White House BTS, Google buys Wiz, Treasury vs Fed, Space Rescue

Freeburg had this great story. There's a machine there.
I've never seen this machine in my life, but he knew the machine. There's a machine.
It's the Coca-Cola freestyle machine. There's a machine that's right by the Navy mess where we had lunch in the Situation Room, which dispenses literally, I've never seen this before.
This is how out of touch you are. This is in every 7-Eleven.
90 different free theater. Every McDonald's.
Every movie theater. It's everywhere.
This is everywhere. Everywhere.
You have not left. I was blown away by this machine.
All the Coca-Colas, all the Gatorade. We need to relive your style.
Timon, let me ask you a question. How much is a dozen eggs? $399.
How much? Yeah, $399. He got it.
$399. That's right.
No, $3.99.

Close. $3.99.

It depends. It's pretty much double that in the Bay Area or Whole Foods, but yeah, it's half that.

Ask me how much milk is.

How much is milk?

$8.99 to $11.99, depending on what you buy.

How much is a sweater, Timoth?

My sweater is $4,000.

All right, now we're back, everybody. We're back.

We'll let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sackett.
all right everybody welcome back to the number one podcast in the world the the all in podcast. With me again, Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg.
And look at this. Look at this.
Live from D.C., our bestie David Sachs is back. He's suited up in the administration and in the fifth bestie seat for the second time.
My long term bestie, Sian Bannister, hot on the trails of her new fund getting announced. Congratulations on that, Sian.
Thank you. Thank you.
I'm excited to be back. And I'm so excited.
I did not expect to see David. So, like, I'm over the moon.
I'm, like, so excited. Well, I just popped in to reminisce about this trip that Chamath and freeberg just did absolutely yeah trip of a lifetime trip of a lifetime we had all the besties at the white house it was really incredible oh wait jacob wasn't there actually it's interesting you say that it's interesting i um i checked my spam filters and my invite got stuck in the spam filters but yeah it was a little bit of a problem but i you know i had ski week this week so i wouldn't have been able to make it anyway but yeah you know i noticed there were some other invites stuck in my um a couple of other invites got stuck yeah my jeopardy invite i see that uh you guys are all going to be in the next jeopardy in the second round my invite to jeopardy somehow got lost i'll have to talk to John, the CEO.
So that was kind of a bummer. Also, I missed my invite to the Bridgerton.
You've got a cameo in Bridgerton there, I see, Greenberg? What is it? I'm not going to be on the Netflix show, Bridgerton. I missed that.
I think we're in a bit. Let's keep going, J.K.
And it looks like my white party invite here with Diddy. Oh, well, we'll just cut it in post.
Oh, God, thank God. The white party.
Oh, look, Epstein's Island. Oh, no, I'm sorry.
That was Reid Hoffman's invite. That was you.
I'm trying to beep that out. Thank you, bro.
Hell, yeah. Keep going.
You're on a roll here. Keep going.
All right, all right. Let's get back to it.
Let's get back to it. It was a triumphant week for our besties there were like uh little school girls giggling on the group chat oh my god i'm in the white house oh my god look i'm getting closer to power what was it like chamas your dream has come true you came here to america from canada you built all this from nothing and you wound up at the White House.
Give it to me. It was probably the most intense three days that we had.
Nat and I were there to see the president, but obviously we were there to see Sachs as well. But there was a bunch of other things that happened.
Myself, Freeberg, New Money Sonny was there. Our bestie, Elon Musk, obviously we dropped in with him.
So to recap, on Sunday we got in, it was just like raining cats and dogs, nothing to say there. Then on Monday, what happened was we basically had some meetings in the morning and then David said, guys, let me just walk you around and just show you where I were.
By the way, we camped out in Sachs' office for three days, which was awesome. So we had the passes to be at the West Wing and in the Eisenhower building.
That's Sachs' office. And so we all kind of worked from there.
And then we went and did our meetings from Sachs' office. And Sachs' incredible chief of staff, Tracy, escorted us around anytime we needed to go anywhere.
So we we started to walk through the west wing we dropped by look at sax's office for a second i love what you've done with the place were you allowed to put up a piece of art and look at that i think the most iconic part of the west wing is the portico where you see that those very famous shots of all these very important people. In this case, it's just the four of us.
But you can see, Nick, there's the shot of all of us. Well, the portico connects the West Wing to the president's residence.
Tracy, Sachs' chief of staff, escorted us from the West Wing after we did an amazing tour of the West Wing over to the residence. I don't know if we were really supposed to do it, but she has full access.
So we were able to kind of go on the walk. And then we took a walk around the residents and saw the rooms.
But this is the entrance to the West wing right here. So when you come in for for meetings, administrators, so we walk in Pam Bondi's on our way out, we got to meet Pam Bondi.
I mean, it really is amazing. Like members of the cabinet are coming in and out of this door.
Members that work in the West wing are coming in or leaders. Yeah.
And then we saw like leaders coming in. One of the most iconic things we were allowed to do was see the press room.
By the way, the people that work and we'll get to it in a second because we met some incredible people that work in the White House. But some of the folks that don't necessarily get a lot of flowers, like folks that work in like the upper press room and the lower press room, some of theest people and what they did was they're like oh guys why don't you come and see where they do the presidential briefings and the one thing about the white house is everything is just like in a nook and cranny away so this is where obviously you see the presidential seal isn't there because the president is not there but we were able to do that we met some really in the press room here this is the actual press room this is by the way it was just like a little door it's so small it's a little door off the side this the whole west wing is like disarmingly small you can walk for 15 seconds between the oval office and pretty much everywhere else in the west wing it really is a very tight and elon's got an office in there that we got to kind of drop in and say hi.
The president, obviously Chamath, went over to the Oval. Then there's the Situation Room.
I mean, everything is within a couple of steps of everything. And it really is, you're in these kind of historic moments as you walk through this.
You just feel the resonance of everything that you've heard about and seen and all the history and legacy to everything. And it's just all right there, compact in one space.
You're just overwhelmed. It really was overwhelming for me emotionally.
It was overwhelming intellectually. You just kind of walk around and you know, it's just, you're part of it.
And it was so, I was telling Shamath, it was so emotional for me at the end of the day to just be like, man, like you you come to this country, you come to America, you know, from wherever you came from, and anyone can find their way into this historic space. That's the beauty of this country.
And it never really hit me until we were in this moment. So let me show you.
That I kind of really got it. We met some really incredible people.
Nick, you can find a picture of myself and Freeberg and Sonny and Sachs. We're with Taylor Budowich.
Who's that? David, he's a deputy chief of staff, right? He's a deputy chief of staff for communications in the White House. His office is well-placed because through that window behind us is the gaggle.
There's this lawn out on the White House called Pebble Beach, and all the networks have tents there. And they they'll do recordings with White House officials and the White House will be in the background.
It's not like a green screen or an LED. It's the actual White House to be in the background.
That's why it's all set up there and it's called Pebble Beach. And then there's an area, I think they call it like the sticks, which is basically just like a paved area where White House officials can go out there and they get swarmed by all the media asking him questions that's called the gaggle so he can keep an eye on everything that's happening with the media through that window in his office is that where marine one lands and you see everybody yelling at the president and trying to like talk about the copters or that's on the other side that's on the other side it's on the other side but a lot of those reporters will just move over there when they have the option to do that.

But when you see Caroline Levitt, who's the White House press secretary, or Stephen Miller is the deputy chief of staff for policy, they'll come out and all of a sudden they're speaking at a microphone. It'll seem impromptu.
There'll be a lot of reporters. That's usually the sticks and that's the White House gaggle.
We saw Elon, obviously. Nick, you can just show the picture of all of us with Elon.
And the incredible thing is here you have the most incredible entrepreneur of our lifetime dealing with so many complicated issues. And I'll tell you, Elon works in one of the smallest offices I've ever seen.

All he has is a desk with an enormous screen and his phone.

And you can see that there is nothing that matters except the task at hand. And that's really inspiring.
Like it just puts everybody on the same level. You feel this energy that all of these guys are doing incredible work on behalf of the country.
201, where there's no ego about some of these things. Meaning, what is the office size? What is this? What is that? that they're just here to grind and i don't think i've ever seen a workforce more happy like you get there and the energy and the intensity it's very much like the tv show west wing there's just this constant momentum every day you live a whole lifetime and everyone is just like energized and you like i was talking to sax's chief of staff and she's like you just never calm down like you never you're never like there's never a dull moment here and that's why everyone kind of has this grin on their face they're just so happy to be doing this work the intensity i'm gonna i'm gonna describe to you a 45 minute or so experience in the oval.
So the next day, myself and Nat and Sachs go to see POTUS in the oval. And there's this incredible meeting room and you're kind of, you wait there, right? The waiting room.
It's quite

large. It's very beautiful, you know, beautiful sofas, et cetera.
And then they say, oh, the president's ready to see you and you get escorted into the oval. And the one thing that struck me about the oval is it's also much smaller than what you would think.
Like it's a very good size and it's a very natural size, but it's beautiful and it's inspiring. And our experience was Nat was in the front, I'm in the middle, and then David's beside me.
And as we were walking through, you could hear that there was this like very important conversation happening between somebody else who I won't say about something that I won't say, but it was really important. And we walk through the oval and we walk through the back and we go into his private dining room.
And that has all this incredible memorabilia sticking around, Nick, maybe you can show the picture of me, Nat and the president. So we had this conversation and in the middle of the conversation, we had a chance to watch some Fox news together because the dragon capsule was landing.
And I texted Elon. I said, hey, we're in the Oval.
Do you want to come drop in? He texts back, can't dragon capsule landing. I'm like, yeah, I know.
We're watching it right now. So Nat, myself, POTUS, Saks, we're watching this thing kind of unfold.
Anyways, then we have our meeting. It ends.

