All right, everybody, welcome back to the All In Podcast. Our incredible comedian celebrity guest got sick at the last minute today and didn't make it.
We won't say who it is, but my lord, when he comes on this show, you are going to laugh your ass off because he's awesome. I like the comedians.
I think that their takes on society and culture are pretty interesting, I think. Do you think it will work in our format? What's your prediction here? We've never done it.
I think the quality of the show is best when it's less just people doing takes and it's more the back and forth banter so yeah that's what i'm always trying to do is get the ball to go around the horn and get some real dialogue going here but you know sometimes people feel passionate with me again this week on the all-in podcast david freeberg and chamath polyhapitiya my name is jason calicanisis you can follow me on x.com slash jason he's at chamath and he is why can't i why can't i make fun of you in the replies on twitter anymore oh because it's a very good question why to you no what i did was my replies were so many maga lunatics and crypto scams that i had no choice but to like i had to do something because i would have like 500 replies to every single one and i put it on subscription and i said if you want to reply it's three dollars a month now 1500 lunatics signed up i did i did so i control it just so you control me and i thank you for the $3 every month. It's all going to charity.
Do you want an intro to the show or get some warm-up banter about Jeopardy? Or do you want to go right into Epstein?

The letter from Pam to Cash is crazy. Dear Director Patel, Before you came into office, I requested the full and complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein.
In response to this request, I received approximately 200 pages of documents. late yesterday

I learned from a source

that the FBI field office in New York was in possession of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein. Despite my repeated requests, the FBI never disclosed the existence of these files.
When you and I spoke yesterday, you were just as surprised as I was to learn this new information. By 8 a.m.
tomorrow, February 28th, the FBI will deliver the full and complete Epstein files to my office, regardless of how such information was obtained. There will be no withholding or limitations to my or your access.
My question to you guys is, do you think that this is much ado about nothing and that the FBI needs to have the discretion to be able to say no? Or do you think this is one of these things where you're not allowed to do what they're doing? It's above my pay rent. I don't know the law of like fbi investigations and then what if they investigated a bunch of people they were not guilty and then they were in the files maybe they need to look at them before they do a document dump maybe there's informants in there i'm trying to think of what happened with like the whistleblower papers from this says something different this doesn't say let's negotiate what we should release together so that we protect people this says we're just gonna lie to you about these we're gonna lie to you and tell you that you know here's here's that's her side to the story maybe they have another side maybe the fbi has a different side we have to hear from them right is this just like people are intrigued by the gossip angle of it or is it because they want to prosecute people for hurting people or is it because they want to cancel people and this is a nice opportunity to cancel like what's what's what's the this i think that's an interesting question because this thing's been going on for 20 years i think this actually has more to do with conspiracy there is now the deep state like is there a deep state cover-up is the question i think question is, if the chain of command requests something, are you allowed to withhold it? Because you decide in your own judgment that the person above you doesn't deserve to know it.
I think that's an important question. Yeah, the thing about the FBI is the FBI can withhold information from the president, from other folks.
if there's an ongoing investigation, sources are like secret and they would be in jeopardy and national security concerns I'm reading here. So I'm very excited to see these next two days unfold.
Listen, it's a breaking news story. We'll have more to say about it next week when we get the facts.
All right. It has been an amazing 24 hours for my guy, David Friedberg.
I am so proud of you. If people don't know, David Friedberg was on, I'm sorry, Celebrity Jeopardy this week, and he had a great performance.
Jeopardy? I can't say that. I can't say it.
You're right. Bleep it out.
Bleep it out. Yeah.
So you were on Celebrity, quote unquote, celebrity quote-unquote jeopardy shows you how much of a bar there is the bar was pretty low they're now inviting podcasters apparently but jeopardy's watched by like 10 million people every episode right yeah they have like a huge audience on regular jeopardy i think it's like 9 million a night or something or 7 7 to 9 million a night yeah but i think celebrity jeopardy because it's like later it's got a smaller audience but it's still like a couple million people watch this thing which is crazy so you were on and for the last four or five months we've all had to like bite our tongues and you've been in a full scale i don't want to say panic but you've been hand ringing your performance. And, spoiler alert, Freberg won.
Not only did he win, he f***ing crushed it. I was, like, watching this.
This was, like, better than watching the World Series of Poker or a Knicks Warriors game for me. Here is my favorite moment, the all-in call.
As a tribute, he gets the daily double and... I'm'm going to go all in, Ken.
Oh, okay. How dare you? 12,800 for Dave, but you have to be correct, in African geography.
Known for its snows, this Tanzanian peak is both Africa's highest and the world's tallest freestanding mountain. What is Mount Kilimanjaro? That is correct.
Yeah. What did you think of that moment, Shemath? that moment he goes all in and these people they think that they're going to get friedberg by giving him a question about africa not knowing that he's african-american honestly like a six-year-old you guys want to hear something crazy so a six-year-old should know that category no that category african geography i was at dinner the night before with our friend zander and his wife and we started talking about their son was taking a quiz on african geography and they started giving me all the questions and we were actually quizzing at dinner the night before on african geography it was like a slumdog millionaire moment

and i was like in my head i'm like there's no way that's real did that actually happen we literally were just talking about african geography at dinner the night before and i'm like the judges had to have been listening or something but but you were nervous you talked about being nervous and your techniques our friend jason coon but the we actually are lucky enough to play with one serious professional poker player in our game.

Jason Kuhn. But the we actually are lucky enough to play with one serious professional poker player in our game.
Jason Kuhn comes to the game and he coached you a bit. What did he what did he what was his advice to you? Well, I was a little wound up because I've watched Jeopardy my whole like since I was a kid.
Right. I mean, I don't watch it regularly, but a couple of months ago I was kind of watching the show.
I kind of reached out and was like, Hey, you know, do you guys know anyone on the show? And I got like hooked up. So and I'm like, Wait, I'm really going on? That's awesome.
Okay. And they're like, you're going on celebrity jeopardy.
So I watched the celebrity jeopardy episodes from last season. And I figured I could get like 60% of the answers.
But you get there and you don't realize how hard it is to buzz in in time. Because if you buzz before the light turns on.
I've heard this over and over. How does it work? Because you bought, I understand, an actual buzzer to practice with.
Am I correct? You did this? Well, yeah, I bought this cheap buzzer on Amazon, the presser. But it didn't do anything.
So I'm watching the TV at home, watching old Celebrity Jeopardy episodes from last year. And I'm like, Oh, buzz in, buzz in.
But the problem is, when you're there, you're not allowed to buzz till the light comes on. And if you buzz too early, you get locked out for a quarter second.
And that quarter second makes a huge difference. So I was actually behind the people I was against.
Most of the show I felt when I was buzzing in,'m like i know the answer and i kept missing i kept missing so i still did okay obviously but wait a second let me ask you a question about that buzzing thing a light goes on when does the like go on when the question is finished when the guy so they show they show the question on a huge screen so the whole screen gives you the question right away so you can read ahead so you can read ahead just read the whole thing boom yeah then you have to wait for ken jennings to finish as soon as he finishes enunciating the last syllable of the last word the light turns on but here's what i found out there is a delay of about 150 to 200 milliseconds difference between your eyes and your ears you actually hear stuff before you see stuff and which is really interesting like for your brain to register it and people have different different delays but for me i'm like waiting for the light and then i buzz in and it's too late because the people next to me have so speed of sound versus but anyway i was a little i was a little wound up going into this i called jason coon because i realized there's no upside by the time i show up i'm like i'm gonna look like an absolute idiot for saying some stupid stuff getting answers wrong which of course everyone texts me last night being like how'd you miss hoosiers how'd you miss this all right here we go since you're bringing up the big miss this is brutal daily double oh man you get the daily double 16 000 crushing crushing their soul crushing their soul not my best category i'll do 4,000. You look great too.
Even 20,000 if youushing. Crushing their souls.
Crushing their souls. It's not my best category.

