the sun uses to make energy, and I want to do that on Earth.

Today we're in, call it year 40 or 50.

of a research cycle of humans trying to solve that particularly complex problem.

It's a scientific problem, it's a discovery problem, it's an engineering problem.

And this idea of superintelligence is that it could give us immense leverage in solving that complex problem that we otherwise may be challenged to solve over decades or hundreds of years, or think about one day solving a problem that would take humans thousands of years to solve.

I don't think that humans are limited in our ability to solve problems.

I think we're limited in terms of time.

And what intelligence, what digital intelligence gives us is leverage on time so that we can now tackle ever more complex tasks.

That, as you think about these tasks, the amount of time isn't just an incremental one year or two years, but it becomes a hundred years or maybe a thousand years.

So, this relates to, I think, projects around physics, around chemistry, around transportation, around biology,

where we're

probably fundamentally scratching the surface today, and where the super intelligence is an enormous leverage crater for us.

And so I don't view it as some like species or race that independently persists in its own intentions, but it is a tool that provides leverage in a way that is orders of magnitude greater than the leverage we got from yesteryear's digital tools and probably today's AI tools and probably tomorrow's general intelligence tools is kind of how I would think about it.

And maybe it's because one model does so much stuff better than any human, you can call it super intelligence.

But I think functionally, leverage into complexity is where this becomes super compelling for humans.

And it's why I think we can and should be highly optimistic about living very long lives and traveling anywhere we want and having abundance in food and having abundance in resources and having abundance in recouping our time to do the things we want to do instead of the things that we have to do today because we don't have access to this incredible leverage.

that's where I get kind of

I think it's a great way to look at it.

But I want to go back to the silver metal here in this sort of competition.

Gold being super intelligence, we start solving fusion and really big problems on deep research cycles, and the velocity of that goes up.

But just going back to the silver, you know, everybody in the economy becomes, I don't know, single-digit, it's more efficient every month, and you know, some amount every year.

I've been trying to back of the envelope what I think the value is for a human being in the West, in the modern world,

and what what they should spend on AI per month.

I've come up with a number of about 75, 150 bucks, somewhere in that range, is a no-brainer to spend on your AI per month as an individual working in the world.

If that's the premise, right?

I think there's a billion people in the developed world who could spend, let's call it 100 a month, 1,200 a year.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out this is a trillion dollars in revenue based on market cap.

That's probably $10 trillion in market cap.

And then we just have to back into the spending of what it costs to build this.

You're doing these kind of calculations, I'm sure, at a treaties, yeah.

And where

this general back of the envelope that I've come up with in my mind for a mental model, that there's a $10 trillion prize, a trillion dollars in revenue, just in the silver metal, does that jive with the spending we're seeing today?

I think people are putting in $10 billion worth of equipment a year across five different companies, right?

Well, I think they're putting in quite a bit more than 10 billion per year.

Each.

No, no, no, no, no.

Google alone is doing 70 billion this year.

Each is playing 70.

Is that 70 billion they're putting in this year going to be repeated for the next five years?

So it'd be 350 billion?

If you look at

if you, well, yeah, TBD, the future is always uncertain.

But,

you know, if there are economic returns to that, they will keep doing it for sure.

Something interesting is AI is, you know, as we've discussed in previous all-ins, extremely compute intensive.

And it's just at no point in my career as a tech investor, except the very beginning, which was kind of the end of the PC wars, which Dell won by being a low-cost producer, going direct, cutting out the working capital,

the components and a PC depreciate.

So if you have to go through a store

where it sits on the shelves, you're at a big disadvantage from either a, you know, call it a cost or a quality perspective.

But at no point in the 25 years I've been a tech investor has being the low-cost producer mattered.

Being the low-cost producer is really going to matter in AI.

Because

at some level, the amount of tokens you produce is intelligence because of test time, compute,

you know, post-training reinforcement learning.

And so if you can produce those tokens at a lower cost, you'll have a big advantage.

You know, if for that $75 billion, or 30 billion or 50 billion that you're spending per year in CapEx, you can produce more tokens.

That is a profound advantage.

I don't like your calculations like just has a back of the envelope,

you know, kind of scratch.

They seem reasonable to me.

The trillion dollars a year in revenue because of AI seems quite reasonable when you frame it as $1,000 for a person to be whatever, 30%, 40%, 50% more efficient at work every year.

Yeah, and it's just, we could probably go back and look at kind of like the early days of, you know, cell phones and what were people willing to pay relative to disposable income.

Your PC analogy would actually be the perfect one.

A PC back in the that era was what, three, four thousand dollars per person.

They lasted for three years.

So it was exactly a thousand a year.

But this is why, this is why

creating such delineated distinction between different types of AI, I think is

also like the equivalent of trying to create distinctions between other types of technology.

So the automobile,

the airplane, the telephone, the computer, all of these technologies are tools that created leverage, leverage on things that were otherwise complexity and reduced them down to simplicity from a human perspective.

Pick up the phone, make a call, instead of getting up on your horse and going across the country to deliver a message or using a computer to do a spreadsheet that calculated everything for you rather than calculate it by hand, and so on and so forth.

Like all of these tools reduce complexity to simple tasks for humans.

And the ever-increasing complexity of what we can accomplish with digital tools is, you know, continuing in this kind of era now.

But that's why I think it's very similar, Jason.

Like this is not some new concept.

It's the continuation of human productivity.

It's the continuation of the improvement.

of what humans can do, what we can produce, what we can, and yes, there's a concept now that intelligence has become such a, like it's caught up to everything.