And we walk out into sort of like this area where Taylor's office is, like where that picture was. And we continue to just randomly sit there watching.
And this is what you mean, Freeberg. Marco Rubio comes by.
And so now we're just standing around. There's Marco Rubio.
We're talking about the landing. and then out of the left-hand side Sheikh Tanun comes in

because he's standing around. There's Marco Rubio.
We're talking about the landing. And then out of the

left-hand side, Sheikh Tanun comes in because he's there to say hi to the president. Then he comes in.
Obviously, he says hi to Marco Rubio, says hi to me. We talked for a few minutes.
He leaves. So the intensity of the people, just within two steps of each other, you saw the CIA director walk in and out.

It's just an incredibly mesmerizing place where irrespective, I think, of your political ideology, the minute that you're there, I think it's hard to not be anything but Team America. I think it's impossible, actually.
And it's really inspiring. And by the way, coming home, I feel like I'm crashing, meaning like there's such a level of adrenaline and dopamine.
And, you know, we are like these observers. So I can only imagine, Sachs, what it feels like for you when you're not in that environment.
It's a really intoxicating, mesmerizing place. I think that's well said, Jamoth.
And every day there's something new. Every day, you discover something new.
One day, it's the Navy mess where... You didn't mention that, but we got a chance to eat lunch.
Cut over to that, Nick. Yeah, we had lunch there.
It was incredible. Did you get a photo of the burgers? I did.
I sent Nick a photo of the burger. I got the veggie burgers.
It's got the seal on the seal. They must use some sort of grill tool to burn the seal of the president of the United States onto the burgers.
Which I think is a nice touch. By the way, you want to know something? They didn't do it on the veggie burger.
They have a veggie burger. What does that say? They're sending you a message.
They're sending you a message, yeah. By the way, what's incredible about the narrowness and the smallness, there's just a door that does not look all that assuming.
It's very unassuming. And there's just a small sign that says Situation Room.
Right. It's right next to where we were eating.
There's a little corridor off of the West Wing lobby, which, by the way, like you said, if you're hanging out in the West Wing lobby, you're going to run into all sorts of interesting people. But you go down this little passageway.

It's so small.

The header of the door is so small that Sriram, you know, does AI policy.

He's 6'6". He almost concussed himself once because he hit his head at the top of the door.

I think the doorframe is about 6'2", is the clearance.

Maybe.

Well, it was made over 100 years ago.

He literally has to duck his head every time he walks by.

But in any event, if you walk to the end of that passageway, there's a little kiosk to get a coffee or you turn the other way and you're in the situation room. I mean, it's really- You could be whacking a terrorist from 4,000 miles away or you can get a mocha.
You could do both. Why choose? Cyan, you have a question.
What do you think? If you're Yeah, I want to know from David what his favorite piece of art is there and whether or not David and Chamath saw the Declaration of Independence. Yeah, actually, yeah.
Well, go ahead, Chamath. Yeah, we saw it.
I mean, so this is the problem, Cyan. I feel like I want to redo that moment.
I mean, David gets to do it every day, but I want to redo it 50 times because we didn't necessarily stop there he has to open and close the curtains because they want to keep the sun off the declaration of independence probably good idea i didn't think to like oh sir can we just stop it it's just such a whirlwind that i want to redo i think you'll get a chance to i think you're real well when i run and i'm president because i'm the only one here who can i will definitely uh cyan can't you cyan can oh wait cyan you're an american yeah yeah you're way to dial up the misogyny good good for you yeah well i was talking about the besties here i forgot for a second um she's the best all right listen amazing i was wondering about the choice of the double-breasted chamotemar. This is a strong, strong choice here to go double-breasted to the White House.

Take me through the thinking.

So, first of all, big shout out to Luca Rubidacci, my tailor.

I did double-breasted on Monday and Wednesday.

Whoa, two in this.

So, you quadded it in one week?

But then I went single-breasted to see POTUS. I did notice that, yeah.