I'll do 4,000.

You look great, too.

Even 20,000 if you're right.

Climactic moments in sports movies.

Jimmy Chitwood buries a jumper from the top of the key to win the Hickory Huskers the

Indiana State Championship.

What is hoops?

Sorry.

What am I doing?

You were right.

I'm so embarrassed just watching it. I can't watch it.
Ho i hoosiers i know i know hoosiers i mean come on gene hackman he died today and no one sends me a text being like oh i can't believe you got that answer great job everyone just sends the text how did you not get hoosiers how did you not get cream it's always like oh i knew the answer you're needing and i realize the answer to different ones and i realized as i'm walking into jeopardy i'm like you know what there's no upside because what will happen is everyone will just call you an idiot for the things you missed which is well i mean and let's face it you're the sultan of science you went to an idea school and you worked at google so there's an expectation you should run these people over you did run run them over for a bit. You know who you're facing in the semifinal?

We don't know until all the quarterfinals are over.

And that'll be in the next couple weeks here.

When you see a category come up, like the Hoosiers one, right?

I think that one was about sports movies, right?

Yeah, that was sports movies, like big moments.

So don't you, when you see sports movies in your head,

catalog probable answers like Rudy and, you know, Field of Dreams and just, yeah.

So you had all those ready to go.

But dude, you don't understand.

Like, look, I'm not a guy who gets very nervous.

I don't get like stage fright or like wound up.

But for Jeopardy, it's so weird.

You're up there and you can't focus or concentrate like you normally can. My brain had these like brain farts where i'm like i know the answer why isn't it coming out or i buzz in and i said like beethoven instead of debussy and i'm like why did that come out god for claire de lune you don't have to i mean dude don't get me started so there's weird there's weird stuff that happens up there that's really hard to explain and then you're angry about the buzzing you can't buzz in in time and you're on the set of and it's like, oh my God, I'm actually on the set of Jeopardy.
It's also real. And you're like watching the scores.
Are there people? It's very overwhelming. Is there an audience? Yes.
There is an audience. Yeah, there's a live audience.
How many people? Like a hundred people there? About a hundred people, yeah. Yeah, well, that's nice.
Yeah. Before you go on the show, they have you do a practice round in front of the audience just so everyone gets used to it.
Got it. And I deliberately answered wrong.
And I was acting like an idiot and acting like I couldn't buzz and acting like I didn't know the answers. You leveled him? I tried to be like a little- Oh, he leveled him.
I tried to be a little- Oh, that's so diabolical. Yeah.
I don't really know what I'm doing here. Ooh, sharp elbows.
Yeah. And then I came out swinging and I felt like I had to kind of get aggressive out the gate.
And you. Yeah, I've done that before in a bar fight once.
I was like, guys, guys, we don't need to get in a fight. And then bang, it's clocked again.
Anyway, we're so proud of you. You won.
You trounced them. I have to say.
The money for the Humane Society of the United States. All the money went to charity, Humane Society of the US.
How much did you make for them in the end? If you win the whole it's a million dollars and then i think dog food as the winner your charity gets more and the losers their charity gets less but it's a fixed amount it's like 30 000 or 50 000 or something like that nice i think they should put the three of us on together normal episode that would be crazy oh my god i would wreck three of us were on it wreck your ass no you would not i, you would not. I will play you heads up Jeopardy anytime for money.
Let's play poker. Yeah.
I say we play poker. We'll play for all of the all-in profits.
I'll give you two retards, two extra chip stack, and let's see what happens. Oh my God, Ed.
That sounds compelling. Would you do it? Actually.
J-Cal, would you do that? Would you do it? All the profits. All the profits.
I don't know if I the profits i do it for all the profits but i would carve out 25 of the profits for a four-way tournament that was televised live if we could get two million in sponsors then we'd be up no matter what grift endless grifting i'm thinking like a business the whole point is man i want to do this so that i inflict pain on one of you or both what gives chamath happiness is hurting hurting us. That's exactly that.
That's his love language. It's hurting the people he loves.
His love language is hurting the people who love him. I like putting you to the test and I like to see you to break.
Okay. This is what makes him feel good.
Anyways, did you guys see Brett Atcock's tweet? No. What did he say? Friend of the pod, Brett Atcock, who's the CEO and founder of Figure.

He just announced today that he's moved his timelines up by two years.

He's going to be beta testing robots in the home by the middle to end of this year.

That's crazy.

Crazy.

Are you an investor in his company?

I don't talk about my investments.

But in this case, no. No disclosures here.
But in this case, no, I'm you an investor in his company i don't talk about my investments but in this case closures here but in this case no i'm not an investor so we're not talking a book here i do think optimus and this figure and the other this is about a dozen of these doing it credibly if they can make these for what you mock 20 grand when do you think it becomes something a middle class household you know dual income household would buy one of these five years from now 10 years from now how last week could they be well i think the issue is bounded by two things one is that i'm not sure that the generalized ai is good enough yet and what he did was he had a deal with OpenAI which he pretty publicly canceled a few weeks ago and he announced his own model and i don't know the details of it to know whether he rolled it himself or this is just like taking some open source based model and iterating from it but I think the model is not perfect yet to be general purpose.

That's one. And then the second is a practical issue with the robots, which is that the actuators themselves are good, but they're not great.
And you can see it in the demo, where it's an incredible demo, because it shows the value and the power of the model where there's sort of this master-slave orientation that has to happen where one model is actually doing most of the computation and the second model and the second robot is then feeding off of it. And the demo that they do, Nick, you can probably find the video, is of them sorting a bag of groceries for the first time, totally unsupervised.
It's an incredibly cool demo. It's a cool demo.
The thing that you notice, though, is that the actuators are good, they're not great. And so the physical dexterity is still relatively limited.
And I think that that doesn't allow these robots to be super functional in the next couple of years. But when they get that figured out, then I think it could be really useful.
Because if you have a robot like this that could sort the groceries, make food, do the laundry, mow the lawn, so to speak, it just requires a level of dexterity that's not yet totally possible. But see, in this example, what you're seeing are the two robots basically figuring out how to communicate semantically between the robots.
And that's incredibly powerful. And it's yet another sort of breakthrough that we need.
So I don't know, we're probably like a couple years away. But see, look at the dexterity there.
He's taking the Pepperidge Farms and feels like he's crushing the Pepperidge Farms or she or whatever you call this robot. They, them, please don't misgender the robot.
But it's really incredible. They're figuring the coolest part of this demo, by the way, which I loved was they take an apple and then the second robot figures out that it should go in the fruit bowl, pushes the fruit bowl to the first robot.
And then the first Oh, that's cool. There it is.
But that level of semantic awareness and understanding between two models working dependently is very cool. Look at that.
That's very cool. They're collaborating with each other makes total sense.
I i can tell you here on the ranch i would love to have an all-purpose robot going out there and using the weed whacker and and trimming the the the bushes and the hedges and getting me wood and collecting chicken eggs like there's a million things they could do on a ranch it'd be immediately applicable for ranch work and if they're 24 hours a day it doesn't matter if they go slow. But I think this is the category people are sleeping on.
And I don't know who on the on our prediction show said this will be the year of robots. But it's been this is the year of robots for 30 years in the industry and does feel like this is it.
Freebergia is sticking with your prediction, I assume. Yeah, I am.
Yeah. I think it's also it's not just this kind of dexterous automation, but I do think drones, autonomous vehicles, I put them all in the same category, whether there's some it's some combination of mechanical response to a machine vision system that I think has become like accelerated this year.
You need a lot of rare earths to make robots. Yeah, where can we ever get those from? Hmm.
Does anybody owe us a little money? Is anybody behind on their payments? Maybe the VIG could be a little, you know, taste. I don't know if you guys have seen this, but there was a company in the 90s that was all the rage called Segway.
They were going to absolutely change cities and everything, and they never did. But it was basically like a scooter you could walk on and had a balancing kind of system to it.