And Gavin, I I don't know if you think that there is this concept of some moment of singularity, but it does feel to me like there's just extraordinary leverage that's being created.

I feel similar to, yeah.

For sure, that's true.

I hope that's true.

I hope your vision of it being a productivity enhancer for humans is correct.

You know, I do think, you know, people deep in AI

do think there's some probability that it goes sideways, but I hope that you were right.

But coming back to Jay Cal's, you know, $10 trillion prize, and relative to the market caps of the companies involved, it needs to be at least $10 trillion.

Something that I think is interesting and relevant, particularly to Grok4 being the best product, is the best product doesn't always win in technology.

No.

Yeah.

And sports, you know, they say defense wins championships.

And on the internet, distribution wins championships.

And Grok4 has formidable competitors with lots of distribution.

And Google

and

Meta, if they get their app together, Microsoft.

And so, from an industrial logic perspective, something that I think makes a lot of sense, particularly since OpenAI bought Johnny Ives' hardware startup, which will place them into competition with Apple at some point, is XAI and Apple are natural partners.

There's been a lot of news about Apple thinking about buying Perplexity or MixedDrawl, but that's just a band-aid.

Those companies don't get Apple what what they need.

And Apple's had an incredible partnership for many years now with Google that's generating tens of billions of dollars for both companies.

And I think there is solid industrial logic for a partnership.

You could have Apple Grok, Safe Grok, whatever you want to call it, so that Apple feels comfortable.

And that probably also helps Grok in the enterprise.

And then it also helps both Apple and Google with this DOJ trial.

And so I think in this

incredibly high ELO chess match that is being played between the leading labs, like that is

that partnership makes a lot of sense.

Fast companies first time I've heard anybody sort of make that natural connection, but you're right.

Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs at one point had this discussion, which was, hey, we've got search and you've got a browser now because the iPhone didn't have a browser, you know,

or, you know, they could have built their own search engine.

They could have partnered with Yahoo, but they decided to make this long-term partnership with Google.

And man, that dropped, what, 20, 30 billion to the bottom line at Apple and cemented Google's search franchise.

Absolutely.

And right now that deal is being litigated by the DOJ, and the DOJ is considering remedies.

And so if you bring on a really kind of effective, credible AI provider,

I think it could help both Google and Apple with their antitrust issues.

And at the end of the day, you know, Google, they have Android and their pixel phones.

OpenAI is making hardware.

Anthropic is kind of a captive of Amazon.

Meta is kind of a,

you know, they're in a deathmatch with Apple.

So I think there is really sound logic for that partnership.

I think it'd be good for both companies.

Love to see it happen.

It feels to me like the interface is going to be the browser.

I know this sounds crazy, but I've been playing with the comment browser from Perplexity.

Did you play with it yet, Gavin, or look at some of the demos?

Yeah.

What are your thoughts here?

Because it's really, and then ChatGPT just launched a virtual desktop that pops up to go do your, you know, little web-based scrapes, agents, assignments, whatever, I'm going to call it assignments, you know, homework, chores, go do your chores.

What are your thoughts on this modality?

Yeah, the browser is part of distribution winning championships.

Apple has Safari.

Google has Chrome.

And if you're not going to strike a partnership with one of those distribution channels, you will eventually need to do your own browser.

And you can extend that logic all the way.

That's why Google, they did a browser.

They did a phone.

But I also do think the,

you know, the companions from Grok have been interesting to play with, and they certainly make it more engaging.

That becomes the agent.

It's a kind of incredible, mind-blowing concept for that to be the interface.

All right, listen, here we go.

Calling in live.

Got a breaking bestie coming on board here.

David Sachs, calling in live.

I see the pale yellow paint in an ancient building.

You must be in some sort of wing of the great White House.

Is that correct, David?

I am.

Well, I'm actually not in the White House per se.

I guess I'm out in the White House grounds.

We're in the Eisenhower executive office building.

That's where my office is.

Yes.

I can tell from that.

Keyberg and Trump have been here.

Yeah, no, I said great things.

And I checked.

My calendar, JKL.

I'll send you some photos.

It's great.

Well, no, but the calendar's wide open between now and the all-in summit, all-in.com slash yada, yada, yada.

So the window's there, Sax.

The window's wide open.

And I'll see you in the cafeteria, I guess.

Play your cards right on stage next week, JKL.

And you might get invited after the New Fly Eye Summit we're doing.

Yes, absolutely.

Live in D.C.

next wednesday which has been publicly announced so it's going to be exciting david you uh you brought a friend today maybe introduce your friend and tell us uh what you got done what have you gotten done in the last week for the american people they want to know what because you weren't here last week doing the pod so you must have gotten something done for the american people let's hear it well first of all this is the czar behind the czar bo hines

He's the executive director of the President's Working Group on Digital Assets.

So that's the working group that I chair, but he actually actually does all the work.

He's the executive director and he's here every day.

And he's been working on crypto pretty much nonstop since we started the administration.

And he's kind of the unsung hero

within our operation here on these two bills that just passed the House, which are historic and quite momentous.

So, Bo, welcome to the program.

And maybe you could tell us a little bit about these bills and what they do for the American people.

Yeah, well, first of all, David, you're too kind.

We've had a blast working together.

I mean, we connected back in transition, I think, in late November, and we started mapping out a plan for this.

And to see it come to fruition this week is really like, it's unbelievable.

The fact that we had the bipartisan votes we did today in the House is remarkable.

It's unprecedented.