It's a little gratuitous to go triple-double. You don't want a want a triple double by the way so we're we're hanging out in the White House and we got the random it was like one o'clock in the afternoon on Monday when they said hey would you guys like to sit down with Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besson and so then special bonus episode they're like at 530 today and we had a dinner at 7 730 so it was pretty tight but we were like yes that sounds good so then we- Special bonus episode.
They're like at 5.30 today. And we had a dinner at 7, 7.30.
So it was pretty tight, but we were like, yes, that sounds good. So then we got to go over to Treasury later in the afternoon.
We had a camera guy come and set up. So yeah, here's this beautiful room in Treasury.
I forgot the name of the room, Tom. Do you remember? Yes, it was like the something chase room.
We got to find this. Beautiful room.
So we set up the interviews on YouTube, obviously on X. And on the main feed.
It's on the main feed. And on the main feed.
And then we got a call after we did the best in interview. And, you know, I think folks that were there from press said that work.
That was great. Howard Lutnick, who Chamath was going to be doing a meeting with on Wednesday morning, right before we were flying home, said, what if I come in early before our meeting, Chamath, and we do a sit down? So we said, great, let's do it.
So then we got to go to the White House press auditorium. They have a special auditorium just outside the West Wing.
And you guys will recognize the stage, obviously, for many Biden press interviews. Here's the stage.
And so then we did this interview with Lutnik, and my God, this is going to be a barn burner of an interview when it comes out. I ran into him after he had done this interview and he was excited about it.
It sounds like you guys were on fire. He was on fire, Sax.
I mean, this guy, I think it's going to, there's going to be so many clips out of this interview. It was incredible.
It was like over an hour and a half. And he just kept going and going.
yeah after the afterwards we went to his building by the way you know that he's the secretary of commerce howard's office is the war department office the old war department office so we jumped in his car and we went to his office it is the most beautiful i i this is again i didn't think to stop and take photos i should have taken more photos but his office is outrageously beautiful the sax i don't know if you've been over there i have yeah i had a meeting over there okay so let me just let me just say one thing i want to say that politics and policy aside these individuals from the white house deputy chief of staff to these members of the cabinet to all the staff that work in the west wing were incredibly open and transparent. There were no press people intervening or involved.
It was very random, very ad hoc that we got to have these sit down conversations, and they were just so open. And I just want to say like, that was really refreshing and really incredible.
And I feel really privileged to have had the opportunity to kind of sit through this. But, you know, I was not expecting this on this trip at all.
I think that when you work in the White House and you have been successful in the private sector, like Scott Besson or Howard Lutnick or myself, or Doug Burgum, or Elon, especially, I would describe it as a money for purpose trade. You're giving up money, but the sense of purpose you feel working for the White House for this president is just incredible.
And I think you guys kind of picked up on that. And in my view, that's a trade that you should be happy to make any day of the week, because it is really an honor to work at the White House and for this president, because he actually wants to get things done on behalf of the American people.
The default state of Washington is just that nothing gets done, right? You guys know that. The bureaucracy and the entropy and the inertia just basically rule the day.
And so it takes a president who, number one, has a mandate for the American people. Number two, has a tremendous sense of mission and purpose.
And number three, brings tremendous energy to the job. And then I think finally assembles the right team around him.
And those are the conditions under which you can actually make change, positive change for the country. And we have that.
And it's kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity. If we don't get this done now, if we're not able to cut the deficit and debt now, when are we ever going to do it? This is the, you know, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity.
And I think everybody there feels that. I think everyone in the White House is really proud to be there and excited to be there and it's fun and you know part of it is that the you know you can tell that the president he makes this job fun because he's having a great time yeah he was really i think born to do this job i mean in so many ways he just brings so much energy to it he's indefatigable there's so's empowering.
He's like everyone we met with, Zach, to your point, they've all been successful in another part of life and in business and whatnot. And they're generally post-economic people, but he's letting everyone run.
We got to meet with several other members of the cabinet and they were all sharing with us that they're being given autonomy and authority. They can just run.
And I think that that's really important. If you want to bring in high impact people, you need to let them have an impact and let them do their thing.
I observe that. Can I give you one quick anecdote, maybe to wrap this segment up? So when we're sitting in, when we're at the private dining room, Steve Whitcoff, who's another incredible entrepreneur, was dealing with something sensitive, comes in, tells the president.
He's like, okay, great, great job. Then there was three other issues.
Saks had something, then Sergio had something. Then on top of all of that, so there's this bang, bang, bang.
Then he's also like, guys, listen, for this dinner coming up, I really want to make sure the acoustics is right so everybody has an opportunity. It's like the level of detail from the most important thing all the way down to literally the acoustics in the dining room he is on top of all of it and i was just like and that was again just in my small little brief observation and i was like this is crazy to your point like the energy and the the indefatigability and the desire to get every little thing right it's pretty rare it's i kind of feel like America's in good hands, to be honest.
You saw just in those few minutes when he's being peppered with so many decisions, so many actions. So many decisions.
You just realize what a demanding job it is, and you really need a person who just is special in that way that they're just somehow cut out for that type of job. It is very difficult.
Totally agree. I think Freeberg is totally right.
If we can create a pattern where people with high executive, let's just say that because that's less of a loaded word than businessman or successful, whatever. People with high executive function that have proven it should at some point in their career step into government and replace money for purpose.
If that is a trend that this administration creates, I think America is in credible hands. Which was how the founding fathers operated the government originally.
There'll be a moment, guys, where the Democrats win, right? There'll be a moment when the Republicans return to power. There'll be a moment when all the ideologies flip.
But if in all of that, you can find people who are willing to pause their private lives, have demonstrated executive function and can make the trade, we're going to just kick ass. And give back.
It's great. David, thank you.
I really, honestly, thank you. Like you are awesome.
You're awesome. Thank you for giving us a window into that.
And shout out to Tracy as well, who's an incredible. Tracy's an amazing job.
She's incredible. She's incredible.
J. Cal, what'd you think of the best in an interview? Did you see it? I did watch the best one.
Yeah, I mean, listen, I would have loved to ask him a couple of questions. Obviously, I would have probably done a couple of fastballs, curveballs.
Would have gone a little bit harder. But he's so impressive.
And you guys did like an hour with him. And I haven't heard.
What did we miss that you would have asked? Yeah. I mean, you know, you got to get a little bit into the chaos.
I think it's a good time for me to drop off. Yeah.
I'll drop off. Pontificate.
Tell us what a better job he would do. Okay.
All right, we'll see you later. You can tell everyone now what a great job you would have done.
Love you, Zach. Love you guys.
Love you, bro. See you.
Love you, bro. Thanks for the invite.
See you in the commissary. What a guy.
No, I thought it was really good to hear from him long form. I think there's a little bit of chaos going on with the tariffs and stuff like that.
But, you know, I don't think the country he is this guy is a powerhouse he has an incredible track record and by the way like trump picking him i'm going to give trump a little bit of flowers here obviously folks know i'm an independent and a never trumper who is you know supporting the administration to do the best they can what does it mean to be independent but also have another label that says you refuse to consider somebody i don't understand keeping options open no i mean i i't i had my own issues with you know what trump did on january 6th and we don't need to get into it overturning roe v way we don't have to get into the things that i don't agree with what he did putting all those things aside i think he's done a great job with the team he's putting here and this is you know my message to i think some of the americans or the people on the left is I would look at what he's doing and some of these individuals. These are really high functioning individuals.
The last time I think he had a cast of characters around him who I think were kind of dark and I didn't care for a lot of them. With Besson, this guy is like a bi.
I think he was previously a Democrat who gave to a ton of Democrats. And he is a powerhouse.
And I really understands financial i think was a big donor to hillary and then rfk was a democrat tulsi was a democrat trump was a democrat i mean you know this is my point i was a democrat you were a democrat yeah so i think that's you know besant is i came away from it saying this guy is super qualified and the chaos that I think Trump has been creating with like back and forth with the tariffs and his communication style, it made me feel better to know that there was somebody who was rock solid like him in there, and who's really thoughtful. Because right now, when you talk to 50 people who are knowledgeable about the markets and say, what is the strategy here that Trump you get 10 different answers five different vectors for it people are trying to figure out exactly what he's trying to do and there's a lot of non-consensus but hearing that he's got somebody like him there and you talking to him for an hour i felt much better about the situation and that maybe there is a plan here i think yeah it was a solid interview yeah absolutely and i mean the access level you know most of the time he's on something like meet the press or 11 minutes the nation and it's 11 minutes and the guy can't breathe totally for him to go an hour and you kind of you did a good job chamath of sort of giving his history with which i think uh the context most americans don't have so i was very proud of the job the two of you did i wish i was they are always doing a great job by the way because Chama is a great job, Chamath, of sort of giving his history, which I think the context most Americans don't have.
So I was very proud of the job the two of you did. I wish I was there.
Chamath did a great job, by the way, because Chamath, he had a very incredible... Chamath, by the way, I got to give you flowers for having good intuition on some of the questions you asked, both Lutnik and Besant, that I think revealed a little bit more about their character and who they are as people, which I was not on.
I'm all about, like, are the hard, what are the questions I want to ask related to policy and agenda, but you did a great job bringing that out in them. And that actually, I think created a lot of texture for both interviews that I was not, I was not thinking about.
It's a great job. I'm looking forward to the next one.
I don't know when that drops, but that should be really good. Oh my God.
That's the, the what Nick interviews. I mean, that guy's like, he's a hardcore New Yorker.
And like, he really. Did you guys talk to him about tariffs? Let me tell you.
Yeah, we did talk about tariffs. The thing you need to know about Howard Lutnick is he is an incredibly resilient and resourceful businessman.
This guy has built himself up literally from nothing. Good human.
I'm a little biased, but he's a great guy. And you're going to hear some really incredible stories.
But again, another one who traded money for purpose. Look, I just want to say real quick, we don't do ads on the show.
But we did have three sponsors that actually helped fund our DC trip and set this thing up for us. So I really want to say thank you to hims hims.com and for hers, Gemini and I trust, everyone listening to the show, please go to the description, whatever player you're in, check them out.
These three sponsors help make this trip happen. We're really appreciative.
Please take a look at their websites, give their products a shot. Thank you to him, Gemini and I trust you guys are the best.
We really appreciate it. All right, everybody, we got a full docket today, lots of docket and, you know, just hey, welcome back to the show, cyan, I just wanted to start you had a really great announcement this week.
Long journey ventures, your venture capital firm, announced 180 million dollar fund. Tell us a little bit about that.
Well, 181, 181, 181, and 18.