But they made robots, and here they're making these lawnmowers now.

And these lawnmowers are really cheap.

They're $1,000, and they work.

Here in Austin, I have seen two or three of these on people's lawns. This could like you know what was the one that you did in your house Roomba so your point Freebird there'll be purpose driven ones to deliver you a burrito do your lawn etc and Roomba is like three or four hundred bucks I think and this thing's a thousand bucks man yeah I do think it's a it's a lot harder to create one of these general

purpose systems and automation than create like vertically or kind of utility specific automation system so a device that just does one thing delivers something to you in the air or drives your food to you or loads and unloads your dishes i you know i'm not sure if that's The whole idea of the humanoid is, it's ambitious.

Yeah.

It is a general purpose device and it makes a technically very hard roadmap. I got to imagine.
Some of the bulldozers out there are also now becoming remote controlled. So you can get like a bulldozer that you have to put in a dangerous situation and their remote control and they're going to have AI.
So I got pitched on a startup one time that was going to go up into Tahoe Hills and allow humans with remote controls to drive them off little bulldozers and make fire pets. So imagine some fire breaks out, you send in or helicopter in the bulldozer, no human in it, just got a 5G connection or a Starlink connection and zip, zip, zip, you're doing fire roads in the middle of the smoke dense area it's going to be really interesting when these things uh get dialed in and they're getting dialed in every day i'm going to ask brett to be a beta alpha tester of one of these robots in my house and then we'll go and do it we'll do a segment that'd be great excuse me robot can i get some more morels a tweet morels.
Let's talk about Stripe. I thought the report was really good.
We had the Collison brothers on last week, they crushed it. Great job to them.
And then here's a quick summary. So in terms of processing volume, ad gen 1.34 trillion, Stripe at 1.4 trillion.
I mean, that's incredible that they're both in the almost

the same exact space. One's growing 33%, stripes growing 38%.
Valuation, ad yen 56, they're public stripe private 91.5 billion. I guess that's the private market premium.
Employee account, very interesting here, since we've been talking about Jamie Dimon's rant last week, ad yen 4.3 thousand stripe Stripe over 8 thousand, and both are profitable. Adyen's got a billy in EBITDA, which is extraordinary, but Stripe has a higher margin.
What's your take on a tale of two cities here? I thought there was three takeaways. The first takeaway for me was the value of Stripe's ecosystem is probably underappreciated.
I think Patrick mentioned it, but he just kind of said it as a passing fact and none of us picked up on it. But in the report, they talk about all the additional products that they're able to build around core payments.
And one of them is the billing product. It's half a billion dollars a year of ARR.
That's just incredible. And I think if they figure out network effects inside of the Stripe ecosystem, that's interesting.
So that's first, which is the hub and spoke of payments being at the center, but all of these other incremental services. I think that that's really interesting and underappreciated for Stripe.
That probably speaks to why there's such a difference in valuation, because ADN has less of that ecosystem, or at least it's not nearly as well described maybe as Stripe's. That's number one.
Second is, I go back to what I've been saying for a while now, but the rise of these stablecoins is really interesting. The stablecoin infrastructure globally, the push for a bunch of these national governments to embrace them inside of India, inside of Brazil, slowly it's happening inside of of the United States.
I think that that was really interesting. Then the third takeaway, Nick, I sent you this tweet, was just the nature of the AI ecosystem relative to the rest of SaaS.
What this is was from Stripe's report which which showed the time to get to $5 million of annualized revenue. The average SaaS company took 37 months.
By 2024, the top 100 AI companies got there in 24 months. That's efficiency in the market, right? That's why we're looking at AI saying, we could see a lot of our economic issues come from growth, and the growth is very clear.
You can do more with less, and you can generate more revenue with AI. So it's pretty clear, the trend, yeah, Chema? I think it's really clear.
I mean, I can give you a little factoid from 80-90. You know, we got to 5 million of revenue in three months.
Really crazy. A couple of wows in there, yeah.
A couple of big ones. Yeah.
And so it's just a very different selling motion than I've historically seen, where the ROI is just so obvious in terms of the efficiency that it creates and the cost savings you can generate relative to traditional enterprise software. It's a more straightforward sale.
The ROI is clearer. The revenue is bigger.
It happens faster. Yeah.
There's also, I don't know if you're seeing it, but there's a sense of urgency in the market right now. people feel like they have to adopt this new technology fast because there's competition

because the gains are so clear, because in a slowing economy, this is maybe a way to accelerate revenue. I'll be honest with you, at least with our 80, 90 customers, I haven't seen that yet.
We're in, I don't know, eight or nine segments of the economy, big segments of the economy. It's more still about the frustration that they have with what I would call the software industrial complex.
You can see it with what's happening to Salesforce and other big companies is that these renewal cycles are getting harder and harder to justify. People are willing to take some bets and see if there are different ways in in dealing with this problem.
And I think that's the real opportunity is if you can find a repeatable pattern to help these companies replace that big software spend that they have, that scales really quickly. And the only way to do that really is using AI in two ways, AI inside the machinery of what you're using yourself to make the things, right? So those are things like cursor and whatnot to just fully accelerate.
And then AI within some very specific products that the customers actually need that also create efficiency. So there's two different places, but the problem with using it in both of these two different places is in the first one, you can manage the errors.
It's very straightforward. At the end of the day, code either compiles or it doesn't.
So even if you're using something like Cursor, which is an incredible product, there are no errors at the end of it because the thing actually works or it doesn't. The problem is actually when you use these models in actual work.
And if you're in a regulated environment, particularly, it gets very complicated. Because if you generate a hallucination in a healthcare business, and it causes a patient record to be incorrect, there are huge consequences there.
And that we haven't solved yet. That exists in regulated finance.
It exists when you're dealing with real estate and construction. It exists when you're dealing with power.
It exists in aerospace, right? Imagine if an LLM helps you design a plane better. But if there's a tolerance error and that's not well understood, that could have horrific consequences downstream.
So we're working with all these people to try to figure it out. It's a very difficult technical challenge.
But I just thought the stripe data was really interesting because it validates what we're seeing, which is the growth in this industry is it's not like anything I've ever seen before. Back to the stable coins.
Here's a look at tether. They're at 143 billion dollars in tethers out there.
Who knows what's reality there? They've got a little bit of a shaky history. And then USDC, Jeremy Allaire's is at $56 billion already.
And that's only been in existence since like really in earnest like 2021. I do think Stripe's main business could be, if we're sitting here in five years, Chamath, could be sitting on $300 billion and getting whatever it is, 3%, 4%, 5% on some coupon, right? They could be making $10, $20 billion in pure profit.
If they have a stablecoin out there, that gets widely adopted. Yeah.
And I think the best way for Stripe to actually do this is just to build it and to actually facilitate payments between existing Stripe customers. Because again, it's sort of what I said last week, these are all ultimately ledger entries.
And I think that the more that you can commoditize these things to be a simple ledger entry inside of two systems of record at two companies, that's a much better product feature. I think Stripe has the scale to do that now.
And to your point, they could have an enormous stablecoin business. At the same time, they're probably better off just embracing what's already been built.
It may be disruptive to try to launch yet another one. I don't know.
They bought that other company, so I got to think they'll launch their own. But bridge is the facilitation layer.
It's the rails, yeah. But I mean, I think, you know, this is where brand comes in if you have a trusted brand amongst developers and uh there's three choices are they going to take tether which people go ah maybe it's a little sordid it's offshore i got some challenges there am i going to use usdc okay i haven't heard of it but okay yeah they sound interesting oh i'm gonna use stripe i'm gonna go right to stripe it's like the IBM, you know, or Microsoft of payments, right? Nobody gets fired for picking Stripe, I would say.
So not anymore. Not anymore.
All right, let's go through the market update here. A lot of people are trying to figure out, are we going to have a market collapse, a boom? Let's just look at some of the numbers and have a first principle discussion here.
S&P up almost 2%. So far this year, Nasdaq 100 flat Dow up 3%.
So pretty good start to the year in those index numbers. But if you look at the Mac seven, some of them have had some serious compression, Tesla down 27%.
I do think that they had a big Trump Elon spike, Google down down 10%, Amazon nine, Microsoft, about 8%, meta Apple, Nvidia, or up to varying degrees. And then coming into our taping this week, Bitcoin down 15% over the last month, that too got the Trump bump.
And then adding to all this confusion, unemployment is still at historic lows, we're at close to 4%. And if you look at the deportations that were promised, they've been modest to start, obviously, they're just getting started, they need some money to deport folks, but they've only been deporting 500 people to 1000 a day.
and we haven't heard many numbers about the last couple of weeks as doge has been sort of the center of attention so you know they'd have to get to two or three thousand