And it shows you that, you know, leaders on both sides of the aisle understand that our country has to be at the forefront of this technological development.

But let's start with genius because I think genius is really the foundation for everything else we can build upon in this space.

A lot of industry cares about market structure, as do we, and we want to see it done on the president's desk as well.

But genius is unique because it really updates the payment rails inside of our current financial system.

I mean, the payment rails have been archaic, and I've likened to the fact that the ways in which we've communicated have changed quite dramatically over the course of the last several decades.

The ways in which we move money really haven't.

And we have the technology there and blockchain technology.

So what we're doing here is we're fixing the plumbing of our financial system.

We're securing U.S.

dollar dominance for decades to come.

If you want to access our capital markets, you're going to have to use a dollar-backed stable.

You're also providing a pathway for tokenization of public securities in 24-7 markets and the things that people have dreamed about for quite some time.

This is a revolutionary piece of legislation.

And the fact that it had this this much bipartisan support is incredible.

It's a testament to President Trump's leadership.

It's a testament to our fantastic AI and cryptos are, David's leadership.

I mean, he's truly been the guiding star behind the ideology and what we're pushing here.

And, you know, he has a phenomenal team as well.

I mean, I'd be remiss not to thank Tracy, who's David's chief of staff.

I mean, in the midst of all of the chaos to get this done, and like there were so many steps to this, we had to beat the banking lobby to get it passed the Senate.

Then it moved over to the House, in which we had to basically fight some members that really misinterpreted or misunderstood what this bill actually did.

And the president stepped up, David stepped up in the enormous way.

It wouldn't have happened without either of them.

And so now we have this bill heading to his desk tomorrow.

And to pivot to market structure really briefly, this provides like the rules of the road for the exchanges, the brokers, everyone in this space.

They desperately need it so that we can break down the wall between traditional financial institutions and these digital asset players.

I think that's well underway.

Obviously, you know, getting a vote as strong as they did in the House is indicative of what can happen in the Senate.

If we deliver on these two pieces of legislation, I mean, that's about 90% of what needs to be done for crypto to make the U.S.

and crypto a capital of the world.

And, you know,

it's just remarkable.

I mean, we're over the moon.

Okay, Sachs.

You got these two things over the finish line.

Congratulations on that.

Lots of compromises you had to make.

So I want to get into what were the compromises to get this done.

Just to clarify one thing when you say finish line.

So So like Bo was saying, there's two bills.

There's the Genius Act, which is the stablecoin legislation.

And then there's a Clarity Act, which is market structures.

Basically, all the other tokens besides stablecoins.

Where we are is that both passed the House today,

but Genius has already passed the Senate.

So it is going to the President's desk tomorrow and it will become law.

We're doing a bill signing with the president.

By the time this pot is released, it will probably be law.

I think we will have the signing.

Clarity started in the House, and so it has passed the House, and now it's going to the Senate.

And they still have to do their hearings and markup on it.

And we expect that'll happen over the next couple of months.

In fact, the chairman of the Senate Bank Committee, Tim Scott, has said that he wants to finish with the market structure legislation by the end of September.

So, if all goes well, then we could be looking at a second bill signing in, say, October.

And, like Bo said, that would be pretty much the crypto industry's wish list for having a clear legal framework in the United States for both stablecoins and other crypto tokens.

So it's really pretty amazing.

I mean, when I started this job, I'll just tell you, one of my friends in Silicon Valley said that,

you know, you may be able to get some AI things done, but you'll never get anything done on crypto.

And the reason is because the entrenched interests are too powerful and they'll stop it.

The banking lobby will stop it, or Elizabeth Warren will stop it or just all the status quo players who could get disrupted by blockchain-based technology will somehow find a way to stop it.

And that didn't happen.

Like we've actually now moved forward.

Genius is about to become law.

And I think clarity is looking like it's going to have the votes in the Senate as well to become law.

So it's really pretty amazing how much progress we've made in just six months.

And like Bo said, this really comes down to President Trump's leadership.

He made the promises during during the campaign to prioritize crypto, to make the United States the crypto capital of the planet.

And it was his negotiating skills and deal making that made this all happen.

I mean, this past week has been a little bit of a roller coaster.

There were reports over the last couple of days that the whole thing was falling apart and wouldn't happen.

There was a moment, I think this has been publicly reported, but I'll give you some color on it, is there were 12 members of the House whose votes were necessary to advance the bill to this vote today.

And

at a certain point, President Trump brought him into his office, the Oval Office, and worked out all the differences personally.

And that's what put this bill over the top.

If it wasn't for the president's direct involvement and action and understanding of the issues, he listened to all the concerns and he paid attention to the ones that were real and then rebutted the ones that weren't.

If it wasn't for his direct involvement, we would not be here today.

And he understands crypto.

He's involved in it.

seems to have an understanding of the value of stablecoins for the U.S.

dollar.

That seems to be a key motivator for this being bipartisan.

You got twice as many Democrats as you thought you would get.

Is that because people want to make sure that dollar supremacy gets locked in and stablecoins is a way to do that?

Because you can't have a stablecoin unless it's backed by a dollar.

Yeah, I mean, like I've talked about on this show before, it shouldn't be that hard to sell regulation to Democrats.

I mean, what we're doing here is providing a regulatory framework for the industry.

They didn't have one before, and that's why the number one stablecoin player in the world right now is an offshore entity.

They will have to come onshore as part of this bill in the next three years.

So what we're doing here is creating a regulatory framework.