18 stands for life to people who are Jewish, and my partners are Jewish. And it was something that was very important to them and to me to stand up after October 7th and, you know, take a very public stance.
And so we announced our funding announcement on Bloomberg yesterday and our office is on 18th street. So.
Oh, congrats. Yeah.
That's awesome. What is the mission of the Venture Fund? What stage are you going to do? You and I started as angel investors together 14 years ago, 12 years ago? We do this on early stage seed checks, first check-in, and this fund is our fourth fund.
We institutionalized more. In the beginning, it was high net worth individuals, and then now we're going to kind of what Shamath was speaking about earlier is aligning what we do with our higher purpose.
And so now we're helping institutions help people go to school, solving cancer, and things like that. So every day that we get up in the morning, you know, we're aligning what we do.
Our mission is to chase the magically weird. We're looking for alpha in things when everybody is consensus investing, and they're doing the same thing and talking about the same things.
We're thinking six to eight years in the future. When our fund three, we invested in a company in the chip space, and we were thinking ahead about what's going to power AI and crypto.
And now that everybody's investing in the application layer, we're going into the next thing, which is like, what is that going to enable? And what's coming down the road and looking for founders that are thinking differently that most other of my peers would look at and say, that's crazy. I don't want to put any money into that.
So that's, that's what we focus on. Such a hard thing for people to get their heads around the non consensus bet and why that's so important.
I'm, you know, I'm training, you know, new associates at our firm, and they always are going to safety. So they're looking at a vertical, they're looking at a startup and saying well this makes the most sense and then they look at the ones that don't make sense but that are like intriguing and they are like yeah i don't know if i want to place a bet on that because i haven't said i'm like that's where the gold is is that non-consensus bet when you and i did uber was a room of 21 people to invest, 19 didn't.
Yeah, that was a magically weird company at the time. If you remember, I sent it around to multiple investors and they came back with the stupidest excuses I ever heard, but it was their excuse, which is, you know, not everyone wants a black car.
The car doesn't come to my house yet. No one wants to get into a stranger's vehicle.
The list goes on and on. But it takes a vision of seeing the future and seeing how it plays out and believing in all the miracles that are going to happen and getting in early is where all the alpha is you know before the thing is defined as a category so that's where i like to play is i don't want it to even have a market name yet such a great observation like when when an associate or company says, Oh, it's the on-demand economy.
That's when you know that opportunity. You can let like all of my peers can go lose all their money in an ocean of dead bodies because like, I don't want to play there.
Yeah. And you get a price advantage too, right? Like if you enter early before it's a defined category, you're taking on a lot of risk.
And so, you know, I'm getting deals anywhere from like, five to 10 posts while all of my peers are playing in the 20 to 30 range. And so obviously, literally, you and I are the product of, you know, our early bets and like what the lessons we learned and like one of those lessons was to be in early.
It's literally what I'm doing. Found a University now is just trying to do 100.
It's just like a pre-accelerator. If I find two or three founders who I like, I give them their first 25K check or 125K check where they can just come, you know, do it with me.
We're starting next Friday. So people want to come founder.university.
But it's just like what we used to do in the old days, trying to get, be the first investor. And it's really working.
And it's super fun. Hey, listen, there is great news, I think, for the venture industry, this Google acquiring Wiz.
I think this is this could be the starter's pistol. Yeah, it's absolutely fantastic.
Google has acquired Wiz for 32 billion in cash. If you don don't know what Wiz is, just imagine you have cloud services like Microsoft's Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google's cloud, Oracle's cloud, you need to have security between these things.
They help do that. It's the largest deal in Google's history.
David was there, I think for some of the other big acquisitions, There haven't been a lot of acquisitions obviously we know the wrath of lena khan was pretty acute for the last four years but uh looking back in history salesforce buying slack which our bestie chamoff here was an early investor in for 27 billion that occurred in 2020 and then we had a couple of things get blocked hp and was a juniper i believe for 14 billion last year got blocked and so and adobe figma adobe figma got blocked in the uk blocked in the uk but they you know assumed it was gonna happen here and this is actually we talked about this on episode 189 shammath whiz turned down 23 billion dollars from google they said at the time was because they wanted to ipo but now reporting is saying i mean it was because of the antitrust stuff under biden plus the uk obviously go ahead you can take it from there i think this is the trump premium i mean the problem when that deal was being looked at back then was there was still a chance that there could be a democrat administration and it was very clear that they were anti-mna and anti-tech quite honestly and when trump won i think it basically said okay we can now look at these deals there's another important part of this though and this was part of our interview with howard lutnik i'd love to just play this quick clip What I'm doing is I'm saying, okay, I got to collect tariffs, right? So I go to one of the great software companies of the earth, and I say, I want you to give me, you're going to build for me for America. You're going to build the greatest customs processing ever.
But what's incredible is you're convincing these companies to basically like do right for America and build a software for you. You think that's going to be a movement throughout the government or is that? Here's the idea.
I say, build it for me for free. Yeah.
I put it in for free. I don't know.
What other countries in the world do you think are going to buy now? Right. If it works for us.
Well, remember, you have to connect to me. Yeah.
country right this is what is he really saying what he's really saying is there are all kinds of companies that are doing all kinds of work who google famously has this 20 time could you imagine if some of this 20 time was allocated to rebuilding the core infrastructure of america and giving back to the country that gives you the ability to have a multi-trillion dollar company. That's about one example.
So when you connect the dots, the way that I interpret it is that I think companies will be much more aggressive on M&A. Jason, it's what you've been asking for.
I think you're going to get it. And I think the reason why you're going to get it is you're going to have a very open-minded administration that'll let the M&A happen.
But also there are ways where you can build goodwill by doing the kinds of things that Howard is talking about. I mean, could you imagine if somebody volunteered, let's say Palantir and said, hey, we can build the following software for the IRS so that we can just completely automate tax returns.
And it's okay for Palantir. There's still a $200 billion company.
They could allocate a small amount of time and get that done if Oracle stepped up and said something. And all of that goodwill will then allow America to just grow faster.
And then under that economic umbrella, a little consolidation is not necessarily a bad thing. So I'm really interested in how all of these pieces move together.
That's the one thing I get. But I'd like to say something else very narrowly about Wiz, which is Wiz does not do something that's necessarily unique, meaning there are other products in market.
But they have done one thing better than everybody else. And I think it's really worth rewarding, which is they have incredible taste.
So if you use it and all my engineers at 80, 90 live inside of this regime, when I ask them, hey, we need to implement something, they all picked whiz. And if you ask them why, and if you ask our sysadmin, why did we implement it? Not only is it good, but it is the most beautiful, it is the most intuitive, it's the most well-integrated.
And it's just an incredible lesson where even when other people do this other thing, you can build $32 billion of value by just doing that thing in a more coherent way. I mean, design matters, right? I think having taste and having taste matters.
Having a perspective. It's so great that that was rewarded.
Cyan, what do you think of what I'll call Lutnik's lighthouse customer approach? In other words, make this piece of software for the US government will become your first customer, the lighthouse that pulls in other customers for free and for free. So we get it for free.
We help you set the standard and then you get to use us as your reference client. Let's start with that.
Thoughts on that and then we'll get into M&A. I think that the government has long relied on private industry to solve some of its biggest problems.
And that's what sets us apart from other countries in the world.

And so, you know, you look at some of the best companies like SpaceX, Andurl, etc.

We need more companies like this if we're going to compete.

And so doing this absolutely makes sense.

And it's just going to help the sales cycle to get that sort of stamp of approval that,

you know, our government is using that software. Freeberg, your thoughts on Letnix Lighthouse strategy.
Could it work? yeah i think this is what makes it good to have you know as we talked about earlier folks with high executive function and business experience and acumen in key leadership positions in the government so they know how to drive kind of better economic outcomes negotiating the price of a contract down and saying in this case give it to us for free one of the things let nick said in the interview which you didn't see in this clip is that the government can actually accept four free contracts these gratis contracts and you don't need to go get approval to do it so they can operate in the executive branch oh that makes total sense right you don't need an approval if it's gratis that makes total that's right yeah that makes it that that's also a big unlock yeah well then i guess we can contrast this chamath with tim waltz know, VP, potential VP candidate. I have a real problem with this clip, Jason.
This was the most infuriating thing I've ever seen from a politician. I mean, Tim Waltz gets on stage, pulls out his stock app, and starts mocking the greatest American car company ever created and that its stock is down.

This is Disgraciad.com to me. Play the clip, Nick.
I know some of you know this on the iPhone. They've got that little stock app.
I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day. 225 and dropping so

and

and if you own one

if you own one if you own one we're not blaming you you can you can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off you know and take I mean Chamath you want to talk about this communist scumbag and what he did there no I'm not going to say anything personal except to say that I think that it is incredibly lowbrow. At the end of the day, he represents the American people.
He needs to be firmly on Team America. I don't think he understands this because he's never actually had a real job, but the auto industry is a vibrant part of how many, many, many Americans earn their living.
Tesla employs 125,000 plus employees. There is no reason a politician should be wishing any American company to fail, period.
I just think that should be the price of entry. And so to lack the basic decorum and understanding, and then to whip people up into wanting any American company to fail.
There are many American companies I like or dislike, whatever. It's not the point.
There's some that I'll buy the stock of. There's some that I would not.
That's not the point. You cannot openly and actively be cheering, as a politician at least, for these things to fail.
That, I think,

is just incredibly lowbrow. I think it's the bottoming out of the Democratic Party.
That

moment will be looked at as the bottom. Cyan, any thoughts? I think it's incredibly lowbrow.

I agree with Chamath. And I think it's just so distasteful for a public official to do something

like that, especially for an American company. it you know if you hear the people cheering

in the background it's obvious that there's a base that supports this and that frightens me even more because he's saying these things because his constituent his constituents believe it and you know a politician says these things because they think it's going to motivate them to vote for them in the future and that really frightens me you know that we are riling people up to cheer on the destruction of American company

and possibly go out and burn cars you know i think well that's the that's a really good point cyan yeah but because whenever you incite like this kind of aggressiveness and by the way both sides do it you get a contingent who takes it too far freeberg maybe we wrap up on this and then we can jump back to whiz sorry for the diversion i think the democratic party um has split into two parties there's the democratic party with beliefs and there's a democratic party without beliefs i think that the democratic party with beliefs is the one that's very far left and their beliefs are fundamentally rooted in concepts of socialism, Marxism. And they're very clear about those beliefs, that traditional power structures need to be dismantled, and assets and influence need to be commonly redistributed.
The rest of the Democratic Party, which people call the moderate part of the party, actually don't really know what their beliefs are. When you talk to anyone in the Republican Party in a leadership position, you hear very clearly what their beliefs are.
We saw it this week in DC. Every member of the cabinet that we met with, and there were quite a number of them, had the exact same message and the exact same set of beliefs of what this administration stands for and what they're trying to do.
You may agree with those beliefs or you may not, but they have stated their beliefs. The problem is that because the moderates in the Democratic Party have not stated a set of beliefs, a set of objectives, a vision for the country, a vision for their party, the party is effectively being represented by this part of the party that does have beliefs, the deeply socialist Marxist beliefs.
And they have basically subsumed the message. And as a result, this is why people have lost interest in the Democratic Party, because the moderate aspect has not been really clear on what their beliefs are.
There's an opportunity for some of these moderate leaders in the Democratic Party, like Dean Phillips, like, and people may not like me saying this, but like Gavin Newsom, who I don't think is all the way over on that far left side of the spectrum, to be really clear and paint a better vision and really state the beliefs of the party and what the beliefs are that differentiate them. And those beliefs, recently, the only thing that underscores what that party stands for is, we're not the other guys.
We're not the Republicans. And that's it.
And so people that don't like the Republicans are like, well, I don't know, because then I'm subsumed by the socialist Marxist rhetoric. So I don't know if I want to be a part of that either.
And that's why I think a lot of people feel left out. And that's why I think the recent polling data, if you pull it up on the Democrats, it's like 23% or something in this country now, it was like 30s or something.
Did you see the crazy clip that did the racial demographic split on some key issues like things like dei is this the one that says white college age women are just like this weird anyway i think tim waltz like a lot of others because there's no other beliefs to stand for you end up being subsumed by the part of the democratic party that does have beliefs and you don't have anything else to say to state and to to show what you're for and i think a lot of here's an idea too it's a really good it's a really good framing i really like that well and here's another framing like is it so hard to agree on something like i think this is one of the brilliant things that trump did was he's like here are some things we can agree on and he just subsumed those like fighting for the working class person saying no tax on tips like these were democratic positions i think this just proves

that meme where it's like standing here and everything the left just went too far away and

let me give you everybody yeah let me give you a piece of advice to the democratic party leadership

that might be listening the advice i would give you is basically take away the opportunity for

the distinction that the republicans have right now which is a more efficient government a more

you know fair government where money isn't wasted where your taxpayer dollars aren't being destroyed