people a day to have low millions, let's say Chamath two or three million people deported for it to have any impact on unemployment. Finally, act three, and then we'll get everybody's feedback on this CPI up 3% year over year, we had hit dip down to that nice 2% handle.
And now it's back a little bit. If you remember in September, it bottomed out around 2.4% just in time for the election.
Interesting how that happened. That same month, the Fed cut 50 bips, then it cut another 25 in December.
And since inflation has been growing modestly, but steadily, not insignificantly. So put it all together.
Chamath, and what do you think? And then Freiburg, where are you? I tend to be sort of in the Stevie Cohen camp. It's not like the bottom is going to fall out, but there's like a lot of room for concern, I guess is the best way to put it.
Nick, I don't know if you can find that clip at FII, but he had a very precise summary of how he saw the world. And I frankly just agreed with everything that he was saying.
So he probably can say better than I. When you take a brew of tariffs, on top of that, we have slowing immigration.
And in addition, now you have doge. I mean, that's austerity.
We think growth is going to slow to one and a half percent from two and a half percent in the second half. And so I'm actually pretty negative for the first time in a while.
And it may only last a year or so, but it's definitely, I think the best gains have been had and wouldn't surprise me to see a significant correction. I think a couple of very specific thoughts.
The first is that you're starting to see this compression of the mag seven towards everybody else. So this is the for PE of these guys.
And so what you're starting to see this compression of the MAG-7 towards everybody else. So this is the forward PE of these guys.
And so what you're starting to see is everybody else starting to capture back some of the ground. People are processing what the real upside of the MAG-7 is.
Now, if you go to the other chart, what this starts to show you, though, is that MAG-7 is really priced to perfection. And so you have to believe that the world kind of stays the way that it is.
Otherwise, you're going to have some amount of mean reversion.

So I think the stock market on the margin is a little expensive and not particularly that attractive.

Second, the bond market has basically said, okay,

we are going to give you credit that Doge is going to work and that tariffs are going to work.

So we've had some pretty meaningful compression in the 10-year, which I think is really interesting.

I think it's very good for Besant and for Trump. And I think I've mentioned this before,

but we got to go in and refinance $10 trillion in the next six months. So you could see this thing

Thank you. mentioned this before, but we got to go in and refinance $10 trillion in the next six months.
So you could see this thing maybe even get under 4% if we get a good string of data. The real problem, I think, though, is that if you look back and say, what does this look like? The example that I would give you guys is in 2010 in the United Kingdom, the deficit as a percentage of GDP was 10%.
The UK government embarked on a multi-year austerity plan. They said, we're going to get the deficit as a percentage of GDP back in line.
Ultimately, by 2016, it got to 3%, which is where we are trying to get to.

Right now, we're a little bit under 7%. We're trying to get it to 3%.

It's interesting to ask what happened.

There, the bond market gave the UK government a ton of credit,

so they kept rates relatively low, and they brought them back from where they were. That seems like what's happening here.
The stock market kind of went sideways to a little bit down. Let's see what happens here.
But the real big thing is, in the UK, all of this created tremendous dissatisfaction, and you had Brexit. So I think the question that I have is, if we go through a prolonged austerity program, and the frustration amongst the American populace builds, what's the release valve? There, the release valve was voting to leave the EU.
Here, it's not obvious to me what a release valve is release electing trump was step one and i don't know if there's something even more populist than trump no i think i think he is the mechanism of implementing the austerity i think people want this austerity just the question is what happens when the actual byproducts of that austerity are felt by people for six or seven years i don't know what is. Certainly, people are in favor of Doge and downsizing the government more than I think anybody anticipated.
People are, the statistics are showing and the polls are showing Freiburg that it's incredibly popular. When you look at this, I don't want to say conflicting, but it's a lot of different conflicting data here as to what's going on.
What do you see in the numbers here? And what does your instinct tell you? Because part of this, I think, is getting used to Trump again, right? Like, he says a lot of stuff. Some of them are scary.
Some of them are just trolling and everything in between. So what are your thoughts here? Are markets just adjusting to the new team back in town? The big question in the Trump actions is around tariffs versus the tax cuts that are being proposed versus the spending cuts.
Those are kind of the three levers. And there's a very serious sensitivity to the economic outlook for growth and inflation as a function of how far each of those three levers are pulled and how they relate to each other.
Is Trump actually going to pull forward the cuts that he has talked about or that Elon's talked about? How real is that? There's a whole spectrum of opinions on that right now. On one end, you're looking at the House and the Senate reconciliation process for the budget proposals that they've put forth.
And you're going to scratch your head and be like, are we really cutting enough relative to what the economists and others are telling us we need to do? Meanwhile, you've got Elon and Trump saying, hey, we're cutting, we're cutting, we're saving, we're going to get to a trillion dollars a year. But that's not showing up necessarily in the budget.
Is it showing up in the actions out of Doge, TBD? So there's a whole spectrum of opinions on the cuts. On the tariff side, there's a spectrum of like how far are these tariffs going to go? You know, the United States up until 18 something was entirely tariff driven in our federal government's revenue.
And it was a way of being kind of protectionary to the industry here. And then over time, the tariffs rates came down and down and down as we introduced an income tax, which started, I think, at 3% right after the Civil War and went to 5% for high income earners.
And then obviously, in the 20th century, that's totally flipped. Now we have like no tariffs and a 50% income tax for the highest bracket.
So can we actually revert back to a tariff-driven income model for the federal government? And what is the economic effect on growth for corporate America in that world where taxes get cut for the companies and for individuals, but we make all of our money from global trade? Does the increased cost of global trade hurt companies more than the benefit of paying fewer taxes, lower taxes? That's the big economic argument that's underway right now. And it's funny, it kind of seems to fall along political lines, believe it or not, much like everything else.
You know, like economists that are Democratic aligned are Democrat aligned. What's my party doing? I agree with that.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

And so the Democrat-aligned economists will say the tariffs don't make sense. They reduce economic growth.
They have a negative effect. We shouldn't be doing that.
And then the Republican aligned economists are saying the tax cuts will more than make up for the reduction from the tariffs. And that's the big unknown right now.
So I would say that the spending cuts, wide spectrum, the income tax cuts, big spectrum on what's actually going to get done here. And then the tariffs, big spectrum on how far this is going to go.
And so those three things, you've got like three very wide ranges of things that all interplay that ultimately determine inflation, economic growth, government deficits over the next decade.