But the reason why it's substantially bipartisan is because the industry wants this regulation because they want the stability it gives them in terms of having that legal authorization.

They want to make sure that if, you know, four years, eight years from now, 12 years from now, whatever, there's not some new Gary Gensler who comes in and turns the whole industry upside down because he doesn't like some aspect of what they're doing and he just starts prosecuting them, which is what the industry experienced over the past four years with Biden's war on crypto.

So we, meaning that the Trump administration, could fix the Gensler issues just with agency rulemaking, and we're certainly on that path to do that.

But if you want long-term stability that goes beyond just this administration, you have to get legislation.

You have to canonize it into law.

And that's why the industry was so interested in getting these bills passed.

So I think that's why you're seeing some bipartisanship here.

Like Bo said, I do think that there's a substantial number of Democrats who understand that this technology is the future and it's a positive thing for the U.S.

What could be bad about allowing digital dollars, which extends the dollar's dominance online, so that it basically bolsters the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency.

Over time, as we get challengers from BRICS, for example, this is going to make the U.S.

dollar stronger.

And every time a dollar token trades somewhere in the world on a crypto wallet, there has to be a physical dollar in a U.S.

bank account invested in a U.S.

treasury.

And that creates demand for our debt, which is another positive thing.

And there have been studies done that show that

the results of this bill could be trillions of dollars of new demand for our debt, which is only a positive thing.

And if you don't allow a legal way to do this and you don't have a proper proper framework, you've been dancing around this person who has three years to get their act together.

That's Tether, I'll say it.

You can do a search for Tether controversies or shenanigans, and you'll find plenty of them.

And I don't think it's fair to say they don't have their act together.

I think they have their act together.

It's just that they did not know how they'd be treated operating onshore in the U.S.

under Gary Gensler and the Biden administration.

And so they operated offshore.

And what was happening under the last administration administration is that the last administration, by creating all this uncertainty and doubt, was driving all the innovation offshore.

Okay, fine.

They have a sorted past.

That's my statement, not yours.

But now they have to clean up whatever messy stuff they have in their past.

That's me saying it, not you.

You can have your opinion.

I'll take mine.

But we're in agreement that if you don't have a framework, they would be doing even more things that were maybe off the reservation of my mind.

Gavin, any thoughts here on crypto?

I'm not sure you've participated in it it particularly because it didn't have a framework yes i would just say um one david congratulations seems like an incredible achievement two

i try to invest in areas where i feel like i i at least believe i have some sort of uh competitive advantage and it's not clear to me that i have any sort of competitive advantage in crypto but three david i am curious for the stable coins is it Does the Genius Act limit them to dollar-backed stable coins?

So it's not like you can create the stablecoin and then swap in something other than a dollar.

Is that true?

Well, I mean, anybody can create a stable coin that's backed by anything.

And in fact, I think there are like Euro-backed stablecoins out there, for example, but nobody uses them.

I think if you look at the stablecoin market share, it's like 98% US dollars, 2% Euros, because there's a flight to quality.

I mean, everyone wants to use the best one, right?

And this is why it's in the interest of the United States to basically enable this technology to continue flourishing is because as the best fiat currency, we're the one that's going to get used the most.

There's no reason to have multiple fiat stablecoins, not really.

So this is going to accrue to the benefit of the United States.

Jake, I'll just let me go back to something you said.

I don't necessarily agree with your criticisms of that particular company, but where I will agree is that this bill will provide additional comfort for consumers and additional protection for consumers, because now all the stablecoin companies will have to operate in the United States.

They'll be subjected to quarterly audits, and we will know that every stablecoin that's been issued is fully reserved or backed up by a dollar in a U.S.

bank account.

And so, therefore, when a stablecoin holder eventually wants to cash out and they go to basically an off-ramp, the money will actually be there.

Now, I'm not saying that the money isn't there with any of the current providers.

In fact, I think it is, but now

consumers will have the additional protection and confidence to know that all these entities have been audited, they've passed these audits, and they're regulated entities under U.S.

law.

And that creates confidence for the market, and it's good for everybody, and it will spread the adoption of this stablecoin product.

And if they don't, they can't participate in our market, right?

So that's the good news here is, you know, if you choose to not go through those audits and you do attestations or other fugazi, fugazi stuff offshore, you know, not saying anybody's doing that, but people have, you know, then you just don't get to participate.

And this is the great thing about having some basic rules of the road.

We should talk a little bit here about infrastructure, Sachs.

You were in Pittsburgh this week.

There were some announcements.

This was another bipartisan win, I think.

Shapiro was there.

A bunch of investment going on there.

Maybe tell us a little bit about the progress made in Pittsburgh with regards to AI and infrastructure.

This was an energy and innovation summit that was organized by the Pennsylvania Senator Dave McCormick and his wife, Dina Powell McCormick.

And they did an amazing job bringing together all of these different companies and interests that have a stake in energy in Pennsylvania and the development of AI.

And Pennsylvania is, I think, it's number two energy producing state in the U.S.

It has tremendous amounts of natural gas.

They feel like they can expand that.

I think there's been a lot of fracking in the past there, for example.

They even have nuclear westing houses there.

And it makes sense to have the data centers near the power source, right?

And so we know that these big AI data centers can be powered by either natural gas or nuclear.

And so Pennsylvania just makes a lot of sense as a place to build this AI infrastructure.

So this was a summit to announce new investment in Pennsylvania, something like $90 billion.

President Trump was there to keynote the summit and talk about these investments.

It's his policies towards energy that

he started describing long ago.