I don't want to have things like regulatory capture or this pork or inside stuff going on. They have an opportunity to make that the core set of beliefs that still aligns with reducing government and increasing efficiency in government.
Efficiency in government should not be a party issue. By allowing the Republicans to say we're for efficient government, it implies that the Democrats now to be opposite of that are saying we're for inefficient government.
And if the Democrats want to win this, they can actually take that message and say, you know what, we're for more efficient government. And the way we're going to do it is get rid of things like regulatory capture and inside deals, and all the other sort of stuff.
It may, you know, that may not kind of go, but there's an opportunity for the Democrats, I think, to really stand up and take the country in the direction that we all as Americans needed to go to, which is to have a sustainable federal government. And that's going to require some degree of fiscal conservatism and action.
But they could take a different point of view on how they do it. And they could have core beliefs around that.
It's really and by the way, Dean Phillips, we're inviting back on the program as recline Sam Harris, we want to have some more people on the left come on here and maybe talk about this very issue. It's really three things they could work on.
Number one, build 10 million homes in this country that are affordable. That's a really key issue.
Rich people should pay their fair share of taxes and reform the tax code. And then third, health care for everyone.
Those three would get this party back on track. We're going to make a more efficient government.
You're going to be able to buy a home. You're going to get health care.
And rich people are going to start paying their taxes, which they're not. And we're going to stop with these crazy Trump tax breaks.
That would be the perfect positioning. And it's not personal.
It's just, hey, we're a rich enough country that people should get healthcare. Why shouldn't people have healthcare in the modern world? Why can't these rich people who are donating tens of millions of dollars to Trump, just pay some more taxes and make sure poor people have basic healthcare, cyan your thoughts, and then let's get back to the docket.
Well, I disagree with all those points, obviously, but sure, they could run on them. They have tried.
They've definitely said we're going to have healthcare for all. Selling the American dream of home ownership, I actually think, is flawed in many ways.
We're putting people into debt for things they can't afford, and they get screwed. And so I just actually think they need to find a unifying, figure out who their moderates are.
And there's also politically homeless people, we didn't include them. You know, there's these people who are just like, I can't vote right, and I'm not left either anymore.
So we've got to bridge this divide somehow, and they've got to figure out the messaging. But I don't think going back to what they used to do is going to work because they promised universal health care and it hasn't happened and they had plenty of opportunity to do so all right let's get back to the whiz deal and the uh and the docket here let's see if there's anything we didn't uh well i think we just talked about the um you know the price they paid and we should talk about how, the strategic rationale, and how others are going to respond.
All right, so looking at this, the deal got sweetened massively over the year, between when the first offer was made for 23 billion, and then went up to 32 billion, the revenue roughly doubled since the time of the first offer. And then there's some really interesting things in the details.
There's a huge breakup fee, we saw the breakup fee with Adobe and Figma. This one is tremendous.
It's 10% of the deal size $3.2 billion in cash, they don't get an investment. If this deal doesn't go through, Google has to give whiz $3.2 billion in cash, let that sink in.
This company is massively high growth growth zero to 100 million in there in 18 months when they started. And last year, they passed 500 million in ARR, you know, that puts the deal at roughly 60 times their run rate, and that is a high price.
However, they're supposed to hit a billion in ARR this year, which would put it at 30 times forward looking or 32 times, which isn't outrageous because Google probably has, Freeberg, some concept or alphabet rather, some concept of how they could increase the velocity of that. Of that revenue, yeah, or that it would be a defensive position, one of those two, yeah.
yeah i I mean, just to put it in context, right? Google's cloud revenue is about $40 billion a year, and Microsoft and Amazon's are both kind of plus or minus, a little bit around $100 billion a year. And so Google has kind of been, as we know, lagging a little bit in the cloud market.
The thing about kind of enterprise sales is there's a common strategy, which is you kind of land with a beachhead, and then you kind of expand from there with additional products and services. This has been the reason so many enterprise software companies over time from Oracle to Salesforce to Microsoft have been acquisitive and can make acquisitions very synergistic.
What that means is you can acquire a new product or a new service and then sell it into your install base or acquire the customers and then cross sell your existing products or services into their install base. And so you can increase the overall revenue by putting the two together and combining sales teams and being able to offer a combined offering.
And so the theory here, and I think this is something I don't understand well enough, is that security has become such a kind of top requirement and product category that it now effectively enables a beachhead type model to be successful, meaning you can cross sell the security into all of your existing customers, or there's enough new customers that Google might be acquiring from the Wiz acquisition that they can now bring new GCP services to and cross sell into. Now, to figure out how this actually has to make sense.
So Google's ROIC is about 30%. That means that when they make an investment, a CapEx investment or capital investment, they expect to see about 30% of incremental profit per year come back at some point from that capital investment.
The capital investment they're making here, again, this doesn't hit their income statement, goes on their balance sheet. It gets marked mostly as goodwill.
So Google's going to have a 32 billion move from cash down to goodwill. So now they've got this asset on their balance sheet, and they've got to make an incremental $10 billion a year profit.
So you kind of got to do the math $10 billion a year of incremental profit against 40 billion of cloud revenue. And against 1 billion of with revenue, there's a lot to be kind of built here to make this make financial sense.
So then it becomes, okay, well, that's a really hard one to kind of think that they're going to get there very soon. But remember, Google's made some investments.
I think it's more, I think it's a very tricky, you said it earlier, actually. It's a Trojan horse into the other clouds.
The reason Wiz exists, and Jason mentioned this up front, is because of the value that it creates in a multi-cloud, multi-tenant environment across Azure and GCP and AWS. And when the deal was done, one of the things that Wiz said is, hey, don't worry, we're not going to prefer GCP.
And it was interesting because I thought, wait, people actually thought that they would just prefer GCP? No, it's the exact opposite of why Google would want this. Because now what you have are your tentacles.
Think of any other service that any cloud provider provides where most of your revenue is coming from the other clouds. Can you name one? Well, it didn't exist until now.
And so I think the strategic rationale is quite clever, which is you start to gain customer traction and workloads in all of these other environments. And I suspect that TK is smart enough to try to pull these workloads back into GCP.
so that that's like i think probably like because they were you're saying about they would have the data they would be able to see from whiz like hey look of course 90 of this this type of job

oracle or it's over here on AWS or Azure. I agree if you would do that if you're running Google Cloud.
Of course. Thomas Curion is smart enough and they're not going to pay.
And David, by the way, the other thing that I would say is I think this is where bankers get this totally wrong as the observer watching a deal like this is it's never about the rate of change when you're trying to do a deal. It's always about the rate of change of the rate of change.
And the most incredible thing that WIZ had going for itself was that they were basically doubling in months. So the time to double at that scale, you can do any kind of fantastical model with that kind of raw input.
Because when that boundary is true and you're trying to you know de-escalate or scale down or weigh down a model you're still going to get crazy gargantuan numbers that when you discount them back gets them to this price so i mean congrats to these guys i don't you know i would love to find out how does whiz because this is i mean i'm sure you guys have this question too how do you build

a sales infrastructure

that can scale

that productively

that quickly

that's an incredible

thing

you know

yeah I wonder

if a lot of people

are I wonder if it's

a lot of self-serve

people just sign up

and use it

it's gotta be

some percentage of it

I mean I'll tell you

our experiences

we had a guy

that had to come in

and sell it into us

and we had a little

bit of a bake-off

and I don't know maybe we were unique and there's a simpler, lower-scale product that's just more pay-go.

Consumption, yeah.

Yeah.

Who knows?

So, again, looking at this, I'm curious your take on big VC because the Series A, $100 million round.

We don't have the valuation for it.