And we don't really have a clear picture yet of how those three things interplay.

And they're all being hotly debated.

And by the way, there's high variability.

They're changing day to day.

Every day, Trump's like this tariff, that tariff.

Yesterday, there's a whole bunch of confusion on tariffs.

Today, there's a whole bunch of like discussion on how far the tax cut extension is going to go in the reconciliation process, and on and on and on. So TBD.
I encourage people to use my 72 hour rule. And look out what happens 72 hours after Trump says something spicy, because a lot of times he's just he says a lot of things.
And you know, it's not just Trump. Yeah, but the House and the Senate, they both put forward their budgets, right? And now they go through this reconciliation process.
And there's a lot in there that leaves a lot to be desired. If you're an absolute, like, you know, fiscal conservative, and you're trying to get us to 3% deficit as a percentage GDP, you're like, wait a second, does this do enough? And the tax cuts are 4.5 trillion over 10 years.
So you know, it's approximately 450 billion a year, if you're trying to catch up, how are we doing tax cuts? But J. Cal, remember, you can't make those statements as fact, because a lot of those over 10 year projections are projections based on someone's estimate of the economic effect of the tax cuts.
So there's also a lot of debate on that, which is, hey, some people are saying if we make these tax cuts, the economy will grow faster than this particular, the CBO economists will estimate, the CBO economists are trying to be conservative. So there's a whole lot of debate going on right now on like, how much is this really going to cost? And people like, oh my god, Trump is talking about raising our deficits so much over the next decade but then there's a different point of view which is wait a second if you assume that the economy will grow because of these cuts then that's actually not true and then there's all these wild cards around the golden visa card yeah we're about to get to that yeah are the tariffs going to be a trillion a year are they going to be two trillion dollars of revenue or no one really knows it's just a negotiating position just to negotiate so no one knows yeah no one knows so that's my i think the main point is this uh this administration is all over the place you know and the cuts are great but you're right the bond market tells you a lot the fact that the tenure has the tenure was it was peaked at five percent two weeks before the election and then it peaked again the second week of January at 4.78%.
Now it's down to 4.26% today. So it's come down by a full half a point in the last month, which tells you a lot about the expectations on inflation and growth over the next decade.
And it's actually a reasonable sign that we don't think there's going to be rampant inflation over the next decade, based on some of the policy decisions and actions that are being taken by this administration. So I would say there's some indication that if, if you were to kind of try and decode the enigma of the three things that we talked about are going on, you know, it's generally kind of deflationary to some extent, or it's not inflation.
Are you optimistic? Just net net, Dave? You're optimistic about this next four year period? I'm honestly pretty uncertain. And I'm pretty unhappy with both the Senate and the House budgets.
Personally, I don't think too fat, too many cuts. Yeah, I don't think there's enough action in there.
I don't think that and it's weird, because you hear Elon talking to all the members of the cabinet, and he's pretty clear cut, hey, we've got to save this government is in a debt spiral, we have to fix this yada yada and then it's sort of like business as usual which like i said when we were in dc that was exactly my observation for every senator representative member of congress that we met with or that i talked to at a cocktail party it was the same bullshit it was like i gotta get this for my people that's the goal and we've turned this federated republic into a whole bunch of elected representatives showing up in DC, scrambling and grabbing money for their constituents. That's what they were hired and elected to do.
And it's a really unfortunate circumstance that no one looks out for the better interest of the US dollar over time, and says, you know what, we've actually got a limitation on us. And that limitation should be less than 3% deficit to GDP.
That's our budget. That's our max budget and start from there and then do a buildup.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, Chamath, I think collective action aside, you've been talking a little bit about this. I don't know if it's a couple of weeks ago, you were tweeting about the great reset theory.
And there's, you know, whatever that is, the third or fourth turning people have been talking about, want to uh maybe encapsulate your thoughts i think you have to figure out what the goal is so one goal is you could say that the republicans want to have consistent political power right that's a reasonable goal the want that too, right? A different goal would be to do what Friedberg said. We're going to go and take the lumps because we are going to defend the dollar and the credibility of the United States.
We're just going to make sure that structurally it's sound and take the pain that's necessary to reset. That could be a i think the reality is something in the middle where you can't be in one camp and you can't be in the other because i don't think you can get anything done and somewhere in the middle i think the thing that i have been thinking a lot about is when will somebody sniff out what the great coalition is that preserves political power, whether that's the Democrats or the Republicans.
The reality is that you will have a consistent majority if you get three cohorts of people together. Cohort number one are the people that frankly don't have many assets and are the working and middle class, meaning they don't necessarily own homes, they don't necessarily have investments in the stock market, so they don't particularly care about what's happening there.
That cohort dominates. There was a clip of a discussion at Harvard just this past week about the different political coalitions that voted for Trump versus Kamala Harris.
The most important takeaway that I took from it is that if you make $100,000 or more a year, you're a reliable Democratic voter. If you went to college, you're a reliable Democratic voter.
Everything else is a reliable Republican voter.

But the thing to remember is that bucket of everything else is growing faster than that

first bucket. So you have this coalition of the asset light, working in middle class,

and then you have other people, patriotic business people, and patriotic business owners,

and technology people that care about innovation, that MAGA has been able to corral into a coalition. My point is, if that is the consistent, reliable thing that cements political power, multiple elections from now, and we've seen this before in the past where Republicans can go on a three-term run or a four-term run, Democrats have as well in the past.
It is bad news for the stock market, and it is bad news for asset owners because it doesn't reward the constituents. Back to Freebrook's point.
If you are going to feed your constituents and your constituents don't own stocks and your constituents don't own homes, or they are so wealthy that they can be inoculated from a massive drawdown in those asset categories, what do you think the winning strategy is? That is my rough working version of what our version of Brexit is. If you have many, many years of austerity, what does it really result in? I think if you want to cement political power, I think it requires a walking down of these asset markets in a meaningful way.
That's stocks and that's real estate. And I just don't see any other way around it.
Fascinating. The good news is, I think, from my perspective is- But by the way, sorry, last thing I would say, that's a total theory and I could change my mind as i get more data but i'm just saying like i'm just trying to work through the possibilities and in the distribution of outcomes that's sort of where my head's at right now i think it's like a good mental model because politicians want to stay in power how do they stay in power the populace has to want to continue to back and they have to understand what backing strategies that that reward asset owners when asset owners are a shrinking minority is not a good idea well there's 60 of the country own assets but 80 of those assets are in the top like 10 so it is definitely weighted heavily people do have some i guess through the 401ks in some cases and yeah 60 of people own a home 61 but yeah i think It's a good framework.
The good news is, if you look at every time we have a great technological revolution, whether it was the iPhone, or the internet, now AI, that tends to make the most impact on the economy. And so based on what I'm seeing on the streets, entrepreneurship is on fire right now.
No, but that's not true.