I mean, remember, he made the campaign promise of drill baby drill.

He's been talking about the need for energy expansion in America for many years.

And I think he was very farsighted in seeing that energy is the basis for everything.

It's the basis for AI.

It's the basis for all other kinds of growth.

So by promoting energy dominance, we also get AI dominance.

And we've talked on this show before about how we're going to need that energy to power the electricity of all these new AI data centers.

So this summit brought together all these different groups.

And the thing I thought was really interesting, the thing I learned from it was just how diverse the business interests are that are going to participate in this whole AI boom.

It wasn't just big tech.

Yes, Ruth Porat from Google was there.

It's also small tech.

There was hardware companies, there were robotics companies, but there were also these energy companies.

There was nuclear, there was gas.

The trade associations were there.

It's construction, it's electricians, it's carpenters.

And so there's a huge diverse array of different parts of the economy that are going to experience growth from this AI boom that's taking place.

It's not just a Silicon Valley thing.

So that was what I took away from Pittsburgh.

And it was a really cool experience being there.

I thought there were two interesting notes as well.

Hydro.

I saw Google was investing in hydro and upgrading some dams there.

This is, I think, Gavin, one of the great upshots of the AI boom is that the AI companies, whether it's Meta or Google, they're so motivated that they'll actually go and upgrade the infrastructure.

They'll invest in the, you know, small modular nuclear reactors that are coming

and even gas turbines.

Obviously, natural gas is a major part of this as well.

And you saw that up close and personal with the build out of Colossus.

Yeah, Gavin?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, electrical production is fundamental to AI.

If we do not significantly increase kind of domestic energy production and electricity generation,

you know, we are already at a disadvantage to China.

And I do think we want to close that kind of electrical generation gap as quickly as we can.

You know, and natural gas is great.

Nuclear is great.

Solar is great.

Batteries are great.

We need it all.

Yeah.

All of it.

And Sachs, I saw your favorite governor, Josh Shapiro, was there, and he was being very positive about finding common ground on energy, economic development, and saying, hey, this is like a great example of bipartisan efforts to collaborate.

So maybe you could talk a little bit about that, because you had two great moments of collaboration between the Trump administration and the Democrats.

This is good for the American people, yeah?

Both on the crypto project and on AI in Pennsylvania.

I've never met Shapiro.

I did see him there at the event, but I didn't see him on the stage.

I don't know if he was part of the roundtable, so I don't know exactly what his status was.

But what's interesting about Pennsylvania right now is that it's a state that's turning red.

And so you see that Fetterman, who's probably the most right-wing member of the Democrat Party in the Senate, and Josh Shapiro obviously is tacking towards the center because they see the direction of travel in Pennsylvania.

So, yeah, I think you've got some centrist Democrats in that state.

Yeah, working out pretty well.

Josh Shapiro, every two days, tweets something about how he's deregulated something.

He's made it easier to do business.

Like he is, he's on the program.

He seems like a sensible man.

Yeah, 100%.

I'll just give a final shout out to Bo here for all the work that he did on Genius.

I mean, he's kind of the unsung hero.

Bo, how are you?

How are you doing all this while finishing up your degree?

When do you graduate from college?

This kid looks like he's 20 years old.

How old are you, Bo?

I have the baby face.

I'm 29, turning 30 next month.

Look at you, 29 in the White House, lead and working with David Sachs.

This is a dream come true for you, huh?

It is.

I mean, David's been incredible.

I've learned so much from him.

Just the way that he negotiates and the way that his brain works,

it's been a blast just to be a part of it.

But I have a 10-month-old now, so I should have bags under my eyes from lack of sleep.

But Jason, I'll make one more point before I jump off on the tether topic.

Like the one thing that I think your viewers should know is

this year, there'll be the fourth largest purchaser of U.S.

Treasuries.

And I think that's something that we should really contemplate.

I agree with David Sinneman on this.

I'm excited to see what they do here in the U.S.

I'm glad they're going to be a part of our system under the regulatory regime.

But so will everyone else.

And I think that's a great thing for our country.

It allows us to have control.

That's great that you guys are backing them up because they've been banned so many times by other governments.

I'm glad you got their act together.

I'm going to keep on those tether guys until they get their act together.

Keep qualifying that you speak only for yourself.

I only speak for myself.

I've been following that tether story for a long time, and I think it's great.

I want to make this point.

I always know that our critics have never actually watched the pod when they start talking about the all-in point of view on something, right?

As if there's a singular point of view from the all-in pod.

Like, you know, it's like the all-in pros or whoever think something.

When anyone who's watched the show knows that we've been fighting like cats and dogs for years, and there's four distinct points of view.

And sometimes we agree, but there's almost always some disagreement.

we've disagreed about this issue.

We also, Trump and I, as you know, are relentless supporters of Ukraine.

We believe we should be giving them weapons and support.

And David, you happen to disagree with me and our president on that.

You've had a different position historically.

So here we are.

I'm going to stay in my lane on that one.

David, can we talk about the H-20s or would you rather not?

Because I feel like you have been like

so dead right about this.

And I am, you know,

it seems like the export, they're going to get the licenses.

And that is 100% the right decision for America.

And I do give you credit for championing that.

I'm happy to talk about why I think it's great, but would just, you know, if you.

Can you frame it for a second for the audience, Gavin?

What we're talking about here, NVIDIA obviously.

was banned from selling their latest and greatest to China and even the last generation, the H20s.

And obviously, that creates an opening for Huawei and other players to create competitive products as opposed to using the standards built here in America.

Yeah.