The B was at $1.7 billion a year later, so maybe we assume it was a $500 million valuation for 20%, something like that, I would guess, maybe a 600 million post Sequoia Insight Index, Cyberstarts all did that series A. When you look at the BCD&E, those same players all participated.
This is another example of sometimes your best next investment as a VC firm is the highest growth outlier in your existing portfolio. Your thoughts on what this means in terms of venture capital and maybe the logjam that we saw over the last four years, five years of no M&A.
Because you and I came up when it was a golden era of M&A and then the IPO market started to open up with Airbnb, Coinbase, and of course, Uber. Now we're sitting here.
What could if this is the starter's pistol? What could it look like for the VC industry, which has just been dead? Yeah, I'm going to start with my thoughts on Wiz. I think this is really exciting for me, because this is a great example of a contrarian investment.
When this investment was initially made, there was not a lot of money going into security. There still isn't.
It's an underinvested category. And with AI and the threat of the types of things that people can build and vibe coding and everything in between, you're going to need better security.
And so I'm excited to see that maybe this might become an investable category. I think this is the largest exit ever in the security space.
Am I wrong? I mean, I think you're probably correct. Yeah, I don't think I've ever heard of anything this large.
M&A wise, absolutely. Yeah.
So, you know, how does this impact M&A? I mean, it's still pretty slow out there. You know, some action is better than no action, but like Niantic was just bought by Scopely.
We're starting to see some- You were an angel investor in that, right? I was. That was the Pokemon Go folks.
I remember you showing me Pokemon Go over a decade ago. Yeah.
That's amazing. And that's a Saudi company that bought it.
It looks like a Saudi conglomerate. Yeah, that's a Saudi conglomerate.
And so that exited for 3.7 billion and you know i i think we're going to start seeing some movement especially with the new administration when we start were you in that uh deal how many years were you in oh my gosh as soon as they spun out when alphabet uh formed and spun them out as their own entity i there's a funny story for another time about how i got into the deal uh but, I realized it was my only opportunity to get in as early as possible. And so I stalked the founder and sat at his door and.
Oh, tell us the story. Okay.
All right. Well, permission, permission granted.
You can't say it's a great story. Yeah, it was a great story.
So before Pokemon go, they had this game called Ingress and I started playing it with my friends and I started noticing that my friends were doing some really unusual things. They were charting helicopters and traveling all over the world to cast these invisible triangles over the earth.
Basically, it's a game of green versus blue and who can cast the biggest triangle. I was like, why are these people spending so much time? And not only that, but why are they going around taking pictures of points of interest for Google? Like, what is Google actually doing with this asset was my number one question.
So I realized that Ingress was part of a bigger mapping plan. I mean, if you look at the team, you look at John Hankey, they all come from Keyhole.
And they're obviously part of the maps team and help build Google Earth. So this wasn't just a game.
Pokemon Go was a joke. It was basically an April Fool's joke where the founder of Pokemon said, wouldn't it be cool if we put Pokemon on the map and we just tried to find them? And John Henke's like, yeah, let's turn this into an Ingress-like game.
I went around telling everybody if I had a chance to invest in anything, it would be Niantic. And because they were part of Google, I thought there was no chance.
And then I got a call one day and they said, Hey, my friend of mine was like, did you hear Niantic spun out? I was like, Oh my gosh, I don't know anyone at Google. How do I reach John Hanke? And I realized I'd invested in this company called Hentwater.
And they were giving out game codes on the bottle cap. And I was setting up her ticketing system one day and helping her out in her office.
And I saw all these tickets coming in with the subject line that said Ingress game code. And I was like, what is this all about? And I just connected the dots.
And she introduced me to John Hanke. And then I went there with two engineers because I figured I got to show up with some value here.
Two badass engineers who are players. We sat on the front stairs and basically sat there and said, please take our money.
He's like, I don't need you. I've got Nintendo.
I've got Google. I've got, and we're like, no, you really need us.
And he gave one of those engineers a job offer pretty much that day. He gave me a key card to the office.
And so I can come and go from Niantic as I please, which is pretty awesome. But it's just a fun story, you know? Yeah.
Yeah. No, I mean, this is what it takes to get in deals in Silicon Valley.
All right. The Fed held rates steady on Wednesday.
Markets have been digesting this pretty flat. The second consecutive meeting, of course, where the Fed held rates steady.
This is after the two consecutive cuts in September, 50 basis points in September, and then obviously 25 in December. And we had this high hopes that there would be, you know, four or five of these cuts this year, and there are apparently none right now.
Trump posted on Truth Social that he urged the Fed to cut rates to create a smoother transition for his tariffs. The tariffs are taking place, I believe, on April 2nd is that date.
That's going to change the history of the United States forever. And so there were some other interesting takeaways.
They lowered expectations on rate cuts. They expect two quarter point cuts for the rest of 2025.
This would take us down to about 4%. Your thoughts, Shema? Let's add some color from Scott Besson.
One of the biggest mistakes that I think Janet Yellen affected was this continued issuance of money on the short end of the curve to finance these deficits, which gives you, you inherit an incredibly difficult challenge, I think, over the next nine months. I think there's like nine or 10 trillion that has to get refinanced do you want to talk about that and yeah look I thought that it that when rates were low you're supposed to turn out right exactly and instead the the Treasury for the past few years has pulled rates in and I think part of that was to keep rates lower that they change the issuance schedule when rates move back up towards 5% I have maintained that policy but I'm maintaining it because let's go back to David's question of when are you going when are we going to see the results from getting the government spending under control? And I don't think the markets recognize it yet.
Okay, translated for Chema. So he's saying a couple of things.
He has inherited a problem that he hasn't quite yet changed. What is that problem? That problem is that when rates are low, you want to borrow for as long as possible, right? You don't want to borrow for the shortest amount of time.
And now that rates are high, you're in this difficult position where you have to refinance all of it at a much higher rate. That's effectively the net of it.
What I took away, and you can see more and understand more when you watch his whole interview with Freeberg and I, but I think that there's been a fundamental disconnect and break from the Fed and the rest of Treasury and the government. I think that Scott was very clear, like he views that as an independent organization and it should continue that way, but it was very clear to me that they are singing from their own hymn book.
And it just doesn't seem to me that Powell really understands the gravity of this situation. And I don't think that he's really willing to play ball.
So he's probably on the margins. Again, this is my total interpretation of this.
Would rather wait longer than necessary because I think it's almost like a political gambit. And I think that that's very dangerous.
That's, again, just my own interpretation. I just do not think that Powell, A, has the data to make a very clear decision and B, will act unless it's totally necessary.
So I think there's an overcorrection here that's happening, which I think is dangerous. And I think it's going to slow down the pace of cuts, which I think will then create a lot of other pressure in the economy.
Well, Dave, I'll drop it to you. The Fed's mandate as an independent organization is full employment and that 2% target, which we talked about before here, was just a number that was picked by an economist in New Zealand, of all places.