I think you're confusing that with how certain people, like everybody has an iPhone, that's true.

But you're the one that's talked a lot about this a lot.

It hasn't lifted average hourly earnings that much.

In fact, we've had massive wage suppression.

It has rewarded the employees and the stockholders of Apple, or Google or Meta. But that's not everybody.
Well, I'm talking more about, yes, you're correct. It does polarize the win in Apple shareholders, right in the case of the iPhone or Google in the case of the internet, but it does make the entire populace more efficient, and the United States more efficient since we led both of those revolutions.
I don't think it does. I think it benefits supremely a small cohort of people.
That's why the denominator goes up. But does it affect individual people in measurable ways on a broad-based basis? I think that's been statistically proven as not to be true.
That's why we have the populism we have today. It's disproportionately rewarded equity holders, that's obvious.
And wage earners, it had, you know, have not had the same escalation. But I'm talking about the United States, and our place in the world and our economy when compared to other countries.
So I still think if we lead AI, we will still have the best standard of living, the best overall economy in the world.

I love his, what do you guys think about the golden visa? I love that. Well, this is incredible because I literally tweeted like six months ago, you know, we should just sell citizenship for $500,000 a pop.
And he added a zero. I'll give you a prediction.
I'll give you a prediction. I will predict that within the next few months after this gets announced, you are going to hear about founders taking $5 million of secondary in a round to make sure that if they are non-Americans to get their visas.
100%. Hey, check out this prediction.
Nick, we now have a polymarket trade. How many gold cards will Trump sell in 2025 poly market oh well done i i think what is the what is the bet well so you either can have zero okay you can have one to a hundred a hundred to a thousand here's the the different levels 1 000 to 2 500 2 500 5 000 so you can basically buy the level that you think there's an 8% probability right now in polymarket that by the end of 2025 there will be zero of these golden visas sold 25% chance of one to 100 17% chance of 100 to 1000 and so on the most probable level is actually 2500 to 5000 which is sitting at 29% probability right now yeah i'm taking the I'm taking them way over way over.
So what do you think? This is by the end of 25 J Cal. So you got to get they basically still have to get this program up and running.
And then people by the so it's by the end of 25 is the okay, so people are really just betting when can he get the first one done? And then yeah, how many does he get done? Yeah. I know I'm gonna take the top two, I think I might take 5000 and above here, you put real money on that, you should do that.
Oh, you can't create it's not available to Americans. But if there was a way to do it, I might do it.
Well, this is not unprecedented. By the way, there is something called the EB five, which I talked about before on this show where non citizens can invest a bunch of money.
But it's a bit of a scam. I got pitched on it.
People said, Oh, we can get you LPs for your fund. Here's how it works.
They invest in some, you know, that's easy for Gazi real estate. You have to you have to create 10 full time jobs is Yeah, so there's a bunch of scams going on about this.
But I said, as your president, I'm going to sell these citizenships and get 100,000 people to do 500k each, right? And I said they would sell like Taylor Swift tickets. I got to tell you, I think out of the gate, Apple, Meta, Microsoft buy, you know, one to 10,000 of these.
So let's say you were able to buy these and you could swap them out. Like if somebody left and went back to their country, you could still use it, you still have the visa.
These would become incredible for recruiting talent. If you got to get the CEO of a company over here, and you can offer them that you could buy their company.
Is that how it's going to work? Or is that is it going to be tied to a person? Do you think we have two different issues here? One is, could you swap these between another person? We don't know the president could make it like that if they wanted to for corporations to give them essentially what is a season pass that you could swap between users those things exist in the world as a concept so he could decide to do that the second piece is how valuable they are are they worth five million or are they worth a million which which would sell the most the way this is proposed by trump and lutnik is it's five million dollars for basically a a green card. You get permanent residence in the United States.
You get to live here permanently. Yeah.
They're getting rid of the EB-5 program after this. That's their proposal.
And so here's the math. Let me ask you guys a question.
Jamal J. Cow.
How many people in the world have a net worth above 100 million. Oh.

Above 100.

Well, we know that there are like

4,000 or 5,000 billionaires

is the estimate, I think, globally.

So a centimillionaire...

Well, I think that there's a lot of...

There's gotta be 50,000?

There's a lot of hidden billionaires, so I would...

That's what you... Russia and China, yeah.

Even in America.

I would guess that there's at least 10,000 or 15,000 billionaires in the world. 100 millionaires.
And so then as a cent millionaire, probably 50,000. That's what I said.
28,000. 40% of whom are in the US, which means there's 17,000.
Who knows that number's real? Come on. Yeah, these numbers are all made up.
You know how many Russian oligarchs have $100 million? A lot. Okay.
So whatever fudge factor you want, 17,000 is the reported number of 100 millionaires outside the US. Do you think that that's the cutoff for people that would spend $5 million? And then what percent of them would buy a US green card for $5 million? I think people with 20 million who are overseas in Venezuela or the

Middle East would spend 5 million on it. If it was a path to them becoming a US citizen, you

amortize that over a lifetime, you could make twice as much money living here. So I think the

numbers like if you had $20 million, you would give 25% of your current net worth to get into

the US. Of course, you're going to buy a house here worth 10 million.
And Donald Trump said that

you would not have to pay any tax on foreign assets right right easy peasy it's a true green card yeah that is a real green no no a real green card is what i had which is your global income is taxed that's true so it's worse meaning the green card is worse than this this is way better so if if i had to do it again and this was available i'm, and this was available to me, I'm just pointing out, I'm not sure there's a million. I would have spent five million bucks.
I'm not sure there's a million buyers. I think there's probably 10,000 max buyers of this thing.
It's my answer. I'll take the over of 10.
I wouldn't take the over of a million. I think you're right on the million number.
Is that what did Trump say? He said there's a million people in the market? Pull up the poly market, Nick? The most probable is 1 to 2,500.

I think that's probably right.

But you didn't ask the total.

That's in year one.

You ask in year one.

It takes six months to get anything done in Washington.

This poll is dumb.

The real question is, how hard will they be vetted?

Because I think the point is, there's a lot of gray money around the world.

So the question is, can you bring it into the light?

Right?

So how many, like, look, I know of many people in India, many, who are extremely wealthy in ways that we don't understand, and their wealth is literally like in cash, it's in gold. How are they supposed to kind of like, if they wanted to like raise their family in America, because now it's possible, how do they do that? How do they take their assets? Do you go to JP Morgan and all of a sudden like you show them this golden visa and they say, great, we're going to, if there's a workaround to like the KYC AML laws, Honesty Freeberg, you could sell 2 million of these things.
Don't think so. If you literally have to go through the existing set of frameworks on like OFAC, AML, KYC, all that stuff, it's probably in the tens of thousands.
All I have to say is this is one of the greatest proposals ever. Oh, it's great.
It's fan-freaking-tastic combined with with doge okay uh if he gets this done if he gets but i agree with you by the way accredited investing done if he gets those three things done i'm voting for his third term we're going to redo the uh jason just your personal interest in accredited investing what's the grift connection i'm not sure i'm fully tracking a grift connection. I feel like there's a bunch of people stealing money doing crypto scams.