Well, I think, I mean, I think you said it well, but first of all, it's not the latest and greatest.

The H20s is not the latest and greatest.

I don't think we're going to let the latest, it's not even the last gen, it's a deprecated version of the last generation.

Right.

Yeah.

So remnants.

It's a less powerful version of the hopper chip, and now they're on to Blackwell.

So it's anyway, Gavin can explain.

Yeah, it is.

It's many, many years behind.

But while it's many years behind the kind of state-of-the-art here in America, it is, I think, kind of devilishly clever because it's called two years ahead of kind of the chips from Huawei.

And so

it...

kind of gives America an advantage while preventing China from developing kind of a domestic NVIDIA alternative.

And the real threat is because China, they do have more electricity.

They can do things that we cannot do here in America.

You know, the Blackwell racks are exquisitely designed to be as power efficient as possible.

If you don't care about power, you can make very different

kind of design decisions.

Huawei has something called the Cloud Matrix 384, which uses fiber optics instead of copper to link the chips together.

And while it's not nearly as power efficient as the Blackwell and VL72,

They have all the power they need.

And so I think it's very, it's, it's, it's a smart decision for America to sell this chip that gives America an advantage in AI and keeps China from developing kind of their own domestic alternatives, which could eventually kind of challenge, you know, NVIDIA, AMD, you know, other kind of American AI accelerator champions globally.

We don't want that to happen.

So I thought it was a mistake when they banned the chips.

And I'm really happy and think it's really good for America if that that is being reversed.

And kudos to you, David.

Gavin, you said it so well.

I don't think I have anything to add.

Can I just say one thing on crypto?

You guys can put it in or not, but I saw it as interesting, David.

I was always worried about stable coins as a risk to the dollar.

But I think you make a very good point that when you are the dominant currency, they entrench the dominance.

And I just should not have thought of them that way.

I think what's going to happen with these dollar-based stablecoins is they'll start being used all over the world.

Let's say that you're in a country, maybe it's a developing world country where the fiat currency is not trusted.

And now all of a sudden you can transact in dollars using a wallet on a phone, you know, and the merchant also has a wallet on a phone and now you can just transact in dollars.

You could see a large portion of these economies dollarizing from the bottom up.

Because again, once you have your choice of fiat currencies through stablecoin, why wouldn't you just use the best one?

And that's what I think is really interesting.

So I do think it extends the dollar's dominance internationally into the online realm.

Yeah.

And previously people were basing their stablecoins on a basket of assets, some treasuries, some real estate investments, because they were seeking yield, Gavin.

So they would buy real estate or, you know, short-term, long-term treasuries.

They might put equities into it.

They might keep some in cash.

And none of that was known.

And so that's where this big fear came.

Hey, these things are getting pretty big.

There's obviously a demand to use

this concept of a stable coin.

But what if there's a run on the stable coins?

And that was always the big fear with various players, was what if everybody wants to withdraw their stable coins?

Are there enough dollars or liquid assets in there?

And that's where I think certain players have maybe, you know, moved the asset allocation.

And in order to be in the U.S.

market, Tether's going to have to be 100% in treasuries, right?

They're not going to be allowed to be, say, in real estate.

There was a

concept that maybe they were buying Chinese paper for real estate back in the day, and people were concerned about that.

So this cleans all that up, and they have an easy path.

But you can't make interest on it.

That's actually a very interesting portion of this.

So that will have to come at a later time.

So the banks don't lose anything here, right?

Well, just to clarify one point on that, one of the concessions that was made to community banks.

is not to have an interest feature because the community banks were worried that this new stablecoin industry would put them out of business.

I think that that fear was wildly overblown on their part.

I don't think that's what's going to happen remotely.

But when you have a new technology like this and a very established industry, you can see why maybe they'd be afraid.

But the bill allows for all sorts of marketing, promotions, rebates, that kind of stuff.

So maybe it's not called interest, but

there are mechanisms to create, let's say, rewards for stablecoin holders.

So it's not as like black and white as just, oh, there's like nothing a stablecoin issuer can do to attract or incentivize or reward one of their holders.

It is a dimension they could compete on.

So maybe if I were to buy $10,000 worth of a stablecoin, I could get mileage-like points or maybe a load-in gift card or something.

Maybe, I don't know.

Yeah, we have to interpret the language, but the mechanism is there.

Okay.

Well, there you have it, folks.

All right.

Reporting from our capital, David Sachs, our czar of AI

and cryptocurrency.

I'll see you next Wednesday in D.C.

for a very important summit.

All right, Besties.

I'm here at the White House with Senator Bill Haggerty from Tennessee, the principal author of the Genius Act.

He, I would say, along with the leadership of President Trump, are the reason why this bill happened.

And we have stablecoin legislation just signed into law by President Trump.

Bill, you did a phenomenal job.

I got to observe.

this whole process and you really played the critical role.

You were a very skillful legislator crafting delicate compromises.

You were kind of the glue that held the whole thing together.

Congratulations on getting this done.

Is this your first bill that you've gotten done as a senator?

It is.

I've served in the Senate for over four years, but we were in the minority for the past four years.

So this is the first opportunity since the Senate was taken by the Republicans to actually drive legislation through.

And the fact that we had the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House made this possible.

It was just a threshold concern.

We worked so hard, as you know, to retake the Senate in 2024, to retake the White House in 2024 and hold on to the House of Representatives.

It worked.

And that's the only thing that's enabled us to deliver this type of meaningful legislation.

And I say this too.

It's been a great team that has done this.