It's not like it's some specific dosage that is perfect, but it is their mandate. They're not supposed to be a political organization.
So what are your thoughts on this situation and these high rates, which we have to pay for our debt? We've never been in a situation where in 100 days, a federal government is setting out to cut their spending by a trillion dollars, which has a significant effect, a recessionary effect on the economy, because there's less federal dollars flowing out, which goes as revenue into various businesses and income for a lot of people that are employed as contractors or directly by federal government agencies. Coupled with, for the first time in 100 years, a significant change in the policy for tariffs for goods flowing into the United States, and whether that will reduce spending by consumers or drive up the cost of products by consumers.
And we talked extensively about both of these issues with Besant and Lutnik in DC this week. And if I'm the Fed, I don't really have a great proxy historically for saying when this was done in the past, here's what the effect would be on GDP.
Here's what the effect would be on inflation. Here's what the effect is going to be on employment.
In fact, folks like Lutnik are making the case that the current measure of GDP is probably not even correct. The way we measure it, the way we count it.
And so the traditional economists point of view on making rate adjustments as a function of economic contraction or growth may be wrong. So I think there are quite a lot of these kind of confounding factors that the Fed is in a very wait and see mode.
What I would look to is the bond market, which also seems to be in a kind of wait and see mode. So remember, right before the election, the bond market traded the 10 year up, so that rates went down to about 3.65%.
About a month ago, the 10-year was at 4.5% and today it's at 4.22%. And so in the last month, we've seen rates on the 10-year decline by about a quarter point or about 30 basis points.
And so the bond market is giving some kind of opening to the Fed saying, look, we expect that this is going to be deflationary, this is going to be recessionary. We are expecting you to cut rates to the Fed.
And so that's what the bond market is saying. And now I think we're going to start to wait for the reports that are going to start to come out that are going to show the impact.
I don't think we're going to know immediately. So I think the first 100 days of this presidency and this administration's actions are going to be pretty telling on what's going to happen going forward in terms of the effect on employment, on inflation, and on GDP contraction or growth.
And then I think the market will know how to handicap those numbers in the future based on actions by the administration. Right now, we're still in a like, I don't know how when you put all these things together or what it does.
And it's a lot happening real fast. And so wait and see.
Yeah, saying I'm not sure if the Fed and you know, the people in the administration can't communicate the strategy perfectly well, and the Fed can interpret interpret it i don't know that we're going to solve it here but any any thoughts on this i don't know if they're not communicating it well besant did that it's the effect that it will have ultimately on the economy and over what time scale that's what's uncertain right now sorry specifically the tariffs i mean you know if they're on they're off to what extent you know i don't it doesn't feel like the entire administration is on the same page. That's just based on everybody I've talked to.
The Fed is not part of the administration. Of course not.
Yes, they're independent. And the quote today in the Wall Street Journal, Nick, you can look for it, is Powell's statement basically blamed rising inflation in the short-term period on exogenous factors.
He said, our job was getting the job done, and now there's exogenous inflation. And I think what he's pointing to are these potential tariffs or something.
So I think it's less that they're not coordinated. I think that they are on very different pages.
And I don't think the Fed wants to play ball. Sorry, Sian.
And then I have a story at the end. Just quickly, you know, one of the things that really concerns me is how we've been so high on cheap supply for so long.
Like if you look at Shein and Timo before this podcast, I went and looked up that their prices are up by 27% or something like that. And so when you used to be able to get a garment for $18, you're now paying $37 and Zara is like 75 for an equivalent.
And I think people really liked getting packages in the mail and feeling like their dollar went further and it's not going far. And so when you have a bunch of people who can't buy anything, and consumerism is a big part of our, unfortunately, in some ways, our culture, you know, what does that do to our country? You know, if you're looking around, there's urban blight everywhere in retail.
And, you know, we can't fill our malls. We don't have brick and mortar stores.
They're shutting down. Forever 21 just shut down.
You know, these are the types of things that, you know, people really care about is whether, especially in a time where, you know, you do have a recession, people want to buy a tube of lipstick or a dress to feel better about their life. And right now they can't even do that.
And so that's what concerns me is thinking about the retail future and then, you know, the consumer landscape of how this all affects everybody. Yeah, and consumer confidence is not good right now.
People are feeling like a little bit concerned about it. And this immigration plays into this, we're supposed to be deporting 20 million people, maybe it's only going to be a million, who knows about that issue, who's going to actually work in these factories, are people getting laid off? Or are they not getting laid off? Like there's just a soup of issues here that makes the Fed's job extremely difficult.
So in an extremely difficult, confusing storm, what is the best thing to do when you're driving the storm is just maybe try to keep the car going straight, not hit the brakes or not hit the gas. And that's what they're doing.
They're taking a wait and see. And let's see if the administration can be a little bit crisper, I think, in their delivery of what their plan is, because it does seem chaotic to me.
And people here might disagree. Jamath, you said you had an anecdote? Well, I kind of disagree with you in one way.
I just think the Fed has totally lost the script. And I don't think they're doing what they're supposed to be doing.
What should they be doing? What they should be doing is actually observing the fact that there's some very complicated money flows. The front end of the curve makes no sense.
The back end of the curve hasn't gone down long enough. They sat around and they allowed Treasury to basically pump trillions of short-term paper.
They were compl complicit in what Yellen did. And it's inconceivable that they didn't understand that strategy.
And so it's inconceivable. So what's the future? Yeah.
So what do you do when you have a, is recalcitrant the right word? You know, like let's, let's just say you just have an organization that refuses to play ball. Again, there was a really interesting anecdote where Besant talked in the interview about how he really wants to deregulate and loosen up bank lending standards, particularly at the community level.
And I think that this is one very interesting thing that is a workaround to the Fed. Why? Because if you think about where money gets

transacted on a 10 to 20 to 30 year duration, those are the big boys. They're making big capital

plays, right guys? But where do you play for the two month to two year kind of thing? It's smaller

stuff. It's the stuff that's required to get small businesses off the ground.
It's the community

lending standards that actually allow communities to thrive. And so I think Scott realizes that if the Fed's not going to really play ball, how do you loosen credit? How do you make sure that that money's available, Jason, to make sure that you can fight off a recession? You have to give it to these smaller banks.
And he was pretty clear about that. So I think that that's it.
So it's almost as if the Fed is just going to get relegated to this like, random organization, like, yeah, they'll control reverse repo, but they just won't have any credibility. And maybe that's not a bad thing, actually, in the end.
Freeberg, it's your chance to shine. We have not one.
But we have two amazing space stories in science corner. First up, SpaceX successfully rescued two astronauts.
And when they landed, there were dolphins breaching around the capsule. It was absolutely magical to see.
Congratulations to the SpaceX team on that. And then Firefly Aerospace completed its moon mission after achieving the first commercial soft lunar landing.
Take it whichever way you want, Freeberg. Which one of these do you want to start with? And then maybe we'll open the discussion up to a little bit broader discussion about the moon itself.
SpaceX was able to rescue the two astronauts that were stranded by the Boeing Starliner debacle nine months ago. We talked about it on the show.
You can go back and watch the episode. Episode 192.
192 in August. Episode 192.
And so having spent far more on the Starliner program than on the Crew Dragon program, the Starliner program is gone now. It's basically done.
And the Crew Dragon program has now done 16 crewed flights to space, 11 for NASA, four private commercial flights, and continues to perform. So congratulations to the SpaceX team on making it to ISS and bringing the astronauts home.
Another successful mission for SpaceX. You know, there's a lot of hand-wringing.
Oh my god, you know, conflict of interest, Elon with SpaceX and Doge and being close to the administration. When we look at what SpaceX has accomplished, I'm not a shareholder, but I know you are, Chamath.
I'm not sure if we have folks on the panel. You are as well, I am as well.
Okay, congratulations, everybody. But putting aside our our personal investments when you look at how much they've reduced the cost is anybody even close to matching their cost to getting to space because this kind of like great takes out the whole the whole hand wringing around the conflict of interest with spacex both on starlink on this, seems ridiculous because their price is so cheap.
It makes no sense to even complain about it. We should just be giving Elon a high five and saying, thanks for charging us such a low rate.
It's a great question. Cyan, you want to take it? Well, you know, obviously Boeing is the big loser here.
You've really got to, you know, it's interesting to me how bad they just fumbled this. And then there's the political element.
I don't know if we want to get into it about how we weren't able to save these astronauts and they were stuck up there. You know, we were seeing it landing in the water, but what you're not seeing is they couldn't walk when they got out and they were only supposed to be there for what, like 10 days? And eight days and it ended up eight months or something.
Yeah, eight is horrendous because one of the things that i believe that america stands for is we don't leave people like that and it's an american issue not a political one and so there's no reason why we shouldn't have engaged spacex sooner it was offered and they turned it into a completely political issue and boeing fumbled the ball really and so you know, I think hopefully this is a message that's loud and clear. And one of the things I'm so excited about is little kids watching this and seeing this and what it means for the future of our country.
Because they're looking up to people like Elon and they're going to be the next political class in the future. And that will matter.
You know, this is the equivalent of moon landing. And to see somebody in private enterprise do what Elon has done is just outstanding.
So that's basically my comment on it. Any thoughts on the cost versus conflict of interest, I guess, hand-wringing? Look, there's a couple of startup alternatives.
I'll put alternatives in quotes because they're not really GA. They're not generally available.
They're not really launching. They're still in this early experimentation phase.
One is Blue Origin and the second is Relativity Space. The problem with both of those two approaches, well, the feature of both of those two approaches is theoretically that there's a different economic model there.
But the reality is that SpaceX is the only company that has consistently

been able to take these costs and just crunch them down to more than one launch a day

this year, I think. It's just an incredible scale and pace.
So no, there is no economic

alternative. They are the absolute cheapest in the market.
I'll tell you a very quick story.

I was also an investor in relativity. I think I owned about 10% of the company.
And I just got recapped out of that business because they needed a lot more money than folks were willing to give it. And then Eric Schmidt just stepped up and offered, I think, $3 billion to the business.
And I kind of said, no, I'm done. I'm out of here.
So, you know, I- Recaps are painful. You put all that money in.
I think I took like a $380 million loss. It was not a good week two weeks ago.
But anyways, that's not the point. The point is SpaceX is the best.
There is nobody even close. The next closest alternative is years and years away.
Would we benefit from more capacity? Sure. But the reality is they are the only solution and they're safe and they're reliable.
And what Cyan said is so true. When the hell does America just abandon people? Why do you do that? Especially in space of all places.
Of all places. I mean, that is really dark.
You would think this would be a Mark Watney story, like the Martian. Look, you have WNBA players that get put in a Russian jail.
We're willing to swap them for arms dealers in the last administration. That's pretty good insight.
Yeah. Fine.
So we didn't abandon her, but then we let these two people flounder. I just think it's really inexcusable.
That that makes no sense there definitely needs to be an investigation into what happened there a lot of speculation it doesn't look good i'm going to take elon as the word that he offered i mean i don't see any reason why he would the astronauts even confirmed that he offered oh they did okay yeah i mean i know that people were saying like unconfirmed if the biden administration. They were like, that's their way of saying, come get me.

Please come get me.