Uh-huh. And that all of that would be solved if people could just take a test to become an accredited investor, which is like currently six or 7% of the country, and then they would understand diversification and you know how different devices were convertible debt, whatever.
And if they did understand that, you could take people who are gambling in the stock market and allow them to invest in private market companies. And I believe that would create more this issue we brought up in the last segment about poor people not being able to become rich people and upward mobility, upward mobility could be be very easily, hold on, let me finish my thought.
Upward mobility could be so much better if a person who's an Uber driver or an HR person working at a company could put $500, $1,000, instead of betting on the Knicks or the Jets, God forbid, they could put that $500 into this new product or service they're using LinkedIn or this new product or service they're using. And then that would allow more startups to get created.
There are so many people who contact me after reading my book and say, I want to invest in startups, they can't. And I will tell you, I think they would be so much better off putting $100 or $500 into a startup than just wasting it at roulette tables.
Great. I'll take the opposite.
Okay, and I'll tell you why. I think you're right, it would be great, but they should buy the S&P.
They should buy the S&P index, proven, scaled, audited, profitable, well-vetted, solid fiduciary responsibility with public board companies. Yep.
And what will they learn from that? The problem is most of these people, most people, even smart VCs, even intelligent people, make extraordinary mistakes in the startups that they back. I don't think that we have a shortage of startups.
I think we have a shortage of good startups. Let me address those.
But if you flood the market with capital, you're going to see the same problem we've had with every venture capital cycle, or every private cycle, which you get a whole bunch of bullshit that gets funded that shouldn't get funded that ends up eating a lot of people's money. And unfortunately, when people are less sophisticated and they enter the private investment markets, they're not going to necessarily be left well off.
They're going to end up getting scammed in a different way. Someone's going to show some crazy fancy PowerPoint to them, take their money, and they're going to get eaten up, which won't happen if they buy the S&P.
Go ahead. Okay, yeah.
So let me counter all that. They should buy the S&P.
Sure. And they can do that today, right? They can get a Robin Hood account, they can buy 11% a year.
Perfect. And that's the protectionist paternalistic approach that we've had.
What that doesn't do is it makes them nice and safe. And then their $1,000 becomes $1,070 next year and $1,150 the next year.
Great. They learned one lesson, the rule of 72 and compounding interest.
That's the only lesson they learn. But when you start betting on startups, you learn how entrepreneurship works, how product market fit works.
And so sure, put 80% into an index fund, and put 20% into investing in private companies, they would learn more. And when Uber wanted to give Uber drivers access to buying shares, they're not allowed to.
And so the rich can buy whatever they want, they can make whatever bets they want, they can be in private equity, they can be in all these things that have the chance to 100x to 10x, but poor people can't. All I'm saying is if they're educated and they take a course, let them do take a little bit of risk in an intelligent fashion and let them learn about entrepreneurship.
I grew up blue collar and I didn't have exposure to how private company formation worked. I didn't understand any of this.
I had to battle my way to learn all of it. If you had a course and people could go just as easily as they go to price picks, which I bet on every Knicks game, and they could go just as easy to price picks as they could go to Coinbase as they could go to a private market company invest that would be better for upward mobility.
So you're right people are gonna lose money, they're going to learn. What do you think, Chamath? Set a little difference between the two of us.
I think that both are true. I think that we're all much better off just owning indices, or at least that was true.
I think the problem with these indices right now is those are not really well-balanced indices because the rules have changed. And the rules have changed because these companies have been smart enough to lobby folks like S&P, and S&P has allowed these thresholds to creep up.
And so now when you're buying the S&P 500, you're not doing that anymore. You're buying the S&P 7, and then the rest in the 493 is 60%.
So if that's what you want, that's fine. So we'd have to fix the ETF market to make sure that there was a little bit more transparency and there was more balance.
But these weighted indices are basically just the mag seven that that's neither good nor bad. I'm just saying that's what it is.
And so, yeah, and I'm just saying it just creates the same problem. People think they're buying diversification because you're like, hey, go here and it's diversified.
And turns out, not even diversification, just like vetted, like mature real companies versus what I think will happen, which we've seen time and again, with people that are not sophisticated or experienced, they first enter a new market, any market is this process of adverse selection, which is you have predatory practices, predatory pitches that show up and say, invest in this, it's a great deal, this is the new thing. Most people aren't able to vet that thing, and they end up getting taken advantage of, and that's the problem.
They're getting taken advantage of in every crypto thing right now. So all I'm arguing for is more education and a path for those people who want to do it, to show five hours of education, 50 questions, that they have an above average knowledge of how private companies work, just so they have the choice to do that.
I think the balance that we will have to strike is there are a lot of people that are on the outside looking in with no assets. And then second, there are a lot of young people who want the high alpha opportunities like crypto represents.
And so Freebrick, it's easy for you to pull the ladder up from under you because you're already rich. But for people that are not rich, and if you went back to when you were poor, the question is, how would you have reacted if somebody above you basically said, I'm going to tell you what you can invest in? And would you have said, okay, that seems reasonable.
I know you're looking out for me. And I think that's the question.
I don't disagree with that. I think there's a reason we have securities regulations and securities laws that public companies have to follow, but private companies are more lax on.
That's where there's this distinction. So I don't disagree.
That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying now that you're rich, you want rules for everybody else.
What That's not true. Don't mischaracterize me, Chamath.
That's not true at all. I'm obviously a free market guy.
I don't give a s***. Why can't poor people invest in Uber? I'm not.
I'm pointing out the consequence of what would happen. I'm not saying I disagree with the notion of let anyone invest in anything they want.
I'm just telling you what I think is going to happen. Okay, what I'm asking you is, go back to when you were poor.
How would you react? I would want to invest in everything. I'm not disagreeing with the notion.
I'm pointing out what will happen, which is predatory ass will show up and they'll rip people off. That's what happens in every one of these.
And if you're educated, that's why the education component hits here, you'll learn something just like people are learning right now to not bet on the jets ever. What do you think the solution solution is people can lose their ass they just need to know they're going to lose their ass i'm just telling you that's what's going to happen and then you know what's going to happen next elizabeth warren's going to get on tv and be like hey we got to fix this put a bunch of regulations nobody cares what pocahontas has to say that's how this goes i'm pointing out this is what happens market yeah i agree with you that is the cycle but what i'm saying is do we fix it then? How do you allow people that don't have assets to have assets that work for them? How do we do that? As you guys know, we looked at the data.
Even the best venture capital firms in Silicon Valley with the smartest, most sophisticated people investing in private assets were not able to beat the NASDAQ over the last 10 years. That's true.
What I'm saying is, what you were saying before, I'm'm confused what you were saying before is people should only be allowed to invest in the s i didn't say that that is what you said that's not exactly what you said that is exactly what you said i said here's what's going to happen i said here's the consequence you're predicting doom got it yeah here's the other possibility of what happens ebay etsy airbnb doordash say to the people who are part of their networks, for every hundred rides you do, we're going to give you $100 in shares. For every hundred nights you book, we're going to give you $1,000 in shares of Airbnb.
And by the way, you can buy extra shares if you want to. And the government says you can spend up to 20% of your yearly income average for the past few years on investing in startups.
And then some number of people who built those networks, whether it was Google's network or eBay's network or Uber's or DoorDash's or were part of Tesla, some number of those people are going to hit massive home runs, and they're going to move from the bottom third to the middle third. And And then some number of those people are gonna say, you know what, I got really educated, I looked, and I understood Tesla, and I understood Uber.
So now I'm going to bet on this AI self driving company, and I'm going to bet on this other company that makes robots, and delivers, you know, VTOLs, and the entire group of people in our United States is going to get more savvy about entrepreneurship and capital allocation. That's a good thing.
I think what's going to happen is not much of anything. I think the rules are going to stay exactly where they are.
In favor of the top 10%. Because I think this argument between the two of you is exactly the reason why it can never change.
And I think that that now again, so then what is the alternative? Maybe it comes back to what I said before, which is then the only alternative left is just to debase assets. And then if you debase assets and make them much cheaper, then there's less money theoretically to lose per quantum of investment.
So maybe that's the right way to think about it. We got to get more people owning equities in this country.
That's just high order bit. Because if you feel like you have more agency in your life, and you're just smarter and savvier, that's the American dream.
And we've lost the American dream to your point in the early segment, half the country doesn't feel like they can ever get into the top half. They don't feel like they'll ever be able to buy a second home or even a first.
So you have this helplessness of one group of people who are like, I need a handout. And the other group of people are like, got any stock tips? Where are you making money? What can I place a bet on we're sitting here at a rigged game, we all get to play in one casino, and then everybody else gets to work in the casino.
I just want the people who work in the casino to be able to play some bets and maybe become owners and businesses. Hey, you know, I think talking about the US Postal Service is interesting.
It turns out Trump is going to issue an executive order to dissolve the leadership of USPS. And the Postal Service is going postal about this in some ways, not literally, but they're angry about it.
And they want to observe the absorb the agency into the executive branch. Just so you know, post office has been operating for 250 years.
Trump plans to fire the governing board and place the agency under the control of? Commerce. Lutnick.
Commerce. And for context, U.S.
Postal Service has lost $10 billion last year on $80 billion in revenue. They can't figure out how to just make a simple profit margin or even break even.
And it employs 635,000 workers. By the way, Howard did an interview with Fox News yesterday where he said one of the ideas that he went back to the president with was for the Postal Service to do the census, which would save $4 billion a year, give him another idea, which is I think that non-farm payrolls and GDP, that data should be collected