I may be the author of the legislation, but the leadership that you've brought to bear from the White House, coming in and

donating your time from the private sector, working as a volunteer here, but making certain that the leadership and the vision is present here at the executive branch, you've been absolutely great.

And that vision, I think, is carried forward into the Senate, the House.

More and more people are understanding this and catching on.

And I think what we've done today is launch the catalyst for what's going to make America the crypto capital of the world.

Yeah,

it's been really amazing and interesting for me to watch this whole process.

They say that you shouldn't watch legislation or sausages being made.

But, you know, earlier in the week, the media was reporting that this bill was dead because there were a dozen holdouts.

And President Trump made calls late into the night.

He gathered people at the Oval Office.

He cajoled.

He twisted arms.

And he also persuaded.

And he got us over the finish line.

It's pretty incredible.

Well, I think the Founding Fathers made it actually quite difficult to legislate for a reason.

But it is difficult.

It's taken months upon months to get to this point.

And the legislation,

the Genius Act has been killed a couple of times in the media.

Elizabeth Warren declared victory early on that she killed the bill.

That didn't happen.

She didn't have the juice to do it.

But there have been many, many.

That's a big deal because until now, the crypto community has been living under Elizabeth Warren's reign of terror.

I mean, she basically was calling the shots during the Biden administration on crypto and I was there when the Genius Act passed the Senate.

I was up in the bleachers or whatever and she was not happy.

I mean there were photos of her and she she did not like losing.

There's a fundamental reason for this, David, because Elizabeth Warren and her crowd want to see a central bank digital currency.

What they want is control of our transactions.

They want the ability, they're the ones that wanted to get to a $600 threshold for your Venmo transactions, reporting everything.

They want the ability to do choke point 3.0.

And if you think about it, they had visibility in our transactions, the ability to centralize and control them.

They could control our lives.

It may be okay for the Chinese Communist Party, but that's not going to work here in America.

And this legislation put the final nail in the cough into that.

It's really amazing that you got it through.

And to get this past, the Senate, you had to have 60 votes, right?

Reconciliation, you only need 50 plus one, but for a regular order, I guess, to get past the potential for a filibuster, you need 60.

That's exactly right.

So what demands did that put on you in terms of getting Democrat votes?

Because the Republicans have, what, 53?

Yes.

So we didn't have all the Republicans.

We didn't have Austin Republicans.

But what enabled me to get the other nine Democrats to come on board was really an education process.

Because at its core, this shouldn't be a partisan issue.

This is about taking America's payment system into the 21st century.

This is about making our nation more competitive.

This is about great, you know, expanding demand for the U.S.

Treasury securities that we we issue.

This is about the dominance of the U.S.

dollar.

It's hard not to like it, but I think there's a partisan bent here in Washington that's so strong that their objective is just to keep Republicans or Donald Trump or David Sachs from getting a win here.

And through education and through listening, and frankly, I don't think it's my legislative skills.

I think it's the business skills that I brought to the legislative branch.

I think it's through the business skills and the ability to negotiate that we've actually gotten to this point today.

And so tell us about that.

So before this, you were a businessman, then you became ambassador to Japan.

You met President Trump.

You told him you wanted to run for Senator Titan.

He told the story up in his speech.

He said that you had learned Japanese in like six months as ambassador to Japan.

It was a little longer than that.

Okay.

There's a piece of the story missing because I started my career at a place called the Boston Consulting Group.

And they sent me to Tokyo for three years back in the late 80s, early 90s.

That's when I learned the language.

And to go back as U.S.

Ambassador to Japan under President Trump in 2017, the honor of a lifetime.

I can tell you, representing the greatest nation in the world, any place in the world is an honor.

But particularly in a region like that that has so much strategic, you know, so many strategic initiatives that are underway right now, you think about this, Japan has more U.S.

military station there than any place else in the world.

Japan is one of the toughest environments in the world.

If you think about the neighborhood that they're in, North Korea, Russia, China right at your doorstep.

The time that I spent as ambassador really helped me dig in deeply in terms of the national security issues that our nation confronts and those that our allies confront.

At the same time, we did two trade deals with Japan.

Nobody thought it could be done.

And we were able to navigate that with Jamison Greer working right beside Bob Blightheiser.

I loved working with those guys and we got two great trade deals done.

Jameson is back now as the U.S.

trade representative and I'm very optimistic that we're going to see more trade flourish.

President Trump knows how to do this.

I've been with him in the trade negotiations.

He knows exactly how to navigate this.

And I'm looking forward to great results from our trade negotiations as well.

Excellent.

And so we're only six months into this administration.

It feels like so much has happened.

So much has been done.

I mean, we just had one beautiful bill.

Now we have this legislation.

What's next, in your view?

What do you think is going to happen next?

What's happening right now in the United States Senate, we just put through a rescissions package for a little bit over $9 billion.

That's a small amount.

It's a large amount of money, of course, but it's a small amount relative to the entire budget.

And the Democrats have had,

they've just gone apoplectic over this.

Any effort to cut back on spending, somehow, they've got to be against that.

They're only for spending, and we're trying to bring physical sanity back to America.

So the focus is going to be to continue to find opportunities to basically legislate what has been found at Doge, the other activities well beyond Doge.

Every department head, every agency is looking for ways to streamline regulations and to cut costs and to operate more efficiently.

And I've got to believe there are tremendous opportunities there and many billions more dollars that will come out of the budget as a result.

But we've gone into a fairly partisan mode right now, and I think it's going to be tough for the next little while.