They're like, I'm literally withering away in space.

Please come get me.

They put their thumbs up.

Okay, come pick us up.

Freeberg, take us to the next story.

And then we'll get a wrap here.

This is basically what I think is going to end up being the story over the next couple of years is the space race between effectively spacex's platform and technology versus china which has effectively ripped off spacex as this is kind of being described here in this article so you can kind of take a look at the long march 9 rocket is what they call it fully reusable first stage powered by 30 of their particular engines which is comparable to spacex's first stage being powered by 33 raptor engines also fueled with methane and liquid oxygen each with a thrust of about 280 tons compared to the chinese at 200 tons this is kind of a very kind of equivalent design all right here's a look at it Yeah, the model of the reusable yeah so this is the long march 9 this is their super heavy lift rocket that they kind of first started talking about call it a decade ago the rocket has three stages solid motors they've recalibrated the design and it effectively has now kind of become a clone of starship and so this whole system is going to be the big race. And as we know, the way the Chinese operate when it comes to kind of industrialization is they can move fast, they can move big, they can move heavy, they can dedicate resources, they can dedicate an entirely vertically integrated supply chain to achieving an objective.
So this will end up being kind of, I think, the big race over the next couple of years. Slave labor.
I've got a lot of resources at their fingertips. You can kind of say that, but I don't know, you know, a lot of people use slave labor in China as kind of a hand wavy way of describing their competitive advantage.
But I think this is really important. China has actually much more of an advantage in automation.
And so if you look at many Chinese factories that everyone assumes are cheap, because they have cheap slave labor, which is kind of the Western and general kind of media perception of what goes on over there, there's actually a lot of automation and engineering that's gone into building these systems that allow them to have much higher throughput at much lower cost. And I think that this is a really kind of key point that the Chinese kind of industrial base and their manufacturing base is so superior to the United States in this moment in time, that the US has to figure out a way to build its manufacturing base up to be competitive in an age of automation, not on a kind of labor to labor system, but on a system of production to system of production basis.

And so this is really where we are lagging deeply as a country. And it is part of you saw J.D.
Vance's speech this week on revitalizing kind of manufacturing in the United States, but it has to be advanced manufacturing. It's not just about opening a warehouse and putting which means robots, not humans in it, because it means both.
It means both. But it's about smarter systems.
It's about designs on how you do manufacturing.

It's about using new things like 3d printing like automation coupled with great labor coupled with great people working but it's about designing entirely new ways of doing manufacturing and we've stalled out over the last three decades in the united states as we globalized and we handed off all manufacturing to the east, and the United States basically just imported manufactured goods while they invested in all of the infrastructure to deliver advanced manufacturing at scale. And so we've got a lot of catching up to do.
Otherwise, China will get ahead of us in any product faster than we will ever be able to kind of stay ahead of the game on. And I think we're seeing that in the space race now.
And it's definitely worth taking note that this is kind of one core example of this advantage that they've developed for themselves. I'm concerned about the cultural stuff of this.
Like, America is so ill-equipped, especially with this wave of the last eight years of DEI and how it's infiltrated all of our institutions and how we raise our children in this country. Like we taught them that math is racist.
While China is, you know, their kids are the leaders in AI. You know, DeepSeek should show us that, you know, we have underestimated China every step of the way.
And I think it's just a tragedy. You know, I'm working on a book that's coming out called The War on Science, which will actually expose, a friend of mine wrote it, it's a collection of essays, exposes just how entrenched this became in every institution from medical, science, etc.
Like, how do we recover from that is how we can compete with China, because otherwise we can't. You know, I really honestly don't understand how we're going to do it if we don't.
And part of it is seeing these space launches. You know, obviously, the next generation of children will be inspired by that.
But we have a gap of about eight to 10 years where we lost that advantage. I mean, in San Francisco, we saw it up close and personal, right? They banned AP math.
I mean, what lunatics could ever, I mean, I guess the lunatics in San Francisco could literally justify that it was, you know, some massive inequality that the smart kids got to take harder courses. Flash the thing to pull from NBC, Nick.
We know who is responsible for it. Are you blaming white women, college-educated white women? I'm just saying, look at the data.
Okay. What is going on here? For those of you not watching, it's voters' opinion.
White men, no degree. White men, college degree.
White women, no degree. White women, college degree.
And yeah, DEI plus 53. No, plus 31.
By the way. For white women in college.
Yeah, NBC News poll., yeah, like a right-meaning organization here. Just to build on what you were saying, it's math that was told was racist.
In one of the best private schools here in Silicon Valley, they taught the girls. These are girls in the best all-girls private school in Silicon Valley.
that reading was racist. Could you imagine?

There was a spreadsheet that these kids had to memorize every day that had every other kid's pronoun. And if you didn't get it right, you'd get in trouble.

Well, not only that, but they are taught that you're either an oppressor or you're oppressed,

and there's no other option. And so if you go to one of these private nice schools,

then you're automatically an oppressor. So think about that.
If you're a kid and you're born

And you're oppressed and there's no other option. And so like, if you go to one of these private nice schools, then you're automatically an oppressor.
So think about that. If you're a kid and you're, you're born bad, inherently bad, evil from birth, what does that do? What does that do? What does that do to your self-worth? Yeah.
Your desire to actually do anything in society. We have to fix that.
I actually think it's one of the number one issues in our country is to get kids excited about being americans again you know we were talking about the democrat party uh they don't love america on the far left they hate america and they're very loud and vocal about it and so i'm glad that they're you know their base is shrinking but it needs to shrink further and we need to have more unifying messages. And I think SpaceX could be one of those unifying messages, where we bring people together and we encourage kids to think bigger about the future.
I'll tell you one anecdote. I have been hanging out at UT a little bit, the University of Texas and Golden Longhorns.
And I've had three or four people of means i'll say you know people who could afford to go to any college ask me do you have any hookups at ut i want to take a tour i want to check this out and i'm like oh and they're like yeah i just don't want to send my kids to you know these as chamath has called them previous on the program woke madrasas i want to send them to the south to be educated in texas or somewhere you know where they're not going to learn to be part of hamas or you know al-qaeda so there you have it folks send your kids uh yeah and send them to a place that values free speech look there first look at the fire rating and then that should tell you everything you need to you need to know. It's a huge trend.
It's a huge trend that people want to go to these schools. Getting back on track, I'll just give a quick shout out as well to Firefly, the Blue Ghost, lunar lander, landed on March 2nd, lasted on the lunar surface for 14 days, launched on January 15th.
They are launching two additional missions, Mission 2 and Mission 3. Mission 2 is going to launch in 2026, back to the moon 28 for Mission 3, all of which are doing kind of geologic surveying of the lunar surface.
Obviously, the long-term goal here is can we establish a base on the moon, Jason? You're a fan. Mission 5 is going directly to your dingleberries.

They're going to go to get those dingleberries.

I'm sorry.

Those big dingleberries.

Oh, sorry.

I'm sorry. And you shouldn't have heard that.

We're just saying.

No, it's fine.

I don't care.

It's our tradition to talk about Freeberg's anus.

I have a 13-year-old boy sense of humor.

It's fine.

You do.

You always have, actually. Would you guys be willing to go to the moon for a week? Would that be something you guys would be interested in? I'm going.
I'm going. I talk to my guy.
100%. You got a guy? I'm going.
I got a guy. I talked to my guy.
He said I could go out with him. So I'm going.
Do you guys have an interest in that? Like, is that something that you'd be motivated to do? 100%. 100%.
I am 100% going to do not sure it's a great question about a week a week seems like a very wow i would go for a month what about a day like just a lunar day like you go like a lunar picnic yes yes a little picnic and then you come back oh yeah what would you bring what are you gonna bring you bring a little chardonnay what are you thinking would be would pair well with the dark side of the moon there what are you gonna bring i'd bring to bring? I'd bring like a- What should Sean make us when we go? 2020 Lafon, I'd bring like a white burgundy. Got it.
Nick, can you make an image of Chamath on the moon drinking wine? Can you figure out a way to do that, please? Thank you. What should we serve on the moon? Would you think we should go with fish? A little syrup and turf? Maybe a syrup and turf would be good.
You know, people don't realize that white burgundy tastes great with me. I know that people think you should always drink a very heavy red, but it's not true.
I just want everybody to know, the more you know. The more you know.
Thanks for tuning into the All In Podcast. She's Sian Bannister.
I'm Jake Howell. He's Chamath Paihapatiya.
And, of course, your sultan of science, David Friedberg.

And, of course, thanks to CEO John and producer Nick, everybody who put so much effort into it.

And thanks to our partners for, yeah, supporting the show.

We'll see you all next time.

Love you guys.

We'll see you on the podcast.

Bye-bye.

We'll let your winners ride. Rain Man David Sack.
Love you guys. Bye- driveway.
Oh, man. My habitasher will meet me at once.
We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just useless. It's like this sexual tension, but they just need to release them out.
Wet your feet. Wet your feet.

We need to get merch.

I'm doing all in.

I'm doing all in.