by USPS as well. Because they touch every business, you can actually get, instead of sampling, with all this error and all of this craziness that we have, there has to be a way for then all of these feet on the street to get us much more accurate information so that the markets can actually function properly.

I am surprised that we don't see even more dramatic revisions. And that probably, again, is like errors on top of errors.
I really don't trust like, you know, you showed the GDP data, or you showed the unemployment rate, Jason. No, we all know this stuff is crazy.
It's wrong. I just don't know how wrong it is.
Yeah. And this is where Stripe's data might come in handy.
I did a tweet about this, and it's one of the most popular tweets or controversial. I got three and a half million views here without an Elon retweet or anything.
I had a very simple concept here. Postal service goes down to one time a week.
Easy peasy. Once a week.
There's nothing coming in the U.S. Postal Service that's that important.
Two, all citizens starting next year have to opt into getting postal mail by paying $1 a year. So you got to sign up for it, you got to give them a credit card or something.
I'm thinking 80% of people don't even bother because it's all flowers and garbage anyway. And what people don't know, because I was in the magazine business.
And I knew all about this, we had a magazine rate, a media rate, and all these marketers have, have they're subsidized so this is the ultimate marketing and publishing grift magazines newspapers anybody publications advertisers catalogs they pay nothing and i think they should just double or triple the rate or remove any discounts and then take all those buildings chamoff put them into the new sovereign wealthploy the buildings, get some money out of that, give every postal worker two-year severance or, you know, whatever, graduate it down, full-year severance, half-year severance, quarter-year severance while you retrain them, and just let the private markets handle this. What do you think, Chamath, are my suggestions? There was a tweet from this woman who got leaked some data from one of her friends or colleagues in the government where they broke down, I think, seven or eight leases and real estate things that were happening inside of, I think it was Veterans Affairs, maybe.
The numbers are just astounding. Yeah.
Half the office space is not being used. The other half is being underutilized.
It's bonkers. Bonkers.
They're going to be able to sell 75% of this stuff. So anyway, you know, don't blame me here.
But I think it's like a really good opportunity. Our guy Jeff Bezos, come on the pod, Jeff, sit in the sax chair one time.
That'd be fun to have him on. He's making some big changes at the Washington Post.
He's lost a fortune running this thing. And it seems like he's getting engaged and in founder mode, dare I say, he posted to his ex account, and he emailed everybody that the editorial page is going to be run differently.
He said that while newspapers once had a mandate to publish opinions from the broadest possible spectrum, the internet now mostly covers that. He said, I'm confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America.
I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinions. So he's going to focus on those two pillars, personal liberties and free markets.
This seems awesome. And I could get into why it's brilliant on a publication basis.
But I'm just wondering what your thoughts are with him getting more engaged with the publication that he was incredibly hands-off with. I was a little surprised that he wrote this.
I think that if you want to write about personal liberty, one of the tenets of personal liberty is free speech, but he's effectively said that certain opinions aren't allowed anymore. I don't think that that's the solution to the Washington Post.
So all I think it does is it polarizes the readership even more. I looked inside of Google Trends.
The overwhelming majority of WAPO readers are in obviously Washington, DC, and then Maryland and Virginia, which are the two surrounding states. So I think it's very much a Beltway paper.
I think he's trying to have a direct influence on the ideas that folks inside the Beltway read. And so in as much as he's the owner, he's allowed to do it.
But I wasn't a fan of that idea because I think the Elon plan is much better. Here's a fire hose.
Go at it. You have to find the people.
Despite all the conspiracy theories, I don't think he suppresses free speech in the least. In fact, I think it's a literal free-for-all inside of X.
It is a free-for-all. I mean, we've got Nazi diamond pendants coming from Kanye.
The difficulty in X, which I think will be the next set of features that he'll have to figure out, is how the curation happens. Yeah.
Where you're curating, I'm curating, other people are curating. How can then, for example, like when I go to an account that I like, there's no easy way where I can mass follow a bunch of their, the people that they follow as an example, right? I can't just copy it.
I can't sort of start with a profile. Those are all these things that allow you to just take on all kinds of opinions right away and filter from there.
I think that that is a really useful feature. So I don't know, I didn't think that if I was the owner of Washington Post, I would have been even more extreme on the free speech part, I would not have sanctioned speech.
So it's an interesting point, you know, newspapers historically always had a point of view, they picked a side, Fox, obviously, MSNBC now in cable news picked a side. This This will make the publication I think by picking aside and saying, Hey, here's what we stand for.
This is our belief system. I think it will just make it viable in one way.
And you're right, he wants to have a certain influence. That's why people buy these things.
That's why they've historically owned them. And they have a point of view.
And the idea that it didn't have a point of view previously was probably a mirage that some people felt there was like some objectivity but i i like it i like him being more engaged in it and uh tightening it up all right for the sultan of science chamath payahapitiya our sick friend the comedian get well soon we can't wait to have you on it's going to be a hilarious time and. And for David Sachs, who's very busy, the Rain Man in Washington, D.C., saving the world.
I am the world's greatest moderator, and we will see you next time. Bye-bye.
Love you, guys. Bye-bye.
We'll let your winners ride. Rain Man, David Sachs.
And it said we open-source it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it love you besties i'm queen of kinwai i'm going all in what your winners lie what your winners lie besties are gone that's my dog taking a notice in your driveway. Sex.
Oh, man.