While we're in this sort of partisan gap, I think what we should be doing is focusing on market structure for digital assets.

And we're working on that.

I just talked to some of my colleagues in the House today about how we're going to marshal that forward.

I'm going to look forward to your leadership there as well and many people in the industry.

Just so everyone knows what that is.

So market structure is the legal framework.

It's the rules for all the crypto tokens that are not stable coins.

So the Genius Act just passed, I gave the legal framework for stable coins.

Now we got market structure for all the other tokens.

And it deals with questions like what's a crypto security, what's a currency, what's a commodity, who regulates those things.

Just providing clarity.

That's the name of the bill.

That's exactly the market participants know what the rules are.

Because the last four years under Gensler, they're basically prosecuted without knowing

how to abide.

Yeah, they called it regulation by enforcement.

You don't know what the rules are, but they just launched an enforcement proceeding against you.

And President Trump was funny today because he looked at the audience.

He said, I guess half of you were being prosecuted here about a year ago by the Breeders administration.

Things are going to change.

He was on fire today.

I mean, people should go back and watch.

I mean,

he spoke

off the cuff, basically, like he normally does for 20 minutes.

And it was very funny.

But

the reason why he said that is when we did the crypto summit at the White House back in March,

the Winklevoss brothers, Tyler and Cameron, were there.

And they told the story about how a year before they thought it would be more likely that they'd be in the big house than the White House.

That it was like the fact that they were at the White House was

because that's the way it was looking.

I mean, they were dealing with so much unfair lawfare.

But in any event, we've moved past that.

So thank you for your leadership on this.

And by the way, on the recisions, I know that this is the one issue that I think all of the hosts, the four hosts of the All-En Pod all agree on is that deficit spending is out of control.

Anything we can do to try and rein it in and have more fiscal sanity is appreciated.

Even Cal Canis

can agree with that one.

He's sort of the token

lib on the podcast.

We're going to continue to work along those lanes.

The Big Beautiful bill is doing, it's oriented toward growth stimulation, right?

Everything that we can do to stimulate more capital investment in the United States is embodied in the tax laws part of that bill.

So with the growth coming out of the Big Beautiful bill, and then if we continue to go through the cuts with recisions, I'm very optimistic that we're going to get back on the right path.

That's the objective.

That's the goal.

Meanwhile, taking us into the 21st century with our payments, with digital assets, we're going to continue to work along those lanes as well.

And I appreciate your leadership in that regard.

Well, and we appreciate you.

I think the state of Tennessee, where by the way, I grew up, I grew up in Memphis, is very lucky to have you as our senator.

The Republican Party is really lucky to have you.

The Senate's very lucky to have you to have someone with your business background, to have your skills, who has now gotten through this first piece of legislation through, again, this wasn't a budget bill.

It took 60 votes in the Senate.

I mean, when's the last time that even happened?

I mean, mean, it's been years.

I heard the Senate Committee.

I mean, I heard they hadn't passed a bill in like 10 years, basically, because it takes 60.

It's been over 10 years to get out of the Senate banking committee.

One of my friends wrote me yesterday and he said, I didn't think you could get the Ten Commandments passed out of the United States Senate.

So congratulations.

And I don't want to take the credit for it because it's been a wonderful team.

As I said, your leadership in the White House and the executive branch, our friends in the House of Representatives, my great staff led by Luke Pettit, done just a terrific job.

Luke Pettit was amazing.

We worked closely with him.

Bo did great,

who's the director of the Crypto Council, who was on the show earlier today.

Tyler was wonderful at Treasury.

Yep.

Tyler Williams at Treasury, who was Secretary Besson's staff person.

The staff people never get the credit they deserve for all the work they do, right?

But Tyler, Luke, and Bo were amazing through this process.

And the Senate, too.

We've had great leadership.

Our chairman for the Senate Banking Committee is Tim Scott.

He's been a true proponent of this.

Cynthia Lummis is very focused on digital assets and was very supportive of me as she chairs the digital assets subcommittee of our banking committee.

So we've had great support in the Senate, and I think it's going to continue to grow, both sides of the aisle.

Cynthia Lummis, she's been great.

I've met with her many times.

Tim Scott's been great.

I understand that Kristen Gillibrand, the Democrat Senate,

she brought in a lot of Democrat votes.

I think you got 18.

And the great thing about Kristen, too, is she was a Wall Street lawyer at Davis Polk.

She understands the markets, and to have her level of technical expertise was a huge asset.

And she was able to really convey to the Democrat side that we were here trying to get the right thing done for the country.

This was not a partisan effort.

This was something that really is aimed at growth, leadership, technology leadership, and frankly, dollar dominance that we all should be for.

Amazing.

So I think it's really amazing that we got this done.

When you compare this to where we were a year ago, I mean, it was non-stop.

I guess regulation by enforcement is basically regulation through prosecution, lawfare, and the crypto community was being driven offshore.

There wouldn't have been a crypto community in the United States.

And then President Trump won the election and now, thanks to the efforts of Bill and others, it's law.

The Genius Act is now law.

We have a legal framework for stable coins.

And market structure is next.

The Clarity Bill is next.

We're going to try and do that by October.

So it's really amazing that this is a, you know, I thought that working for President Trump would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity because he's a president who really wants to get things done.

And that's what's happening.

It's really been amazing.

So thank you, Bill, for being here.

Greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

We'll let your winners ride.

Rainman David Sachs.

And it said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.

Love you.

I'm the queen of Kino.

Let your winners ride.

Besties are gone.